Books, Power, and “Truth”: How Manuscripts Shaped the Medieval Mind

In a world before printing presses and paperbacks, books weren’t casual objects—they were handmade technologies of authority. This episode explores how medieval manuscripts shaped what people could know, who controlled knowledge, and how “truth” was established through institutions, commentary, and tradition. We follow the manuscript as both a physical artifact (parchment, ink, illumination, binding) and a social force—one that organized education, reinforced power, and preserved (and sometimes transformed) ideas as they traveled across time and place.

Along the way, we examine the culture of glossing and marginalia, where medieval readers literally wrote their thinking into the page, and we zoom in on two key case studies: the devotiona ...