>Every so often, these scribes would add winging and moaning into their marginalia. Below are some genuine inserts from manuscripts that prove that monks weren’t always keen on their task at hand:
>“New parchment, bad ink: I say nothing more.”
>“I am very cold.”
>“That’s a hard page and weary work to read it.”
>“Thank God, it will soon be dark.”
>“Oh, my hand.”
>“Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”
>“As the harbour is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to a scribe.”
>“Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”
I love the one about Summa Theologica, how it was difficult and tedious for the scribe, deo gratias, deo gratias, and again, deo gratias
Nolan Brown
Printing was worth inventing just to avoid this bullshit
Jason Walker
please, imagine having to hand set each individual letter. and you cant even add a snide remark to let the world know you existed
Oliver Ortiz
>While many scribes had anxieties about working with such precious materials, others directed their complaints to the content of the work itself: “Whoever translated these Gospels did a very poor job!”
>Veeky Forumsfags shitting on translations a thousand years ago
Luke Smith
>"This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, "The hand that wrote it is no more.""
Kayden Campbell
>>“Thank God, it will soon be dark.” Just found the title for my new doom-folk album.
>It's a Veeky Forums doesn't understand what life was life was like for bookfags You would have to spend hours upon hours writing into a pieces upon pieces of parchment - pieces where if you made a single mistake you would have to scrap the whole page - trying to shit out a book you've made dozens of times until your hands cramp.
Cooper Davis
>Donald Trump will never come out with a Doom folk album Why even live?
You've got to wonder, did monks ever get the temptation to fuck with the text? I imagine if you're sitting down, scribbling down the only copy of some mind-numbing book on kitchen etiquette or something, if you wouldn't feel like throwing in random "FATHER GIOVANNI IS A FOOL" in the middle of a paragraph or something.
Alexander Peterson
Try handrighting for 8hours a day beautifully with no mistakes in a dim candle light. Yea its hard work that is why it was don almost exclusively by monk. As a tribute to God in a way.
Lincoln Powell
Im sure they did, but controlling themselves is part of being a monk. And am sure the punishment for something like that is saver and he would have to scribe the gospel for penance.
A lot of them didn't even know how to read properly, so that wasn't possible. They were just copying characters one after another, one at a time, from one page to another. If they could read they'd probably feel more inclined to correct an error they saw before they got any inclination to start fucking with it.
>This is so sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, "The hand that wrote it is no more." Why did OP leave out the best (worst) one?
"Deliver me from writing" is the best one, though.
Carson Jackson
I took a class on the Irish transmission of classical texts last year, and recall one monk who called himself 'Virgil the Grammarian' who wrote texts on Latin grammar that are so odd they appear to be elaborate parodies of monastic tradition.
He would write something about the form of Latin grammar and then cite his source by saying 'Aeneas told me this' or say 'there are actually 12 kinds of Latin, but people these days only use one of them.' So I think there were definitely some early academic pranksters, considering scholars who look at this particular monk's work don't have much of a consensus on what to take seriously.
