I largely agree about the administrative difficulty although I‘d emphasise the written word over the printed word in this context.

Using thousands of monks to copy documents by hand instead of using printers was incredibly resource expensive, but affordable for the Medieval Church.

It'd be fascinating to see a conversion to person-hours to copy one book in medieval times.

And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be spent {farming/military/political administration} to give a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow them time to copy the book itself.

It's an interesting thought. Challenging because of the fixed costs though. The cost to produce one book would be almost identical to the cost to produce 1000 books; it is the infrastructure more than the marginal resource cost per book.

Could see it going either way. Agricultural efficiency (in terms of person_fed : person_farming) in Europe was pretty low. So the dedicated headcount (monks) might dominate the net cost, which would make it scale more linearly with number of books.

The market price 1 medieval book was roughly the same price for 5 pigs according to this analysis [1]

Price of 7 books = £5 = 100s -> 14s per book / Price of 1 Pig in London = 3s

14 / 5 => roughly 5 pigs per book

Note £1 = 20s

[1] http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

Paper was also a huge cost--maybe more than the monks' labor depending upon how you want to value their real cost.

Today I learned! Thanks!

I think they viewed the transcription itself as a form of meditative/devotional practice and didn't prioritize efficiency as much. The illumination on some of these manuscripts can get pretty elaborate and, sometimes, kind of whimsical. So they were clearly doing some creative expression while doing it.

I'm not following. The parent, I believe, was not talking about canon law specifically (which is changing and to be distinguished from doctrine which only undergoes development, but never revision). I also don't understand what papal crises have to do with anything in this context. And what is meant by "political-nation-religious entity"? The Church is a religious institution whose bishops (including the pope) have also exercised distinct secular political authority in addition to religious authority. It was never "national" in character, only supranational (hence, "catholic").

Parent was observing that the Catholic Church was an exception to GP's point that the written word stiffened and froze monotheistic religious practice, as it blended oral and written transmission.

I was observing that the modern Catholic Church (post-printed word) has offified in exactly that way, with the printed word allow direct dissemination of the "agreed" canon (i.e. pope / hierarchy) to the entire church, thereby unifying them into a single practice.

In counterpoint I offered the number of papal crises and schisms that abounded during the medieval and pre-medieval period (i.e. before printed material became cheap and available).

Ergo, the use of the printed word allowed the Catholic Church to unify and standardize in a way it had not before -- GP's point.

It's indicative that the majority of monotheistic religious splits within Catholicism happened before the printing press, when intervening human parties could reinterprete the canon as it flowed through them.

For political-national-religious entity, the Catholic Church / Holy Roman Empire partnership allowed the Church to become a nation in all but land, by the power its blessing conveyed upon a chosen leader.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law#Catholic_Church

> But the body of canon law would have been impractical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word.

Would it? The Bible, which is much larger, was practical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word, and its not like there was a proximate relationship between the availability of printing (presumably with movable type, in the 15th century) and the codification of canon law in the 20th. The idea that this was waiting on printing is…hard to defend.

> See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times

The really durable schisms after the 11th Century emerged after or just before (and became crystallized because of) printing, though.