How did monks preserve ancient knowledge?

Answer 1

You are referring to a time before the printing press. This would have been from the seventh to the thirtheenth century AD.

There was a written language, but paper and printing was not yet invented, so everything had to be done by hand. The monks handwrote the books as an act of worship. There are wonderful manuscripts in museaums showing the fine printing that they did. Monks who were assigned to these tasks would sit at a desk with a goose quill and a pot of ink and they would spend all day carefully writing the manuscript. They would also draw people and things in the margins and much of the text was very fancy.

The most important thing about the manuscript books of this period is that they were objects of religious veneration. They were seen as consecrated objects. Their creation was an act of religious devotion. The monks who sat for years, working on single chapters of the Bible, were not reproducing books. They were making the word of God manifest in the world.

The style of these books is very different from anything we are used to reading. They are not meant to be a collection of words that convey information from an author to the reader. Their primary function is to serve as decoration which pays tribute to the word of God.

In an illuminated manuscript, the complexity of the decoration was intended to mirror the complexity of the biblical passages the decoration illustrates. Just as Biblical text is open to many different interpretations, the illumination of that text was intended to pose the same allusive and meditative possiblilities.

Check out the website link below to see examples of this writing.

Answer 2

They wrote it down. Many monks were scribes and that is all they did. Most of the ancient documents that have been found were written or copied by monks.

Answer 3

Yes the above people are correct in that monks wrote things down. However they also had rituals (to help remeber things) and also sang songs to help remember

Answer 4

They wrote on parchement and in books, also by word of mouth. There was even one case where a monk took a piece of parchement that Archimedes wrote on, rubbed it off, then wrote his own rhetoric on it. So much for progress.