Multiple copying of manuscripts was no longer the monopoly of lonely monks in their cells but the occupation of professional scribes who had their own guilds. Licensed in Paris by the University, supposedly to ensure accurate texts, the scribes were the agony of living authors, who complained bitterly of the copyists’ delays and errors. The “trouble and discouragement” a writer suffers, wailed Petrarch, was indescribable. Such was the “ignorance, laziness, and arrogance of these fellows” that when a writer has given them his work, he never knows what changes he will find in it when he gets it
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