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+--- Thread: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material (/thread-4853.html)
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Koen G - 08-08-2025
Of course I understand "provincial areas" for example may change much more slowly. Even to this day, medieval traditions persist, in some places more so than in others. (An awful lot of those traditions are actually modern or nationalist inventions, but that's another topic altogether).
But there are evolutions in society, evidenced by the fact that we don't live in the Middle Ages anymore. And there are broad tendencies as the results of those evolutions. For example, especially from the 19th century onward, a much greater emphasis on the importance of individual privacy. The emergence of new literary genres. Increased access to literacy and writing materials.
I'm not a historian, but adding a few 15th century books to a pile of 18th century plus books and then drawing retrograde conclusions from that seems like bad practice.
Let's say I collect all books I can find where the characters are anthropomorphic animals. I would have to conclude that such tales are made for little children. But that misses the fact that the way animal stories function evolves over time. Not everywhere all at once, that's beside the point. The point is that animal stories aimed specifically at children was not the medieval standard. They would moralize for a general public, offer criticism..
In fact, children books in general are a recent phenomenon. 17th century or so. Book culture evolves, and you cannot project the present onto the past, even if there are holdouts from the past in the present.
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Jorge_Stolfi - 09-08-2025
Just to be clear, I am NOT suggesting that the VMS is a diary, or the elucubrations of some "Genius Of The First KInd". You know my theory, and the "medieval attitude" toward books or anything else is totally irrelevant to it.
That said, I would still argue that, a priori, an undecipherable manuscript from the 1400s is about as likely to belong to either of those two categoris as one from the 1800s. Back then, fewer people could write and would have access to pen and paper; but those who did would have the same variety of motivations to produce such books as those of 400 years later.
I do not agree that there is such a thing as a "Medieval mindset", or any other epoch's mindset. Again, there was an international community of scholars who interacted by mail or travel, and shared somewhat similar views about life, the universe, and everything. Those views may be what passes for the "Medieval mindset". But it is a mistake to think that everybody who could write were part of that community and shared that supposed general "mindset".
My point is not just that some "provincial areas" evolved more slowly. It is that, like today, there has always been an enormous variety of "mindsets". The available technology and social structures might constrain people's actions, but not their motivations.
Quote:Let's say I collect all books I can find where the characters are anthropomorphic animals. I would have to conclude that such tales are made for little children. But that misses the fact that the way animal stories function evolves over time. Not everywhere all at once, that's beside the point. The point is that animal stories aimed specifically at children was not the medieval standard.
What changed there is that books now are much cheaper than they were in the 1400s, so that now most parents can afford to buy books for their children that are pure entertainment, not educational. And so a legion of authors took to write children books and comics to exploit that market.
But that technological and commercial "progress" did not affect the production of diaries and elucubration treatises.
Sometime in the 1980s, when I was in the US, a fellow computer scientist got pestered by some crank who gave him a stack of neatly handwritten notes to evaluate. They described his rebuilding of all of mathematics with new original foundations, notations, and vocabulary. I recall only that one of the first pages talked about a "BER magnitude" without clearly defining it; "BER" being his own initials. That guy could have been the very subject of that Stanislaw Lem's tale. Had he lived in the 1400s, he could well have written his own crazy alchemical-astrological-medical treatise...
All the best, --jorge
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Aga Tentakulus - 09-08-2025
Legends and anthropomorphic animals.
Take the skull of a European rhinoceros and search for fossilised traces in a fault line.
A large animal that can run along rocks.
Result:
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RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Aga Tentakulus - 09-08-2025
Let's assume that every year, 1,000 new students enrolled at universities and monastery schools in Central Europe. Between 1400 and 1420, that amounts to 20,000 students. We may know something about 200 of them.
But what about the remaining 19,800?
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Jorge_Stolfi - 09-08-2025
(09-08-2025, 02:47 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Between 1400 and 1420, that amounts to 20,000 students. We may know something about 200 of them.
But what about the remaining 19,800?
And same for scholars. The vast majority did not leave a record; both their life story and their writing have totally vanished.
RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material - Eiríkur - 13-08-2025
A copyist blind to the meaning of the text they are copying helps with one of my key problems with the MS: the paragraphs of (seeming) babbling repeats of words/affixes/syllables. I saw that as a quality control problem of some kind, but I just don't think something that is that large (major sections of large paragraphs) would have been missed. I'm saying that I, naively, think that those should have been removed. I'm probably wrong. So, those sections are valid and they contribute in some way to the purpose of the MS, steganographically or as a verbose cipher. (Seems to be the ninja concensus.) Something (but not many bits) could be encoded in the patterns.