Question about mediaeval scholars

[eckadimmock]

How did medieval philosophers publish their works or get their ideas out there?

Modern scholars send their papers off to a peer reviewed journal, or book length contributions to a publisher. They can also attend conferences and present papers.

In what form did the works of people like John Buridan or Duns Scotus get published? Did they write them themselves and get someone to copy them? When was the moveable type copier available to the average author, especially for nonreligious works?

There were networks of people (and James mentions the Merton calculators, for example) who presumably knew each other, but how easy was it, for example, for scientists in Oxford to know what was going on in Italy?

Probably a silly question, but I'm interested in organizational structures and knowledge flows.

[jonkon]

I have always presumed that, prior to the printing press, scholars got their ideas out there through personal contact. A large part of my own research into the history of science has been to document the individuals and modes of this communication. For example, Oxford was founded as a Jewish trading colony and thus had ready access to the manuscripts being translated in Toledo, Spain. Students copied the manuscripts of their teachers for their own use. Scholars, like Roger Bacon, did travel from one university to another and would take their manuscripts with them. Wealthy patrons would hire copyists to make manuscripts for them. Ptolemy built up the library of Alexandria by requiring all travelers to surrender any manuscripts they had on them to have them copied.

[peterdamian]

>>In what form did the works of people like John Buridan or Duns Scotus get published?

This is very well documented. Printing did not arrive properly until the early 15th century. Before then, works would have been 'published' through handwritten copies made by armies of scribes. Handwritten notes taken during lectures were called a reportatio. Notes that were checked by the author and made into an edition were called an ordinatio.

Because the scribes used a special shorthand, works could be copied quite rapidly, and the information stored efficiently. Here is a copy of a manuscript dating from the 1280s, roughly contemporary with Scotus, which will give you an impression.

www.logicmuseum.com/pictures/Q.13%20p.49va.jpg

The shorthand makes it very difficult to read without training. The two lines at the top of this one read

et individua temporalia, et tamen individua sunt verius quam universalia et
verius esse habent, quia universalia non habent esse nisi in anima vel in individuo.

meaning '[Thus it is clear that universals are perpetual] and individuals temporal, and yet individual things are more true and more truly have being, because universals do not have being except in the soul, or in the individual'. The writer of this text clearly had nominalist sympathies - he was Peter of Cornwall, who may have influenced Scotus, and the lecture was transcribed by John Aston, a monk at Oxford.

The medium is brown ink on vellum. Note the funny faces in the margin that Aston doodled while bored. Note also the gash in the vellum lower down, presumably caused by the slaughterer's knife.

There a huge number of these manuscripts still in existence, only a small number of them have been deciphered and translated.

Indeed, the translation I have given above is probably the first time anyone in 700 years has represented those thoughts in English.

Even though they were speaking in Middle English during that period, all scholars wrote in Latin. It is rare to find any reference to the existence of English or any of the common European languages in this genre. However it had the advantage of being a universal language of scholarship, perhaps rather like English today.

>>I have always presumed that, prior to the printing press, scholars got their ideas out there through personal contact.

That too, but some of the works Aston's book (see link above) were originally written in Europe. It is quite common to find English works in French manuscripts, and vice versa, so there was clearly communication by written works alone.

Also, it was quite common for the English masters to move to Paris and back, taking manuscripts with them, so the communication was fertile, even then.

[himself]

And the copy possessed by the master was called the master's copy, and we still use the term "master copy" today. Student copies were made in the stationer's office. Those copied directly from the master copy were especially coveted, since they would have fewer scribal errors creeping in.

That was the fatal problem in the manuscript tradition. The number of errors that crept into the Toledan Tables over the centuries so corrupted ancient/Arab/medieval astronomical data that Copernicus' mathematical system was unable to out-perform the Ptolemaic one. (And led Tycho Brahe to his program of intensive and detailed astronomical observations (pre-telescopic!) perfected by his assistant Kepler as the Rudolphine Tables.) There was a famous error that crept into an early work by IIRC Jordanus that in effect reversed a ratio in his formulation of power and work. (And remember, all formulae were in words. The + sign was not invented until Nichole d'Oresme, and the other arithmetic signs around the time of movable type printing.

