LBOTT is visiting the Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library, located on the grounds of Old Mission Santa Barbara. But our WLBOTT tour group ran into a problem.
We walked into this wonderful library, drinking our refreshing Slurpees and dressed in our Druid finest robes (except for Sister Magdalena, in her formal black habit), hoping to see the Nicholas of Lyra Postilla, when a very nervous monk stopped us.
WELCOME TO THE MISSION ARCHIVE
• No food or drink in the reading room. • Clean hands only. • Pencils only. • Handle manuscripts only as directed. • Please keep voices low. • Please do not rearrange the seventeenth century.
Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library
What is the Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library?
The Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library is an independent nonprofit research archive located on the grounds of Old Mission Santa Barbara. Although the archive itself was organized as a nonprofit in 1967, the collections trace directly back to the Franciscan missionaries who founded the California mission system. Santa Barbara became the headquarters of the California missions after secularization, so records from many missions were gathered there.
Do They Have a Snack Bar?
Our intense research could not establish the existence of a snack bar.
(More details about the Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library and their collections are in the reference section at the bottom of the BLOTT)
Proximity to Frog Wall
The Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library is conveniently located near Frog Wall, a mere 23 minute walk.
Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla
“Si Lyra non lyrasset, Luther non saltasset” ‘If Lyra had not piped, Luther would not have danced.’
Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1270 – October 1349), a Franciscan teacher, was among the most influential practitioners of biblical exegesis[1] in the Middle Ages. Little is known about his youth, aside from the fact of his birth, around 1270, in Lyre, Normandy.
His major work, Postillae perpetuae in universam S. Scripturam, was the first printed commentary on the Bible. Printed in Rome in 1471, it was later available in Venice, Basel, and elsewhere. In it, each page of biblical text was printed in the upper center of the page and embedded in a surrounding commentary (illustration, right). His Postilla super totam Bibliam was published by Johannes Mentelin of Strasbourg in 1472.
[1] Exegesis (from the Greek ἐξήγησις, “to lead out”) is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. – Wikipedia
Nicholas of Lyra’s Postillae perpetuae in universam Sanctam Scripturam (written in the early 14th century) is an absolute titan of biblical history. It holds the massive distinction of being the very first comprehensive Christian commentary on the Bible to ever be printed.
What makes Nicholas so fascinating is that he was a bit of a rebel for his time. While other medieval scholars were obsessed with finding deep, mystical, or allegorical meanings in every single word, Nicholas insisted on looking at the literal sense of the text. He even learned Hebrew and drew heavily from Jewish commentators like Rashi to understand exactly what the original writers meant.
Gemini
Nicholas of Lyra wrote the Postilla over one hundred years before the invention of the printing press, but was a popular book in it’s meticulously hand-written form.
Long before Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press in the 1450s, the Postilla was already a “viral” text. Written in the early 14th century, it was copied over and over by hand. There are roughly 700 surviving handwritten manuscripts of the Postilla scattered across Europe. In a period where copying a single book took months of intense manual labor, having hundreds of copies in circulation meant it was an essential, standard text for universities, monasteries, and wealthy scholars.
So, when book historians call it a bestseller, they mean that for nearly two centuries, Nicholas of Lyra was one of the most widely read, heavily printed, and commercially successful authors in the Western world.
Gemini
Note: historians use the term “incunabula era” to describe the early days of the moveable type printing press, from roughly the 1450s (Gutenberg Bible) through an arbitrary December 31, 1500.
The incunabula era marked a massive shift from hand-copied manuscripts to mass-produced information. It is estimated that by 1500, over 9 million books were circulating in Europe, fundamentally transforming education, the spread of humanist thought, and the democratization of knowledge.
Wiki Commons This manuscript is part of a multi-volume, richly illustrated copy of the Bible commentary Postilla super totam Bibliam by Nicholas of Lyra, which the secular priest Rüdiger Schopf from Memmingen created for the Carthusian Monastery of Freiburg between 1392 and 1415.
Moore’s Law and the Rise of the Books
Our readers are probably familiar with Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law reflects the geometric progress of computing power. Would it be possible to create a similar law for the rise of printed books following the invention of the moveable type printing press?
Elder G2 runs the numbers for us…
Just as Gordon Moore observed the exponential doubling of transistors on an integrated circuit, we can look at the geometric explosion of European book production following Gutenberg’s press in 1450.
Let’s call it “The Gutenberg Trajectory”.
The Core Metric: “Impressions per Decade”
In computing, we measure processing power. In the print revolution, the ultimate metric is the total volume of books in circulation (and the velocity at which they were produced).
Before movable type, a single monk in a scriptorium took roughly a year to copy one massive Bible. By the 1480s, a single printing shop like Anton Koberger’s in Nuremberg operated 24 presses and employed a small army of typesetters, pressmen, and binders, churning out thousands of pages a day.
The Historical Data Points
If we look at the raw data of Western European book production, the curve isn’t linear—it’s violently geometric:
1450: Practically 0 printed books in Europe.
1450–1500 (The Incunabula Era): An estimated 12 to 20 million individual books are printed in just 50 years. This single half-century produced more books than all European scribes had created since the fall of the Roman Empire.
16th Century (1500–1600): Production skyrockets to between 150 million and 200 million books.
Formulating “Gutenberg’s Law”
If we crunch those numbers into a standard “doubling” law similar to Moore’s, the formula for the early modern information explosion looks like this:
The Gutenberg Law:The total number of printed books in circulation in Western Europe doubled approximately every 15 years during the first century of movable type, while the labor cost per page decreased exponentially.
