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A Medieval Artist In The 21st Century

by Randy Asplund

Why on earth would any single person go to all of the trouble to learn to make medieval books entirely by hand? It may seem crazy at first, but there's a logic to it. I actually came upon it because events in my life naturally led me in this direction. I had always loved fantasy and mythology while growing up. During my early days at the University, I decided what I wanted most was to become a Fantasy and Science Fiction illustrator. Along the way, my interests in history led to me joining the SCA, a medieval reenactment society. All of this was mutually sympathetic.

My career started really taking off in 1993, when I started doing early Magic: The Gathering card game art, and my first Star Trek cover art commissions. For a while I was so busy that it was overwhelming. Along side of this I had been learning to make medieval art as a hobby. Gradually, I started phasing that into my professional commission work. Then, as it often does, the world changed. Technology overturned the SF & F illustration industry when the computer made it easy for anybody to crank out pictures, or cobble together low quality images from photos. My clients started buying cheaper digital art and cut the prices they were willing to pay so low that it wasn't worth the time to do the work. And then to add insult to injury, they now demanded All Rights contracts for the work rather than just First Use rights! It was an economic disaster for illustrators in the genre.

It felt to me like I was experiencing my own version of the Fall of Rome, and it was not just happening to me, but also to many of my friends. I was faced with either changing my art into something that I hated, or suffering through lean years as I competed with a plethora of really awesome artists who were now struggling for work. Fortunately, there was a choice number three.

Choice number three was to follow a passion I had been developing over the years, that of medieval manuscript calligraphy and illumination. I had gotten good at it, and the clients I was finding really appreciated me. As the church in Europe had held out against the Fall of Rome, I would also turn to the manuscript as a tool for my salvation. I stopped bothering to send portfolios to publishers. I dropped every one of my regular SF & F clients except for Baen Books. I like the people at Baen, and they have always treated me well. But work from one company would not provide enough for me to make a living, so I pushed on with the manuscript work.

I was getting a lot of great feedback. People were saying “Randy, you should write a book on this!” I would reply, “Yeah, I should. I will, someday...” But I wasn't ready. The subject was very broad and deep, and I had no idea how to drink in that much knowledge. Then one day, a woman saw me at a book festival and loved my artwork. She asked if I could make a medieval book for her.

A whole book? I'd only made the most rudimentary attempts in the past; mere casual endeavors. Yet, I had been teaching myself enough about it to feel that it could be done. I live in a good place for it. We have a lot of book arts support here, and we even have a thriving book arts supply store here in Ann Arbor! The improbability of such fortune did not escape me, but I had everything I needed, so I accepted the commission. In the end, I produced my first complete book made entirely from medieval materials and using medieval methods.

With this success, I realized that I was now at a point where I could consider really writing my book. I had already been putting bits and pieces of the idea for a book together, but I now knew that the book couldn't be just about manuscript calligraphy and illumination. It had to be the whole A-Z process of making the book. I already knew that it would need to include sections about making the materials, and now it would have to include everything all the way through binding it. Somehow I had gone from just writing a medieval version of a book any watercolorist/calligrapher could write, to writing one so involved that few people in the world would have the practical hands-on knowledge and experience to pull it off.

I soon realized that my book would also have to bring in scientific analyses of what had been found in extant books. It would need to cover the many ancient treatises, and it would have to pull it all together in such a way that it would work for any reader with an interest, not just historians and not just artists.

Stepping back from that notion, I realized that this was going to take a whole lot of effort and a whole lot of specialized research. A lot of the treatise recipes don't work as written, so I'd have to work them out and find out how to make them work. I am an artist, not a scientist. I just don't have that background. It was clear that I would need to teach myself a lot more than how to make a medieval book.

I started getting more and more commissions. I fostered the ones that brought me into more complex techniques. I gathered specialized tools, and when I couldn't get exactly what I needed, I made them. I created pen knives and ceramic studio ware that hadn't been seen in centuries. I went to collections housing medieval books and met conservation scientists and librarians who let me look at the real ones under magnification and to take measurements and direct observations. I even got to handle the pages of one of the greatest books in history between my bare fingers!

