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Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts
- vectorbunny 13y agoFavorite: "St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing."
- sgrove 13y agoStriking how similar the concerns are from one age to another. I've often spent a long day tracking a bug down, fixing it, and pushing it out to production, and thought, "Now I've written the whole thing: for Christ's sake give me a drink."
- pavel_lishin 13y agoMy first thought was that this is the middle-ages equivalent to comments I sometimes leave in code. /* So this is where it gets dumb. */ // Really dumb one-time override for this asset
- Apocryphon 13y agoThat's what I figured, too. No wonder this article is so appropriate for this site, it echoes the mundane pains of today's code-scribes.
- archon 13y agoI'm currently hand-writing a copy of the Greek New Testament as a (theoretically) fun project. I've bound many books before, but this is the first I'll write by hand before binding. I sympathize with "Now I've written the whole thing: For Christ's sake give me a drink." If you want to truly appreciate the work monks did to preserve knowledge in the medieval period, try writing a book out by hand.
- Zimahl 13y agoHow are you proofreading your copy? I'd hate for an error to result in Seventh Day Advent Hoppists[1]. [1] http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Seventh_Day_Advent_Hoppists http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Seventh_Day_Advent_Hoppists
- vectorbunny 13y agoIf you don't mind my asking, are you making your own paper, and if not, what are you using for the pages of the book?
- archon 13y agoNo, I don't enjoy pain and frustration that much. I get large 22 inch by 30 inch sheets and cut them down to size (do a search for 'Zerkall Book Smooth' if you want the exact material). I cut out four 10x14 pieces per sheet, which gives me one signature. A signature consists of four sheets of paper stacked, then folded in half to make a little booklet. That yields 16 pages. Then the signatures are sewn together during the binding process. Edit to add: I would have loved to use real parchment for a more authentic end product, but that amount of parchment would have cost thousands of dollars.
- scrumper 13y agoSeems like that would be quite the family heirloom, good on you. How far through are you?
- 13y ago
- yareally 13y agoI am guessing I am not the only one to find how much this parallels some of the comments we leave in code due to venting/frustration or for other random reasons. Perhaps in another 1000 years someone will be going through ancient source code to find similar comments.
- gngeal 13y agoIn another 1000 years, your hard drives will be unreadable.
- yareally 13y agoYou imply that conventional hard drives are the only storage mechanism that exists. It's a valid point, but there are ways to keep data around. The monks of 500-1000 years ago were writing books that were meant to be kept for a long period of time, so they were already thinking past their own lifetime (even a monk's comment in the article mentions that).
- pavel_lishin 13y agoMy hard drives of less then a decade ago are already unreadable, but my code is still around.
- Apocryphon 13y agoNow I'm imagining an artisanal service that prints out all of your code- or at least the ones your take pride in the most- then illuminates it for you, before binding it. Now that's a coder's heirloom.
- fusiongyro 13y agoIt would be majestic if it weren't so absurd. Who's written anything worthy of that treatment? I think this is why literate programming interests me. Almost none of the code written today is worthy of being a real cultural artifact, or even a family heirloom.
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- speeder 13y agoCoding is excessive drudgery, it crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and sides.
- devindotcom 13y agoHeh. Reminds me of The Name of the Rose. This kind of thing is endlessly interesting to me. Edit: I see this comes from Lapham's Quarterly, which is far and away my favorite magazine and an incredible resource to anyone remotely interested in ideas and history: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/ http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
- gngeal 13y agoI was secretly hoping for "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of God's existence, which this margin is too narrow to contain."
- themstheones 13y ago...but said proof was actually based on an error; a real proof for God's existence wouldn't come for centuries after much more advanced theological tools were discovered and refined.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThat said, it's hardly surprising that something so simple and innocent on the surface took a whiles to figure out.
- Yourfags 13y agohe was so excited he forgot to write it =)
- e3pi 13y agoJohannes Trithemius(1) Abbotus of Spondheim Abbey De Laude Scriptorum -`In Praise of Scribes' 1492 Praises why scratching ink on vellum by quill/point, is, among many other things, the better input device over this new Gutenberg press invention(~1436), improving both the entirety of the scrivener, as well as all of civilization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Trithemius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Trithemius (1) mnemonic I use, Tri: them-i-us
- jtsnow 13y agoI imagine these monks would be horrified at the rate that we produce frivolous text today. We have notes like these scribbled all over our social networks. Some are entertaining, but I wonder how much of our "written" word will be deemed fit to preserve for reasons other than data analysis.
- fortepianissimo 13y agoLots of what they produced can be said to be frivolous too - just produced at a much slower rate.
- jordan0day 13y agoI guess there's probably lots of various standards for "frivolous", but it's not like they were just firing off quick forum replies.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoThey might be horrified until they realize that copying a book is as easy as Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Then they'd be ecstatic.
- mdda 13y agoBut the cost (in human life, if not money) of re-transcription of the text was itself a filter for getting rid of the frivolous.
- EzGraphs 13y agoI have often thought of that - and considered writing a time travel story that included an ancient ending up in a modern grocery store or some such place and be paralyzed while meticulously reading each label (out loud). One of these days...
- vijayr 13y agoImagine a tool, that can write the biography of any person, simply by going through the truckload of data that we generate. -- Dating/Relationship stuff from FB status -- Spending habits from credit card data/Mint/Amazon etc -- Professional/Career data from linkedin etc etc And so on. Granted, it would be boring for most people. But it is possible to do it. This is fascinating and disgusting, at the same time :(
- loupeabody 13y agoAll of these would be suitable as tweets. Manuscript margins are to Medieval Monks as Twitter is to Contemporary Socialites.
