Texts are cheap these days, according to Union University English professor Gavin Richardson. That’s why he wanted his students to appreciate the value of books from ages past.

“We don’t even have to buy a book anymore,” Richardson said. “You can get an ebook. You can get texts on your Palm Pilot, on your Blackberry. I want to make my students aware that texts meant more in the Middle Ages. Owning a deluxe manuscript in the Middle Ages was a status symbol. It was like owning an SUV today.”

To accomplish his goal, Richardson assigned students in his class, “The Middle Ages: Chaucer,” during the fall 2006 semester to produce a manuscript quire using medieval techniques. A quire was a subsection of a manuscript that was inscribed with text, and then the quires were all bound together to form a single manuscript.

For the assignment, Richardson divided his students into four groups. Each group worked with a piece of goatskin to produce a quire, using dipping inks and goose feathers which they cut into quill pens.

Each member in a group had a different responsibility. Junior Racheal Pressnell did the border artwork for her group’s project.

“I spent at least 24 man-hours on that project,” Pressnell said. “I put a lot of time into it.”

Pressnell said she enjoyed her labor, and that the project gave her an appreciation for the value of books in the Middle Ages.

“It was a wonderful artistic break amid all of the papers I had to write this semester,” she said. “I really appreciated the idea of working with medieval methods and just the feel of the inks and the vellum, and I wanted to do a good job. It gave me a much greater respect for book making in general, and a much greater respect for the arts of literature of that period.”