And it didn't stop there. I have been in communication with scientists around the US and in Europe about the processes. Sometimes they help me figure things out and other times I help them. Along the way, I had discovered that much of what I was learning was lost information, and that much of what had been figured out by scientists and historians was either presented out of context or is scattered amongst numerous academic journals. The knowledge is used mostly for learning how to preserve what remains in museums and other collections. The armchair historian could speculate about meaning, but without actually practicing the skills, the feeling of it was lost. It's like the difference between sending a robot to the moon to take measurements vs. actually sending an astronaut to stand there and feel what it is really like.

This is where the concept of "experimental archeology" comes in. Experimental archeology is the exploration of the actual historical methods used, with the same tools and materials, and it is accepted by the academic community as a valuable research method. It is the key to unlocking the secrets of the past in ways that science in a lab cannot. It is the uncovering of these lost secrets that has inspired me to call my book Secrets Of Forgotten Masters. The research I am doing for this book has become so ingrained in the artwork I create now that each supports the other. I could not do my medieval art without the research, and my artwork is the testbed for proving the research. I began to feel that writing Secrets Of Forgotten Masters had became as important to me as the art I was making with that knowledge.

And as I thought more deeply about it, the combination of research and artwork became more than a career move for me. As I considered why I was doing it, I thought about something else that struck me very deeply. What about the ancient people who made these books?

They were the master artisans to whom we owe the very transmittance of our culture. Without them, we would have no better clues about who we are and where we came from than what we learn from artifacts dug from the ground. Without the master parchment maker, the master calligrapher, and the master book binder, how would the works of Homer have been there to tell Schliemann where to find Troy? Without them, we would have forgotten the works of Aristotle, Socrates and Euripides. The great works of mathematics and engineering would only be hinted at by observance of such ruins as the Colosseum and the aqueducts. And so it seems fitting to me that my research and book respect these masters for the gifts they have given us. I am dedicating my book to them because I feel that none are more deserving of such a dedication than those who dedicated themselves, be it for faith or fortune, to giving us our identity.

These days, many of us seem to consider books to be cheap and disposable. After all, pretty much anybody can write one on their computer, send it digitally to a print on demand shop, or have it physically printed and delivered to their doorstep. Adding photos and other illustrations is just a matter of dropping in the image file and shaping the page around them. You can even get it paid for if you are good at online crowd funding. But my exploration of how books were made in the Middle Ages has opened a whole new perspective for me.

Because they were made entirely by hand from raw materials, books in those times were so valuable that they would equate to the cost of a nice car, or even as much as a house, by today's value. To make them was to manipulate a combination of death, of harvest, of poison, of crushing flowers and the bones of animals, the toil of digging hard stones from the earth, and literally the use of fire and brimstone. It took a lot of hard work with the hands, with molten metals, with leather, and with knives and hammers. Making a book required the skills and efforts of a diverse range of skilled workers, each specializing in their own craft.

To someone interested in the evolution of technology, that's pretty cool. How could someone like me resist? I am an artist; I love making things with my hands! Since my career has greatly been the illustration of our modern SF&F genres, when I started to explore the calligraphic and illustrative arts of medieval books, I considered that art to be the precursor of modern fantastic illustration. It seemed to be a natural progression. And while it was enjoyable to create, something bit me deeper than it does many contemporary calligraphers and watercolor artists. I wanted to know exactly how it was done in the past. This became a new passion. The more I explored this ancient, hands-on technology, the more fascinated I became.

