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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gavin Richardson, post: 7312067, member: 83956&quot;]Significant work has been done on whether medieval scribes could be illiterate. I think there&#039;s good evidence that scribes indeed might not have been able to read the texts they copied. Might one assume the same about Roman die engravers?</p><p><br /></p><p>I once did a paleography project in my class and reached the conclusion that the &quot;illiterate scribe&quot; was quite possible. This from an article I published on the matter:</p><p><br /></p><p><b>On the whole, the students made some interesting text selections.&nbsp; Three of the four groups chose Biblical texts....&nbsp; But despite being in a Chaucer course, no group chose to copy a Chaucer text, or an English vernacular text for that matter.&nbsp; Three quires were copied in Latin and one in Italian, even though no student had formal training in either language.&nbsp; Nevertheless, the quires featured remarkably few errors despite students copying in unknown languages. Unexpectedly, the paleography project thus became a foray into experimental archeology by prompting an important research question: Could scribes be illiterate, if literacy is defined as the ability to read and write the languages they copied?&nbsp; Such a question has been explored by scholars such as Armando Petrucci in recent years and remains an important avenue of inquiry in medieval paleography.<a href="https://www.cointalk.com/#_edn1" class="internalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.cointalk.com/#_edn1"></a><i>&nbsp; While the results of this student project could hardly be adduced in a refereed journal discussion of this question, simply from a pedagogical standpoint the project served as a useful intersection of theory and praxis for student and professor alike, arguing that illiterate “scribes” could indeed produce generally accurate manuscripts.</i></b><i></i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://www.cointalk.com/#_ednref1" class="internalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.cointalk.com/#_ednref1"></a><i> See “Reading in the Middle Ages.”&nbsp; <i>Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture</i>.&nbsp; Ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding.&nbsp; New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.&nbsp; 132-44, at 135:On the whole, then, one has the impression that the scribe of the early Middle Ages was scarcely sensible to the problems and practice of reading. This indifference can only come from the limited experience he himself had with the practice. In fact, the scribe of the early Middle Ages was destined and trained (if he received any training at all) for writing rather than for reading, which explains the high number of raw, unskilled, and uneducated scribes that characterize the production of books in the early Middle Ages. It is thus not surprising that the chronicler Ekkhard IV of San Gall tells us that in the second half of the tenth century his homonymous predecessor Ekkhard I assigned to copy books those young brothers whom he judged to be less intelligent and less adapted to study: “et quos ad literarum studia tardiores vidisset, ad scribendum occupaverat et lineandum” (and those whom he saw came later to the study of letters, he employed in writing or lining). The fact that this occurred in a monastery like San Gall, which at that time was a very active center for producing books, renders this practice still more significant.</i></i>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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