- shmerl 13y agoIf you look at the page of the Talmud, it actually resembles an on-line forum, or more precisely some Wiki with discussions around some subject: http://www.hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx?mesechta=1&daf=3&format=pdf http://www.hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx?mesechta=1&daf=3&format... It's more of a printed version style, but even hand written editions which predate the printing press had a similar arrangement.
- stan_rogers 13y agoIt's probably easier to follow in the Steinsaltz edition (I had been buying it for a while in the English translation as it came out, but it was like waiting for the fourth volume of TAOCP).
- shmerl 13y agoProbably depends on what you are used to. One of the best in typography and design was the Slavuta edition, but that printing press was shut down long ago, as known, and the Vilno edition became the widespread one ever since. This particular scan is from Moznaim. It's a newly typeset edition, but like most today follows the Vilno one.
- stan_rogers 13y agoI was thinking more about reading it than seeing it. Steinsaltz is translated, but retains the traditional layout (and distinct typefaces, as for Rashi), so it can give a taste of what's there in the original. One doesn't have to agree with Steinsaltz to admire the translation effort.
- shmerl 13y ago
- bitwize 13y agoThese are beautiful, the ancient equivalent of the F-bombs which glitter from within the Linux kernel comments.
- will_brown 13y agoMy Godfather lived as a monk in a monastery in Switzerland for a number of years, and aside from chanting and prayer, the monks otherwise took a vow of silence. However, once a year the monks were allowed to utter a single word to the "head monk"...my Godfather chose the following year 1: "Bed", year 2: "is" and year 3: "Hard". At which the "head monk" replied "you complain to much". After time my Godfather did leave the monastery and one of his sons became a VP/General Counsel of Yahoo (retired).
- dmd 13y ago(You do know that that's an old, old joke, right, and that it didn't actually happen to him?)
- bch 13y agoOh no. This reminds me of a girlfriend who thought her parents really did take their old dog to a farm...
- will_brown 13y agoTo be clear he was a monk for a number of years in a Monastery in Switzerland, and he did tell the story (as I am sure many former monks tell the same when reflecting on their experience); however, many people in the thread are drawing similarities between themselves and the unknown scribes, thinking the scribe's work sounds similar to their own as a coder, or that the both put hidden messages in their work. Simply the biggest similarity is human nature, humor and complaining are good examples. In other words I did not see to many people making the point that they too know what it is like to be cold like some scribes mentioned. Although you make a great point it would be great if one of these margin notes had a second note underneath saying, "its really not that cold in here" or "given a few hundred years the paper softened up quite nicely" a la HN. Edit: Sorry it must not have come thru, I know this is not my Godfather's actual experience...what made it great is that it was told to me by a former monk in the first person
- nether 13y ago
- EzGraphs 13y agoReminds me of Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs (based on anonymous Irish poetry): http://www.listeningarts.com/music/art_song/sounds_and_texts/BarberTexts.htm http://www.listeningarts.com/music/art_song/sounds_and_texts...
- a_p 13y agoThere are methods of handwriting that allow you to avoid hand cramps. The Palmer method of handwriting, which was popular in America at the turn of the 20th century, emphasized using the whole arm and shoulder to make marks on the page. In order for this method to be effective your wrists must be limp in order for your arms to slide quickly across the page. Instead of consciously "drawing" letters, you build up and use muscle memory to create letters, in the same way you naturally build and use muscle memory when you throw a ball. If you master this method of handwriting, you can write at 60 words per minute, for hours at a time without your hand cramping. Unfortunately, the Palmer Method was abandoned when education reformers in the U.S found it too "difficult", because it requires months of training and practice to become proficient. It also required left-handed students to write with their right hand, because English runs from right to left and this method requires your other hand to manipulate the paper. As a result, generations of Americans have grown up using an inefficient, painful method of writing. Of course, the manuscript writers needed to draw the letters in a calligraphic style, which necessitated precise wrist motions. So a writing method designed for brisk mark making wouldn't have helped them. EDIT: I'm not saying that I support forcing left-handed people to write with their right hands. It may be true that the Palmer method (or any right-hand only method) has a history of teachers using corporal punishment to punish mistakes, but corporal punishment is of course not necessary to become proficient. Eksith, you're right that "drawing" the letters doesn't have anything to do with the speed at which letters are made. The "drawing" comment was made about why many people's cursive handwriting is so poor. When students learn cursive now, too often they are simply copying letters from a book or blackboard ("drawing the letters"), instead of practicing the physical motion. So when students need to write cursive script quickly, they don't have enough time to render each letter correctly and consequently they develop their own methods muscle movements, which usually leads to sloppy handwriting. The same kind of thing can happen when you are taught to type. Correct touch typing teaches you to let your finger return to the home row after pressing a key before you reach for another key. If you aren't taught to do this, you will develop your own muscle movements that are suitable for typing some words, but lead to mistakes in others. A common error is letting your finger hover near the letter you typed when the same letter is repeated in the word that you are typing. This seems like an "optimization", but it isn't, and causes lots of spelling errors because it can easily mess up your key press timing. Using your own "optimizations" might be able to type as quickly as a touch typist in short stretches, but it is far more likely that you will make more errors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method
- cpeterso 13y agoIn post-apocalyptic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, monks of the fictional Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the day the outside world is again ready for it. Many of the "manuscripts" they reproduce over the centuries are mundane blueprints they don't understand, carefully reproduced with blue ink backgrounds and gold inlays.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mcs 13y agoAnybody else see a similarity between that coding? I see git commit messages like those all the time.
- rickyconnolly 13y ago>Now I've written the whole thing: for Christ's sake give me a drink. Equally as likely to be uttered by a modern-day graduate student on the Nth draft of his presentation.