The printing press was the first write-once/read-many device. Once the proof copy was proof-read, all subsequent copies would be identical. For the first time, scholars, instead of quoting the first line or phrase of a memorized text, could refer to a specific page in a specific edition in the confidence that the reader could then find it.

[peterdamian]

>>For the first time, scholars, instead of quoting the first line or phrase of a memorized text, could refer to a specific page in a specific edition in the confidence that the reader could then find it.

How much evidence do you have for this? Certainly, one of the frustrations of medieval texts is that they never refer to a contemporary source by name (they say ‘certain persons say that’ without specifying who the persons are), and even when they refer to the ancient authorities (Aristotle, the Christian and Arab commentators) they specify only chapter numbers or ‘incipits’ (an ‘incipit’ is a brief beginning phrase that accurately locates the source).

But I don’t know when the practice changed, if ever, to the use of page numbers. Remember that, even today, use of page references is vulnerable to the repagination over different editions. I am not aware of any incunabula (pre 16h century printed texts) referring to page numbers.

In general, I think you may be over-emphasising the changes that took place with the advent of printing. When I compared 15th century printed work to its original source, the main difference is the reduction in the ‘shorthand’. This is obviously because there is little extra manual work required to write the whole word instead of the shorthand. Nonetheless there are interesting exceptions which survive even today from the medieval period, like the use of the ampersand & for ‘et’, etc. for ‘et cetera’, i.e. for ‘id est’, ‘viz’ for ‘videlicet’ and so on. There is even the word ‘item’ which now means some salient object, which derives from the medieval Latin meaning ‘again’ – the medieval equivalent of the bullet point.

Another medieval practice which is still around is the use of two columns per page, rather than the use of the whole page. You still see it occasionally nowadays. The modern practice of referring to Aristotle by a ‘Bekker number’ depends on this, but remember this was not established until the 19th century.

I don’t know when the practice of numbering by page rather than folio came in. In medieval works, the first page was 1r, page 2 is 1v, page 3 is 2r and so on. ‘a’ is column 1, ‘b’ is column 2. This was still in use in the 16th century, I don’t know when the change occurred. Nor do I know when the practice of referring to page numbers first happened.

[himself]

I was not clear. I meant that the printing press enabled this transition by creating identical copies of the same text. Different editions might have different pagination, but that is why the bibliography lists the text by publisher and year, no?

Since mss were so expensive, scholars memorized entire texts. The use of a key phrase was meant to remind them of an entire argument previously digested. We still often pepper our texts with quotes.

[peterdamian]

>>I was not clear. I meant that the printing press enabled this transition by creating identical copies of the same text. Different editions might have different pagination, but that is why the bibliography lists the text by publisher and year, no?

And I asked how much evidence you have for this. For perhaps the last 150 years, authors have cited editions and dates in the way you suggest. But the 19th century was long after the invention of printing. I am not aware of page references being used in the 16th century, for example (as opposed to chapter and section references). Clearly after page numbers are invented, reference by page is possible. But when was the actual practice taken up?

>>Since mss were so expensive, scholars memorized entire texts. The use of a key phrase was meant to remind them of an entire argument previously digested. We still often pepper our texts with quotes.

Evidence for this? Scholars would certainly memorise key phrases from key authors like Aristotle, Boethius. And they would naturally remember the gist of an argument. But if you compare the remembered version with the actual, it’s clear that their memories were not very good.

As for the expense of books (i.e. ms), the scholars would have access to a well-stocked library (just as modern students do) so I don’t see the problem. Then, as now, academic literature was prohibitively expensive.

[eckadimmock]

Some very interesting responses, thank you all. I wonder how difficult it is to memorize entire texts? I know there are people who can recite the entire Quran verbatim.