13-10-2019, 06:17 PM
I've done some reading recently about Scholasticism, and also about the manuscript industry in medieval Europe, which was a market cornered by monastic orders and their scriptoria. Most of you here know much more about this than I do, and I thought it would be helpful background information for thinking about the cultural milieu from whence the VMS came, and maybe now and again having something intelligent to contribute to the discussion of medieval manuscripts. (Plus having seen a lot of the pictures posted in these forums, I definitely get their appeal!)
One thing that stuck out to me in my reading is that in a typical monastic scriptorium, for maximum efficiency, there would be someone standing at a raised lectern reading the original text slowly and loudly, while multiple scribes would copy down what they heard at the same time. I was struck that if the VMS is a copy of an earlier work — which it might very well be — it was very likely read aloud by one person and copied down by another. And/or, the scribe might be called upon to read back a section that he had written, periodically, to check for accuracy.
This is making a lot of baseless assumptions, though. For all we know the VMS was a one-off project by a single person, who never had any need to consult with anyone else in making it, and never intended to share it with anyone, and thus never needed it to be readily convertible to human speech.
One thing that stuck out to me in my reading is that in a typical monastic scriptorium, for maximum efficiency, there would be someone standing at a raised lectern reading the original text slowly and loudly, while multiple scribes would copy down what they heard at the same time. I was struck that if the VMS is a copy of an earlier work — which it might very well be — it was very likely read aloud by one person and copied down by another. And/or, the scribe might be called upon to read back a section that he had written, periodically, to check for accuracy.
This is making a lot of baseless assumptions, though. For all we know the VMS was a one-off project by a single person, who never had any need to consult with anyone else in making it, and never intended to share it with anyone, and thus never needed it to be readily convertible to human speech.