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.