I started to look for translations of treatises written in the Middle Ages which told how to make and use the colors. It turns out that there are quite a few recipes—when you know where to look. I started with the simple ones. My humble beginning was to make lamp black pigment by burning olive oil and collecting the soot on the bottom of a pizza pan. Then I bought malachite and other stones and ground them into pigment. It was fun, but it was just the bare beginning of something far greater. The act of creating the pigments became a part of my artistic process. It became as important to me as the final art itself. I read more. I started importing exotic plants from Europe, and growing many medieval plants in my yard that would create a host of yellows, greens, reds and blues. I harvested berries and flowers in Europe, making colors exactly the way they were made in the past. I bought specific insects from Turkey, and I charred the bones of animals as instructed by a 14th century manual. This was just the beginning of something amazing.

It became an obsession. I had to make things exactly as they did in the Middle Ages. I knew that the precious ultramarine blue came from one mine in Afghanistan in those days. So I had to get the same stuff. Even today, it is still hacked out of the mountain by people with pick axes, wearing just a cloth over their faces to protect them from the dust. Then it is carried by pack-mule past bandits and warlords and government officials, all needing to be paid off, until it reaches the coast, where in the Middle Ages it was sold to Venetians who took it home to Venice. From there it was distributed by ship across Europe at great expense. I discovered that the only significant difference between that story and today is that the Venetians have been replaced by New Yorkers, who then sell the raw rock to me at a gem and mineral show. Then I get to fracture this very hard stone by burning it, crushing it in a mortar, and then mull it on a slab before working it into a mass of wax and resin until it is like toffee. Only then can I extract the blue from the impurities by working it with sticks in potash lye that I make from scratch.

And providence smiled on me again. I discovered that the plant that makes two of the most important and vibrant hues of medieval manuscript illumination is not only naturalized in the US, but I happen to live in what I jokingly refer to as “Buckthorn Central, USA.” Its considered a pest plant over here. As tall as a tree, it has berries that American birds relish like few others. It grows everywhere, along fences, in backyards, and it fills the forests, keeping the park service quite busy trying to weed it out. In the summer, the Rhamnus cathartica berry is hard and green. As I follow a medieval recipe for it, I become part cook and part chemist. Through a process involving boiling the berries in potash lye and straining off the brilliant yellow through a linen cloth, I consider what it took just to make that cloth by hand in the Middle Ages, and the work I went through to acquire the potash lye.

Yeah, we can just buy the potash crystals and cloth today, but what fun is that? And when I tried modern potash, it ruined some of my colors because it was too strong. Medieval potash lye was milder and simple to make. So I decided to make my potash lye the old fashioned way. Fortunately, I had a friend with a long fence full of unwanted grape vines. I was happy to haul the vines away for her in order to further my experiments. So after hours of cutting, I had completely filled my van with coils of vines. Once home, and after drying them out, I built a fire in the fireplace downstairs. It was so hot from the vines that I feared I might set my house ablaze! I had to be careful, constantly ready to use the fire extinguisher rather than add a new bunch of vine. All I could do was hope there were no cracks up in the chimney. Eventually I had what I needed, a nice big pile of ashes. I took a large iron pot and some water and poured the water through the ashes. At the bottom of the pot were waste minerals, and the ash that came through the screen was skimmed from where it floated on top. That left an amber fluid of mostly potassium carbonate. Yup, we call it potash because it used to be made with ashes in a pot of water.

The fabric is another story. While one could purchase the loose linen fabric used to strain the berries out of the yellow broth, many medieval people made their own. Medieval linen started as flax fibers. It had to be processed, spun into threads and woven, just to get the straining cloth.

The other color buckthorn makes is called sap green. The real stuff is nothing like the imitation sap green sold today. The medieval color is far richer, more staining, and translucent. It comes from the same berries, but they are taken “in the vintage season” as one treatise recommends, early September. By that time, the berries have ripened. They are black and filled with a very sticky, dark purple juice. The trick is to make the juice turn green.

As it happened, I was in a conversation with one of the scientists at the conservation lab at the Getty Institute who was doing research on certain oriental dyes. She needed buckthorn, but had no idea where to get it fresh. I offered to get her some. So when the season came along, I headed out to a forested park to gather a very large bagful. I've done this before, so I thought I knew what to expect. The berries grow in big clumps, but come off easily. They are fragile, and often break, spilling their sticky purple juice. This tends to run down the hands onto the arms, and it is a certainty that it will get on one's clothes. I dressed appropriately; a 20 year old faded purple tee shirt and my worst painter's jeans. I was ready to stalk the wild buckthorn!

