The scriptorium#
Three weeks ago you controlled what changed. Last week you had one output and no history. This hour starts a different kind of problem: many copies, no original, and a question about how each copy diverged.
Three ways a hand copy fails#
Omission. Something present in the exemplar is missing from the copy.
Repetition and its opposite. Dittography (written twice); haplography (the eye skips ahead, dropping what’s between).
Substitution. One reading stands in for another.
The reading that lies to you#
Not every substitution is scribal error in the same sense.
Normalisation — regularising an archaic idiom into its familiar form — is a change scribes make unconsciously and independently.
Two witnesses agreeing on a normalisation may share nothing but the same ordinary instinct toward tidiness.
Polygenetic vs. inherited#
A normalisation is polygenetic — it entered more than once because nothing about producing it depends on a particular ancestor.
A haplography, or an omission that breaks the line’s sense, has no ordinary mechanism for happening twice, independently, in the same place.
The rule the week hands you#
A shared error is strong evidence for shared ancestry in proportion to how implausible it is that two copyists made it independently.
A shared normalisation is weak evidence for exactly that reason.
Anonymised, and withheld on purpose#
Five witnesses disagree with each other in several places.
None of you can see the document they all come from — the Ordinance stays withheld until week 6’s reveal.
Reconstructing a text you already know is a memory exercise. This course is not testing memory.
This week stops at classification#
What kind of mistake happened at each disagreement, and how confident is that classification?
Week 6 turns the table you produce into a claim about who copied whom.
Before Wednesday#
Read the branching instructions linked from the
workshop page. Do not open reveal/.
Workshop: The scriptorium
Text walkthrough#
For a reader who cannot use the deck view: hand copying fails in a small number of recognisable ways — an omission drops something present in the source; a dittography repeats a word or phrase that appeared once; a haplography skips ahead from one occurrence of a repeated element to a later one, silently dropping what lies between; and a substitution replaces one reading with another. Substitutions need a second question asked of them, because the commonest kind, normalisation — regularising an archaic or odd spelling into its familiar form — is a change scribes make unconsciously and independently of each other, so two witnesses agreeing only on a normalisation may share nothing more than the same ordinary instinct rather than a common ancestor: this is called a polygenetic change, one with no mechanism tying its recurrence to shared descent. A haplography or a sense-breaking omission has no such easy mechanism for happening twice by chance, which is why a shared error of that kind is strong evidence for shared ancestry in proportion to how implausible independent occurrence would be, while a shared normalisation is weak evidence for the identical reason. This week’s task stops at classifying each disagreement among five anonymised witnesses by type and confidence; turning that classification into a claim about which witness copied from which is deliberately left for week 6.