Christopher De Hamel:
The arrangement and publishing of the Bible was the most enduring monument of the scribes and illuminators of Paris in the early 13th century. This deserves some attention. It has a major place in the history of manuscripts. The way that the Latin Bible was redesigned and promoted from the Paris schools was one of the most phenomenal successes in the history of book production. The Bible is not an easy book to publish: a very diverse collection of ancient historical and literary texts sanctioned by divine authority and forming a vast and complex record of the Word of God. Of course, the Bible has been central to Christianity from the beginning...[A History of Illuminated Manuscripts by Christopher De Hamel. Phaidon: London, 1994]
But (with a very few distinguished exceptions) Bible manuscripts had been made up of several separate volumes, usually enormous in size, which were intended as vast monuments to be displayed on a lectern or altar in a church or in the refectory of the monastery... These volumes were not portable in the usual sense, and they were not designed for private study. 12th century students of the Bible text (and naturally there were many) would make use of those twenty or so distinct volumes which made up a glossed Bible. One studied the Psalms, or the Gospels, or the Minor Prophets, for example. Biblical scholars were known as Masters of the Sacred Page, a term which echoes this concept of the biblical corpus as the sum of a great many pages of Holy Writ rather than as a single book within two covers.
Some time in Paris in the late 12th or early 13th century all this began to change. This is really significant. The Bible was now put into a single volume. The order and names of the biblical books were standardized, the prologues ascribed to St. Jerome were inserted systematically, and the text was checked for accuracy as far as possible. For the first time the text was meticulously divided up into numbered chapters which are still in use today. The so-called Interpretation of Hebrew Names, an alphabetical dictionary of the Latin meanings of Hebrew proper names, was added at the end. More important in the history of publishing are the changes to the physical appearance of the book. Scribes used the thinnest silky vellum. The pages became extremely small. They employed headings at the top of each page, little red and blue initials throughout the text to mark the beginning of each chapter, and the text was now written in black ink in a microscopic script in two columns. The effect was dramatic. The new type of Bible was an absolute bestseller...
More than that, the Bible design masterminded in the early 13th century has so fundamentally entered the subconsciousness of all of us that, even now, 700 years later, Bibles still look the same. Choose a traditional printed Bible from a good bookshop today. Look at its physical layout. It is on tissue-thin paper, very like the uterine vellum of the 13th century. It is probably octavo in size, like almost every 13th century copy. It has the same order of biblical books, headings, the same division into chapters (with verses, not introduced until the 16th century) and - many centuries after this layout has been dropped from most other text - it is in minute writing in two narrow columns. Look at the binding and the colored edges. The chances are that the cover will look like leather and be black or red or blue: these are the three colors of 13th century Parisian painting. It is hardly possible to find another object which was so new in 1200 and which is still made with so little modification today.