I was wrong. I normally get these from my backyard, but since I needed a lot, I went someplace with more of nature's abundance. Walking up to the first tree, I tested the berries. With a gentle test pinch, the purple juice ran between my fingers. Perfect! I opened the bag and started pulling off handfuls at a time. As the berries rolled out of my hands and into the bag, berries were inevitably broken, and the juice streamed down my arms. And that was about when the mosquitoes discovered me. Not just a few, either. It seemed like they came in organized squadrons, like German Messerschmitt fighters defending their Reich.

I started swatting them. I would pick a few berries, and then slap myself somewhere. Pick, slap, pick, slap. I cuffed myself behind the ears, in the face, all over my torso, on my legs, ...everywhere. I slaughtered many, but they just kept coming. Still a third of the bag to fill, and I was a huge purple blob covered by sticky juice. I persevered...

And that's when the yellow jackets discovered me. Because what makes the juice sticky? Sugars, and it turns out that yellow jackets just love buckthorn juice. If the mosquitoes were like fighters, I was not going to stick around for the bombers. I'd have to come back. Memories of a desperate flight from a honey tree that my childhood friends and I had thrown rocks at urged me on my dash back to the car.

Luckily, the green is easy to get, once you have the berries. For a large spoonful of juice it takes nothing more than to add a pinch of alum and let it soak a while in the presence of calcium carbonate, such as a clamshell.

Making paint brought me adventures that ranged from digging red ochre from a muddy commercial excavation in Virginia, to wandering in the woods of Sweden along ancient stone walls to collect billberries. But the illustrations these colors produce need to go with the words, and in order to write a book, one has to have ink. Medieval recipes for ink-making are plentiful, and they usually start with wasps. Great. Back to stinging insects... As if bees weren't enough!

But these are special wasp nests called oak galls. There are many kinds of oak galls, but they all start out with the wasp laying eggs in the tree's branch. The tree grows a sort of scar tissue around the eggs. As it grows, it is filled with gallic acid, which is a critical ingredient of the ink. Just as in the Middle Ages, the galls are harvested (I pick them up off trees with low branches) and crushed. The acid is extracted by soaking and boiling. To make it black, green vitriol (iron sulphate) is added and there is a reaction that makes it become silky black. The broken galls can also be fermented to make the ink more permanent, and wine can be added to make the letters hard to erase by scraping. But the ink is not ready yet. It won't stick to the page without a binder. In the Middle Ages the gum (sap) of certain trees was used for this. The favorite was, and still is, the imported sap of the acacia tree. But other gums such as the sap of cherry, plum, and some others also work well. Gum arabic, as acacia sap is called, is the binder still used today in watercolor paints and in many food recipes.

So, now you have ink; what about a pen? People originally cut reeds and dipped the shaped points into the ink, but then someone figured out that a bird's quill actually works a lot better. It makes finer lines. In fact, there are texts from the Middle Ages where the letter height is about 3/64 of an inch high. These were not huge ostrich feathers with the plumes waving around like the fans held by slaves in a bad Cleopatra movie. The favorite quills came from the feathers of geese, and they were stripped of the plumage and cut short, like our modern pens. These were tools, and they had to fit into a pen case.

We're almost ready to write that book now. Obviously, there were no laptop computers in the Middle Ages, and paper came to Europe gradually, never becoming common until the Renaissance, so what did people write on when they wanted to compose a book? (This is where most people say “vellum!”) But what is real vellum? Is it that thin tracing paper stuff you buy for drafting? No, it's animal skin. Specifically, vellum is a parchment made from calf skin. But wait, isn't parchment the stuff you use in baking?

