Scribal publication is the term used to refer to the copying of manuscripts by hand, which was the only way to propagate written texts before the development of movable type and the proliferation of the printing press.
Ever since antiquity, scribes in cultures that possessed written languages routinely copied existing texts so that the information in them could circulate more widely. The most skilled of these scribes were artists, whose elaborate and intricate decorations can be found in illuminated manuscripts, such as the world-famous Book of Kells (produced ca. A. D. 800) kept in the Long Library at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and the book of hours called Tres riches heures of the duc de Berry kept in the Musee Conde at the Chateau de Chantilly in France.
Yet most such scribal publication did not consist of crafting elaborate capitals or gold-laced interwoven borders. More mundane copying was necessary for the information in a text to spread. At times scribes worked together, either on parts of a single manuscript or multiple copies of a text, but some no doubt worked individually.
The so-called “print revolution” of the 15th and 16th centuries did make information more widely available because printers could produce printed pages more quickly than scribes. But printers did not necessarily preserve texts more accurately than scribes. That is, while the text of a book might appear to be stable—identical from one version to the next—there is now ample evidence to suggest that changes were frequent and a book’s contents not necessarily closer to an original text than a scribe’s copy.
Recent scholarly work has revealed that scribal publication did not disappear even when the printing press spread across Europe and the rest of the Atlantic basin. Certain kinds of texts, such as musical scores and newsletters, typically remained in the hands of scribes rather than in the workshops of printers. Instead of viewing the rise of the printing press as marking the end of the scribal trade, it makes more sense to see the two technologies coexisting, at least until sometime in the 17th century.
Further reading: Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993); David McKitterick, Frint, Manuscrip-t and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
World History
