Queeste - Current Issue

A significant portion of medieval literature owes its survival to professional scribes, whose contributions to textual transmission are only now being more fully recognised. This essay investigates the attitudes of such scribes toward literary texts by reconstructing the working methods of one of them — likely active in Ghent during the second decade of the fifteenth century. This professional scribe copied Die rose (a Dutch translation of the Roman de la rose) into the Comburg manuscript, a version that diverges notably from other known renditions. A close analysis of orthographic changes, textual variations, and scribal errors suggests that scribe A acted chiefly as a faithful copyist, with little critical engagement with the text or interest in correcting his exemplar through comparison with the French original of the Roman de la rose. The stark contrast between his approach and that of contemporaries such as Geraert van Woelbosch highlights the broad range of scribal involvement with literary texts. The article calls for a reassessment of textual variation in conjunction with archival research and codicological analysis to develop a more nuanced understanding of scribes — not simply as transmitters, but as individuals whose agency and involvement varied according to context, skill, and purpose.

This article examines the nature or status of medieval manuscripts. Whereas the early printed book always is a formal book, professionally made for the market and hence a commercial product, a handwritten book could possibly be made for other reasons or purposes. Once someone had learned to write, he or she could copy a text for private use or as a gift to someone else. Furthermore, while printing a book involved a single, streamlined process, the creation of a manuscript often occurred in multiple stages, as is demonstrated by codices that were ‘growing’ over years or even decades. In assessing the ‘qualities’ of a given manuscript, the article departs from four oppositions in the manuscript’s production: formal versus informal, for private use versus for the market, commercial versus non-commercial, and professional versus non-professional. These denominations are not intended as rigid labels or mutually exclusive classifications, but rather as analytical tools to help determine what kind of book a particular manuscript might be.

In German medieval philology, the manuscript production of the fifteenth century has long held a rather poor reputation. This article reconsiders that perception by reevaluating the manuscript culture of the period, focusing on the influential workshop of Diebold Lauber in Hagenau in Alsace. Lauber, a scribe and book dealer, actively marketed illustrated vernacular texts, including classics such as Parzival and Tristan, to a noble clientele. His workshop modernised book production, introducing standardised layouts, full-paged coloured pen drawings, and chapter structuring, merging traditional content with innovative paratextual features. A close comparison of three manuscripts of Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Parzival reveals nuanced illustration programs and a conservative approach to old courtly texts, likely reflecting the preferences of Lauber’s noble customers, who identified with the ideals of High Medieval knighthood. Earlier regarded as formulaic and impersonal, the standardised features of these codices are now seen as the most notable innovations of Lauber’s workshop, and as effective tools for recontextualising classical texts at the threshold of the age of mechanical reproduction.

Diplomatic research has revealed that in the late medieval Low Countries the production of administrative texts for temporal and spiritual lords, such as the count of Hainaut and the bishop of Utrecht, was not only done by the clerks of their chanceries, but also by public notaries and town scribes, working on a professional basis. Moreover, in the second quarter of the fourteenth century the copying of registers in the comital chancery of Holland was outsourced to two Leiden priests, Gerrit Hoogstraat and Dirk Gravekijn, who also wrote books for the famous jurist Philips van Leyden, their relative. Other professional scribes in Leiden wrote administrative texts as well as books; in the fifteenth century we have the example of Huge Claaszoon die Scriver, who worked for the town’s magistrate and for a number of religious institutions. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, and beyond, more instances can be found of professionals writing both types of texts. Research on late medieval book production should therefore take into account the work of the documentary scribes, whose products, which are often richly available and mostly dated and localised, can give much information about the activities of professional writers.

Books of Hours in the late medieval Low Countries were typically produced in modular form, with specialised craftsmen handling different stages of production — parchment preparation, copying, rubrication, illumination, and binding. A single parchment leaf, once reused as a pastedown and now kept at the Museum Huis van het boek in The Hague (MS 10 A 10, 58f), offers rare insight into the (commercialised) process of book making. The recto contains the beginning of the Hours of the Virgin in Middle Dutch, likely intended as a sample page for prospective clients. In the lower margin, a production specification outlines the planned content, structure, materials, and cost of a custom Book of Hours. These scribbled notes shed unique light on the role of the librarius — a bookseller acting as an intermediary between producer and client — and illustrate the modular approach to producing a Book of Hours in the Low Countries during the second half of the fifteenth century.

The Collegiate of Sainte-Waudru in Mons, which was founded in the seventh century and evolved into a chapter of Secular Canonesses by the middle of the twelfth century, played a significant role in the book production in late medieval Hainaut. Two capitular acts, from 1265 and 1545, allocated portions of the Chapter’s prebendal income, derived from the Canonesses (all of noble origin and not bound by vows of poverty or required to relinquish their property), to cover liturgical expenses, including the purchase and repair of books and vestments. Between 1306 and 1623, records from seventy different years document payments for the production and the maintenance of liturgical books, revealing that approximately eighty craftsmen — secular and clerical — including scribes, illuminators, and bookbinders, were employed, with Tournai, Paris, and Antwerp as the main production centres. By examining the Latin 1269 lectionary (London, British Library, MS Egerton 2569), written by the English scribe John of Salisbury and commissioned by Dean Hermine de Héronfontaine (d. c. 1294), along with the unique French poem in it that names three Canonesses, this article highlights the Canonesses’ direct and multi-layered involvement in the manuscript’s creation process.

The allogenetic composite manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Can. misc. 278 comprises three multilingual booklets, probably all produced in Bruges in the 1460/70s. The booklet covering folios 97–128 ends with a colophon dated 17 February 1467 in which the scribe requests prayers ‘for her who has written this’, followed by the signature ‘per me SR’. It is the only known colophon from a Middle Dutch manuscript attributed to a secular female scribe and one of the rare examples of such attribution to female scribes in the late Middle Ages. Attempts to identify her through the records of the librarians’ guild in Bruges, which date from the second half of the fifteenth century, have yielded no result. The register reveals that around 1480, women made up twenty-five percent of the members, with some being self-employed and taking on female apprentices. However, there is no specific mention of female scribes — let alone the one who signed her work with ‘per me SR’. Her colophon refers only to the set of Middle Dutch didactic texts that were added to a booklet originally consisting of two quires containing a Latin-French Disticha Catonis, followed by some short French texts. This original booklet, to which a third quire was added, was copied by a different scribe. The question of whether ‘SR’ — assuming these initials do refer to her name — was a professional scribe is not necessarily complicated by the fact that the manuscript, now totaling three quires and 32 folios in total, was not produced in a single operation. Nor does the request for prayer conflict with the conclusion that this extended codicological unit was produced on commission for an urban clientele. The rather professional execution of the ‘first’ booklet, comprising two quires, and its later extension by the female scribe, suggest that the manuscript, now the third section of MS Can. misc. 278, may have resulted from a commercial cooperation between two scriptoria within the Bruges book trade during the second half of the fifteenth century. The colophon, however, provides evidence only that women acted as professional scribes in this industry.