The Scribe’s Mistake: Errors in Medieval Texts

Imagine a world without spellcheck, without the delete key, without even the mass-produced perfection of a printing press. In this world, every single book is a unique, handmade object, copied letter by letter in the flickering light of a candle. This was the reality of the medieval scriptorium. The scribe, often a monk, would spend countless hours hunched over a sheet of vellum or parchment, painstakingly recreating a text. And in this intensely human process, mistakes were not just possible—they were inevitable.

These errors, far from being mere blemishes, are a treasure trove for modern scholars. They are the accidental footprints left behind by history, offering a direct line into the minds of the scribes, the evolution of languages, and the very way knowledge was transmitted for centuries. Welcome to the fascinating world of the scribe’s mistake.

The Anatomy of a Mistake

Why did scribes, whose entire job was accuracy, make so many errors? The reasons are deeply human and relatable. Scriptoriums were often cold, poorly lit places. A scribe might be working for hours on end, fighting fatigue, a wandering mind, or the distracting sounds of the monastery. The source text (the exemplar) might be faded or damaged, or written in a difficult, unfamiliar script.

Sometimes, texts were produced by dictation, where one person would read aloud to a group of scribes. In this scenario, a cough, a mumble, or a simple mishearing could result in an error being copied simultaneously into multiple manuscripts. These “auditory errors” are particularly valuable to linguists, as they preserve clues about how words were actually pronounced at the time.

A Taxonomy of Scribal “Bloopers”

Scribal errors aren’t just random typos. Over centuries of study, paleographers (scholars of ancient handwriting) have categorized them into several distinct types. Understanding these categories is the first step in unlocking their secrets.

Omission: The Vanishing Text

• Haplography: When a letter or sequence of letters appears twice in a row, the scribe might accidentally write it only once. For example, the Latin name Philippus might become the shorter Philipus. It’s an easy slip of the eye.
• Homeoteleuton: This is one of the most common and significant errors. The term means “similar ending”. It occurs when a scribe’s eye, having just copied a word or phrase, jumps down the page to another word with a similar ending, skipping all the text in between. Imagine copying a passage like “The brave knight went to the market for a fight. He knew that the coming day would be a test of his might, so he sought a new shield before the approaching night“. A tired scribe’s eye might jump from “fight” to “night”, omitting the entire middle sentence.

Addition: More Than Meets the Eye

• Dittography: The opposite of haplography. Here, a scribe accidentally repeats a letter, word, or even an entire phrase. It’s the medieval equivalent of writing “the the”.
• Interpolation: This is a more complex addition. A scribe might write an explanatory note (a gloss) in the margin. A later scribe, copying that manuscript, might mistakenly think the gloss was part of the original text that had been accidentally omitted, and so “helpfully” incorporate it into the main body. In this way, commentary could slowly merge with the text itself over generations of copying.

Substitution and Transposition: Jumbled Words

• Substitution: This happens when a scribe misreads one letter for another. In many medieval scripts, letters like ‘c’ and ‘t’, or ‘f’ and the long ‘s’ (ſ), looked remarkably similar. A simple misreading could change a word’s meaning entirely. A famous (though perhaps apocryphal) story tells of a priest who for decades had read the word sumpsimus (“we have taken”) in the liturgy as mumpsimus. When corrected, he refused to change, preferring his familiar “mumpsimus” to the correct “sumpsimus”—a tale that gave us a word for stubbornly holding on to a known error.
• Metathesis: This is the swapping of letters or sounds. We see it in modern English with words like “aks” for “ask”. In manuscripts, a scribe might write brid instead of bird, reflecting either a slip of the pen or a common feature of local pronunciation.

How to Fix a Flaw: The Medieval Correction Toolkit

Scribes were well aware of their fallibility and developed a sophisticated system for correcting their own work. When a proofreader (a corrector) or the scribe himself spotted a mistake, they had several tools at their disposal:

• Erasure (Rasura): The most direct method. Using a small, sharp knife, the scribe would carefully scrape the ink from the surface of the parchment. This was effective but almost always left a slightly roughened, discolored patch on the page that is still visible to us today.
• Expunctuation (Subpunctio): A less invasive technique. The scribe would place a series of dots or a thin line underneath the erroneous letter or word. This signaled to the reader that it should be disregarded, or “punched out”.
• Insertion: For omitted words, the scribe would place a caret-like symbol (^) in the text to show where the missing material should go. The omitted word or phrase was then written in the margin or, if space allowed, squeezed between the lines (an interlinear insertion).

Sometimes, these corrections came with a personal touch. We find notes in the margins where scribes complain about the poor quality of their ink, the biting cold, or the sheer tedium of their work. One famous note reads, “The book which you see here was written in a foreign land. As a thirsty man rejoices in water, so a writer rejoices in seeing the final word”. These notes are a poignant reminder of the human beings behind the beautiful script.

From Flaw to Family Tree: What Errors Teach Us

So, why are these mistakes so valuable? Because they act like a genetic fingerprint. For most major classical and medieval works, the original autograph manuscript is long lost. What we have are copies of copies of copies.

Nineteenth-century scholars, particularly the German philologist Karl Lachmann, realized that errors could be used to establish the relationships between different manuscript versions (or “witnesses”). The principle is simple: if two manuscripts, B and C, share the same unique error (especially a significant one like a homeoteleuton) that is not present in manuscript A, it is almost certain that B and C were copied from a common ancestor that already contained that mistake. Manuscript A must come from a different line of descent.

By tracking these shared errors, scholars can create a manuscript family tree, known as a stemma codicum. This allows them to work their way back up the branches, closer and closer to the original text (the archetype), and make educated guesses about what the author originally wrote. An error, once a mark of failure, becomes the primary tool for textual reconstruction.

Furthermore, unintentional misspellings based on sound (auditory errors) give historical linguists priceless data on how pronunciation has shifted over centuries. When a scribe writes knyght as nite, it tells us that the “k” and “gh” were likely already silent in their dialect. The mistakes are not mistakes at all—they are evidence.

So the next time you see a high-resolution image of a medieval manuscript, look beyond the beautiful calligraphy and intricate illuminations. Search for the scraped vellum, the dots under a word, or the text crammed into a margin. In these “flaws”, you’ll find the scribe’s humanity, the secret to recovering lost words, and a direct, tangible connection to the living, breathing history of language.