11/17: mistakes and corrections

Mistakes and corrections are regular parts of any teacher's life and any student's life, but today I got to spend time with very special mistakes and corrections: mistakes made around 1200 on a leaf of the Latin Bible by the scribe who was creating the manuscript, and then corrections of (some of) those mistakes, sometimes by the scribe himself and sometimes by a later reader. It was so (so!) fun to analyze where and why both the mistakes and corrections were made--not because it gave me a feeling of superiority, but because it provided a glimpse into the real human workings of two people long, long ago. When have mistakes given so much pleasure? Thank you, medieval Italian scribe; thank you, later reader/emender of an unknown time and place. You two made my day. If your manuscript had been perfect, it would have been much less sweet.

Here's an instance where the scribe seems to have corrected himself:

If you look at the line that starts near the top of the big red E, you'll see [E]Rat aut[em] danihel. The aut[em] danihel has dots underneath it, because it's a mistake. The scribe accidentally started to repeat something he had already written--just two lines above it you'll see Erat aut[em] danihel. The dots--or puncta--tell a reader to disregard it; it's been puncta-ed out, which is the origin of "expunged."

And here's the later reader at work:

In the middle line shown you can see two things squeezed in, written in a different color ink. The first one is an e with a bar over it (meaning est or "is"), and the second one, which looks kind of like a z (or a 7 or a 2), is a sign for et ("and"). The reader decided to break one clause into two by adding a verb and then a conjunction.