Medieval books and libraries
When I started researching The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, I became unexpectedly fascinated by the physical reality of medieval books.
Modern readers, including myself, often treat books as ordinary objects. We buy them cheaply, stack them on shelves, underline passages, or abandon them halfway through without much thought. Yet in the medieval world, a book was never ordinary. A single manuscript could require months or years of labor, hundreds of animal skins, specialized knowledge, and an entire institutional system devoted to preserving it.
The more I studied medieval manuscripts, the more I realized something important about Eco’s novel: the library is not merely a setting. It is the true center of power.
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