No, baking parchment is just another example of how a word meaning one thing can change over the centuries to mean something entirely different, like when in the old days a mouse was a small rodent, not an electronic interface. Parchment means any rawhide skin that has been stretched wet on a frame, scraped very thin, and allowed to dry under so much tension that it becomes white and semi-opaque. That sounds exactly like the right stuff to compose a book on- but it's not.

Parchment is expensive today, and it was expensive in the Middle Ages. Depending on the size of the book, and a book may have several hundred pages of thin animal skin, it may take much of an entire herd of goats, sheep or calves to make enough parchment to copy out one book. So how did they do it?

The answer is the waxed tablet. My friends jokingly refer to it as the “medieval palm pilot.” It was simply a set of thin boards, hollowed on one or both sides, just deep enough for a layer of colored wax to be applied about as thick as a layer of paint. An author would compose their book on the wax, writing with a small pointed stylus, and erase by wiping the wax smooth with the flat paddle shaped end of the stylus. In this way, an author had the ability to make edits or even change the order of whole passages, before committing anything to the page. The tablets were often joined together along one side with cords tied through holes, and a pair was called a codex. And that is how our modern term for a codex style book evolved from the long papyrus roll type of book.

So the scribe sits now at a desk with a forty-five degree writing slope. The ink is in a ceramic pot or maybe a lead flask. The quills soak nearby in a horn of water to keep the tips straight; the parchment has been cut, and lines ruled out so the calligraphy will be straight. Now how does the scribe write the book?

This is where the “experimental archeology” becomes very important. While a chemist can work out how to make colors and inks, and a leather worker can work out how to process the parchment, just presuming that the scribe sets the waxed tablets out on the desk for copying is a poor assumption. By trying it out, you learn that the tiny squiggly lines cut in the shallow wax are only legible in raking light, and that you have to keep the quill going constantly to get any good use from it. Stopping creates mistakes, and pausing lets the ink dry and clog the pen.

This is where you need a dictator. No, not some egocentric politician who wants to rule the world. You need someone who can pick up the tablets and read them in the right order against the raking light. And the scribe cannot be a mere copyist, because he has to know how to spell the words. That meant another educated person, which during some periods of the Middle Ages was hard to find. Of course, in those days, an education wasn't really education and literacy wasn't really literacy unless it was in Latin.

Many people today fail to recognize the distinction between being literate in Latin and being entirely illiterate. It is commonly said that everyone outside of the church during the Middle Ages was illiterate, and it was only the monks who made all of the books. Well, that's just not true.

Let's go back to one of the most literate periods in the history of humanity, the time of the ancient Romans. There were a great many people who could read and write, even slaves. There were no Christian monks yet. They hadn't been invented. In general, people had a pretty good idea of how to communicate by writing. One could even grab a piece of birch bark, cut it into a long rectangle, and scratch with a dull point to write home that you needed a new pair of socks to be sent to your frigid outpost on Hadrian's Wall. You would simply roll it up and send it off to your wife back in Tuscany. Merchants had to keep records of what they shipped and where, and the tax man always wrote down who had paid and how much.

It was like this for centuries, with people writing this and that, mailing messages, drafting legal briefs for lawsuits, and invoicing each other, just like today. And then it happened. Rome crumbled. While the reasons and process of that long decline are not necessary for the explanation of literacy, it is important to understand that when new political entities took over, the massive bureaucracy that was Rome went out of business. In the meantime, there was that new religion in Europe which needed to know how to copy out holy books and other works, so they hired the lay scholars to teach them to read and write.

Merchants still kept records, and tax-men still wrote ledgers. It's not like people didn't know how to write, or we wouldn't have rune stones in Scandinavia. But keeping a lot of books was not the first priority outside of the church. Eventually many of the people who didn't need to know how to read and write had no place to learn it. Languages split into diverse dialects. Only the Latin of the church was close to stable.

