(04-03-2016, 05:54 PM)Koen Gh. wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think many people underestimate the amount of copying that went on in the middle ages, and how little material was actually original.
Also in literary traditions, many supposedly original works drew heavily on oral traditions, examples of the ancients, examples from other countries...
Copying is basically what people did in the middle ages. With manuscripts being created by hand, one-at-a-time, and many of them being sacred scriptures, copying was THE thing to do, to make sure the information wasn't lost, especially considering plague could wipe out a whole town in a few weeks and all that was left as a legacy of activities and beliefs was books.
And sometimes the rules for copying are extremely strict, one mistake while transcribing a Torah scroll and you start again.
Even before printing presses, the number of Bibles and Q'urans that were copied is staggering, considering materials were scarce, people who could write were not numerous, and it takes years to copy a Bible.