The specific article I looked at is called Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life, which explains the origins of copying texts. I came across a fantastic website from Dartmouth University called Dartmouth Ancient Books Lab, which offers historical background on paleography, codicology and papyrology. This all lead to my final question, how or why did monks transcribe? Where did it begin? So I did some further research to find out. It wasn’t as simple as copying line per line most of the time Latin was not the first language of monks (depending on where they were from), so copying Latin texts was no easy feat – or even if they spoke Latin flawlessly, a lot of texts were in Greek as well. While I spent my time trying to configure my 3 lines, I came to think: “if I’m struggling with 3 lines, how on earth did monks copy/transcribe whole volumes of books?!”. While this process is ridiculously frustrating, it is also incredibly fascinating (if you like this kind of stuff, that is). It took me an hour to transcribe 3 short lines of my manuscript, and there are definitely some questionable words I have created, due to the fact that I cannot decipher the correct letters and/or spelling. Medieval Latin has this “amazing” thing where it uses unfamiliar abbreviations, sometimes there are no breaks in sentences or words and occasionally the letters do not look how they do in today’s modern alphabet. To a new transcriber, that thought is so wrong, so very, very wrong. One might think “oh well, this must be easy, all I’m doing is copying what I see in front of me!”. ![]() ![]() This week in class we began the increasingly tedious task of transcribing our medieval manuscripts.
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