The church became very popular—by mandate and sometimes pain of death. One kingdom after another adopted Christianity as its official religion. The Irish were sending missionaries all over Europe, founding churches and monasteries everywhere they could, even as far away as the Swiss Alps. By the twelfth century, there were so many churches popping up from Norway to Spain that the monks couldn't possibly keep up with it all. It's a whole lot of work and expense to make all of that parchment and all of that ink to just write the book, one calligraphic letter at a time. And that isn't even beginning to account for hand-planing the oak boards of the book covers down to the perfect, even thickness, or the tanning of the leather for its covering, or sewing the pages by hand onto tawed thongs in order to attach them to the book covers, or fashioning bronze clasps to hold the book shut. And all of that is just what was needed for a simple book. A fancy one often had gold that had to be beaten into leaf so thin that it actually floats on air currents, fine tooling on the leather coverings, and finely wrought illustrations, sometimes by some of the greatest artists in history.

The best Bibles and Gospels might even get treasure bindings of silver and gold, ornamented with intricate scenes carved on ivory panels and surrounded by precious gem stones. This required great skill in metal work, carving and lapidary arts. Where would the monks and nuns find enough skilled artisans to do all of that work?

To make it even more complicated, the chaos of the early Middle Ages evolved. Nobles had second, third and fourth sons who weren't going to inherit, so what would they do with them? The answer had been to send them off to an ecclesiastic life or turn them into warriors, but around 1200 a new option came along. It was the University. These were sprouting up in major cities, and of course the church was behind them. And what did the brash young noble student need to get him through his studies? I know, you're probably thinking “lots of beer.” True, but also books. Lots of books.

And once again, there we have the poor monks, struggling to just crank out enough bibles for the many churches and monasteries going up on every other hilltop. How did they ever do it in the age before the laser printer and inkjet? They didn't. They taught the lay craftsman to do it. And so the circle came around. Once again, professional scribes from outside of the church were needed. Book production became a big business. People called stationers would keep text exemplars, send them out to several calligraphers, commission the bronze clasps and bosses for the cover, arrange acquisition of the leather for the covering, and then they would collect all of the elements and bind the books. It's almost a modern industrial method.

This is a lot for a single twenty-first century artist to deal with, but somehow I got to the point where I have learned almost all of these skills. I don't know how to beat gold yet, but I've learned most of the rest. I have made my waxed tablets. I have taken dead sheep and goats and turned them into pages which have become illustrated, written artworks. I've dug colors from the earth and processed them into pigment by grinding and extracting them from impurities with the use of resins and fire. I've learned to write and paint using the same kinds of tools they used back then, many of which I've had to make myself, in order to do the job right. And I have learned to sculpt waxes and cast my bronze hardware for the clasps and bosses.

The Middle Ages was full of death. Not just the imagined death of action-packed science fiction stories, or real wars fought by robotic drones over some distant mountain range. The people dealt with death on a daily basis. When war came, it came in the form of burnt villages and slow death by sharp, heavy blades. Or death came more often at home where family members commonly watched their children die young, and older family members die from diseases seldom even seen anymore.

As I write this, I am sitting in the waiting room of the University of Michigan's Cancer Center, waiting on a loved one. There is tension here, forced into smiles as the people around me try hard to make the best of things. But this is no trip to a medieval physician. Some patients are here for simple screenings, and I just heard a nurse call for an old woman and say “I see you're really happy to be out of that wheelchair!”

The contrast between the past and the future is stark. I appreciate the reality of the past, and because I understand it, I love living in the future. The future has brought us so very much. I sit here, not in a place of death, but in a place of hope. The very old here understand. Through their lives they have witnessed great technological advances and they appreciate the privilege that the future has provided. To many of us though, these advances are less obvious because we live in a constantly changing world where everything is done for us, usually in the background.

But some of us have a great interest in the many hidden wonders of ancient technology. In times when life itself was a difficult challenge, people created incredible innovations and stunning works of beauty, many of which laid the foundations of our current culture and technological triumphs. And through more than two thousand years, the hand-made book carried our wisdom and our knowledge.

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