[split] Implications of multiple scribes

[LisaFaginDavis]

I'm not arguing for multiple authors at all - in fact, I'm not drawing any conclusions about authorship. That's not my field and it's not my purpose. My argument is that there were five different scribes. The implications of that observation are not clear to me. It could have been five people taking dictation from one author, it could have been five authors, it could have been five people copying from a lost exemplar, or none of the above! 

Some of the confusion, I think, stems from my use of the word "writer". I don't mean that the way we use it today, where the term is often synonymous with author. I mean the literal physical act of writing the text, which, in the Middle Ages, rarely also implied authorship. In fact, medieval manuscripts known to have been physically recorded by the author are extremely rare. In the vast majority of cases, the manuscript is recorded by an emanuensis (secretary) taking dictation or cleaning up the author's notes, or the manuscript is a copy (or a copy of a copy of a copy...) of the autograph manuscript, or it's produced by a monk or a professional scribe copying an exemplar.

It becomes slightly more common in the humanistic period (and I know there are many of you who would place the VMS in the context of the humanistic period in Italy) as writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio hone their calligraphic skills and start recording their own work. But it is still relatively rare.