New Post: "I Do Listen to the Experts. Do YOU?"

[Koen G]

We don't know the author of most manuscripts. How can it be more extreme than "author unknown"? Author extremely unknown? And similarly, there are many manuscripts of which we don't even know in which country they were made. And of which we don't know how they ended up in the repository where they were first inventorized. Why? Because manuscripts travel. Because of Latin as the lingua franca. Because medieval scribes rarely signed their works. 

I would flip it around and say that the situation of the VM is pretty standard. The cases where we actually know everything about a manuscript's provenance are the extremes.