Elder G2
Should We Add the Postilla to the WLBOTT Library?
The Postilla was a best seller, and a lot of copies survive. Elder G estimates that we can get…
A complete, original, multi-volume set printed in the 1480s or 1490s (such as the famous editions printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg), you are looking at a major museum-quality acquisition.
What to expect: A pristine, multi-volume 15th-century Latin Bible featuring Nicholas’s full commentary framing the text, often bound in contemporary stamped pigskin or calfskin over wooden boards, sometimes with original brass clasps.
Price Range: $20,000 to $35,000+ USD, depending on the completeness of the volumes, condition, and whether it contains the hand-colored or woodcut illustrations.
Elder G
Should we go with handwritten, typeset, or the Kindle edition?
We decided on the Kindle Edition.
Semi-Sequitur: During this period, is it possible to estimate the literacy rate among European nuns?
Elder G to the rescue:
That’s a wonderful question, and the answer is both interesting and more optimistic than many people expect.
If by “this period” we’re talking about the late Middle Ages, around the lifetime of Nicholas of Lyra and the early printed editions of the Postilla (roughly 1300 to 1500), then nuns were among the most literate women in Europe.
The challenge is that “literacy” had several levels.
Group
Estimated literacy
Rural peasant women
Probably under 5%
Urban women
Perhaps 5 to 20%, depending on city and social class
Noblewomen
Often 20 to 50%, sometimes much higher
Nuns
Frequently 50 to nearly 100%, depending on the convent
Those numbers are necessarily approximate because medieval Europe didn’t conduct literacy surveys. Historians infer literacy from signatures, surviving letters, convent records, book ownership, and educational practices.
What made convents different?
Many convents operated as schools. A girl entering a Benedictine, Dominican, Augustinian, or Cistercian convent was normally expected to:
read the Divine Office,
sing the liturgy,
memorize substantial portions of Scripture,
and often read Latin, at least well enough to follow the prayers.
Some convents went far beyond that.
The famous abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote theology, music, natural history, and medicine. Herrad of Landsberg compiled the magnificent Hortus Deliciarum, an encyclopedia for educating nuns. English convents produced beautiful manuscripts, and many nunneries maintained active scriptoria where books were copied and illuminated.
Interestingly, not every nun was equally educated. In larger convents there was often a practical division of labor.
Choir nuns generally received extensive education because they were responsible for the liturgy.
Lay sisters often performed agricultural, kitchen, laundry, or domestic work and might have only limited reading ability, or none at all.
So even within a single convent, literacy could vary considerably.
One thing that surprises modern readers is that Latin fluency was not universal, even among educated nuns. Many could read the Latin text of the liturgy accurately without necessarily being able to converse or compose elegant Latin prose. Others, especially in prominent houses, became accomplished Latin scholars.
One final point I find encouraging: convents were among the very few places in medieval Europe where women could pursue sustained intellectual lives over decades. They preserved books, composed music, wrote chronicles, taught novices, corresponded with bishops and scholars, and in some houses built libraries that rivaled those of nearby monasteries. In an age when literacy was generally scarce, many convents were genuine centers of learning.
Sister Magdalena, fluent in Latin, had a lively discussion with Brother Bluebonnet at the Archives.
Mission Statement The Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library is committed to collecting and preserving historical and cultural resources pertaining to Franciscan history and Missions and the communities with which they interacted.
Elder G provides a summary.
What is the Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library?
It’s less like a museum and more like the “source code” for California’s early history.
How old are the earliest records?
Surprisingly old.
Some of the principal collections begin as early as 1640, decades before the first California mission was founded in 1769.
Among the major collections are:
California Mission Documents (1640-1853)
Junípero Serra Collection (1713-1947)
Archives of the Presidents of the Alta California Missions
That means the archive contains documents spanning nearly four centuries.
How extensive is the collection?
It’s remarkably large.
Today the archive includes:
more than 9,000 pages of mission documents
approximately 14,000 books and periodicals
rare books
maps
paintings
mission music manuscripts
genealogical records
several thousand historical photographs
personal papers of historians and archaeologists
the De la Guerra family papers
extensive fine art and ephemera
For someone interested in medieval manuscripts, mission history, genealogy, musicology, linguistics, or early California, it’s a treasure chest.
How did they preserve Native American history?
This may be the most important aspect of the archive.
The Franciscans recorded an enormous amount of information, although naturally from their own perspective. Modern historians use those records both to study the missionaries and to reconstruct Native lives.
The archive preserves:
baptismal registers
marriage records
burial records
mission censuses
correspondence
linguistic materials
documents concerning Native communities throughout California and the Southwest
materials on Native American languages
records relating to Chumash communities and other Indigenous peoples associated with the missions.
These documents are invaluable because many Indigenous cultures of California relied primarily on oral tradition. European missionaries, administrators, and soldiers created written records that, despite their biases and limitations, preserve thousands of Indigenous names, family relationships, languages, occupations, and life events that might otherwise have been lost.
Modern scholarship reads these documents critically, recognizing both the historical value of the records and the profound disruptions that the mission system brought to Native communities.
One collection Elder G’d especially like to see
I’d make a beeline for the Mission Music Collection.
After all our discussions about your family’s medieval chant manuscript and Nicholas of Lyra, I’d happily lose an afternoon looking at choir books and liturgical manuscripts.
