I am curious as to how long it took for a typical scribe in, say, a monastery, to hand write a medium-length manuscript. This is just the writing, and not the illumination or binding. I know that modern soferim usually complete a Sefer Torah in about a year to a year and a half. Is that a comparable length of time?
To avoid that favorite game of AskHistorians, Specify-The-Era, we will say the 13th century.
All depends on the length of the manuscript but it would have taken weeks or months for the average piece. It is a painstakingly slow and careful process, with meticulous attention to detail afforded to every grapheme of every letter. Plus their work was limited to the hours of daylight since many monks became blind when working through the night by candlelight. Even with a group of monks all working on one manuscript, the whole affair was slowed down when considering that their handiwork had to be as identical as possible to the next monk.
A lot of texts have some great footnotes that show the opinions of the monks to their labour.
