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Scriptorium (plural scriptoria) comes from the medieval Latin script-, scribere (to write), where -orium is the neuter singular ending for adjectives describing place. Thus, a scriptorium is literally "a place for writing".

'Scriptorium' is commonly used to refer to a room in medieval European monasteries devoted to the copying of manuscripts by monastic scribes. Written accounts, surviving buildings, and archaeological excavations all show, however, that contrary to popular belief such rooms rarely existed: most monastic writing was done in cubicle-like recesses in the cloister, or in the monks' own cells. References in modern scholarly writings to 'scriptoria' more usually refer to the collective written output of a monastery, rather than to a physical room. Scriptoria in the conventional sense probably only existed for limited periods of time, when an institution or individual wanted a large number of texts copied to stock a library; once the library was stocked, there was no further need for a room to be set aside for the purpose. By the start of the 13th century secular copy-shops developed; professional scribes may have had special rooms set aside for writing, but in most cases they probably simply had a writing-desk next to a window in their own house.

The monastery built in the second quarter of the 6th century by Cassiodorus at Vivarium in southern Italy, contained a purpose-built scriptorium, because he was consciously attempting to collect, copy, and preserve texts.

The Plan of St. Gall is a sketch dating from 819-826 of an imaginary Benedictine monastery (not a real one), which shows the scriptorium and library attached the northeast corner of the main body of the church; this is not reflected by the evidence of surviving monasteries.

The mother house of the Cistercian order at Cîteaux, one of the best-documented high-medieval scriptoria, developed a "house style" in the first half of the twelfth century that spread with the order itself.^[1] In 1134, the Cistercian order declared that the monks were to keep silent in the scriptorium as they should in the cloister. There is evidence that the existence of a separate scriptorium for communal writing was later untypical: in the 13th century, the Cistercians would allow certain monks to perform their writing in a small cell "which could not... contain more than one person".^[2]

This miniature ^[3] is a fanciful late fifteenth-century depiction of a scribe at work: he is shown copying a document or scroll from a bound book.

• Manuscript culture
• Manuscript
• Rule of Saint Benedict
• Plan of Saint Gall
• Cassiodorus
• Codex
• Johann Gutenberg

• New York Carver: Scriptorium
• Etchings of scriptoria and an example of a manuscript
• Fr. Landelin Robling OSB"The Order of Saint Benedict : Monastic Scriptoria"
• The Digital Scriptorium: a visual catalog, an image database of dated and datable medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that forms a repertory of scriptorium styles
• History of Scriptoria
• "Manuscript catalogues": Charles D. Wright's on-line bibliography covering medieval libraries and scriptoria.
• St. Gall Monastery Plan
• The St. Andrews Scriptorium