December 30, 2021 • 28 mins
You might want to write this episode down. Helen and Matt look at one of the most important occupations in human history, the Scribe, and we only know about this job because they were so helpful as to write down what they did.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is job selete, where we talk about jobs that
are long gone today. We're looking at a job from
before the printing press, a time when you couldn't just
photocopy written material. Every copy of every letter, contract, book,
or piece of music had to be written by hand.
This episode, we're learning about scribes, calligraphy, historical Korean dramas,
(00:32):
a four thousand year old complaint, letter, monks and stuff,
plucking quills from a live goose, noisy script or hymns,
Am I right, medieval memes, and adult image doodles. So
what do you know about scribes, Helen? I don't think
(00:55):
I ever used the word scribe before, but I do
know that before the printing press, people definitely had to
write things out by hand, and I know it was
just like long, painstaking work and there was a lot
of hunched over being hunched over, you know. And not
only that, but of course there's the quill and the ink,
(01:16):
and it's you have to constantly dip it in the ink.
And it's not like they can just type a hundred
and twenty words a minute here. They have so slow. Also,
I feel like the way that we write is much
simpler than the way that things used to be written
back in the day. There was a lot of like
(01:37):
flourishing of the F at the top of the F
or the bottom of the S has to be very
like rounded and flourished. Because it was slower, every word
was more thought out. It wasn't like today with B
R B L O L. In many ways more visually appealing.
And I would say artistic, yeah, yeah, yeah, because if
(01:59):
it was on by hand, it was like a little
mini work of art. It was, but we remember they
had to make every copy by hand, so very tedious.
And we have an audience question here from Katie Young.
The question is how long did it take to handwrite
a book or also how many people did it take?
What kind of resources went into it? If it's just
(02:21):
one person copying an entire book, we're talking about serious time. Here.
Is the book the Very Hungry Caterpillar or is the
book a Dostoevsky novel, because that is two different books. Yeah, yeah,
I haven't read the latter. I've read the former many times.
But right now, you know what time it is? Oh,
(02:42):
my favorite time. Are you guys ready? It is time
to hop into the jobs to lead time machine back
to ancient EGYPTO. Okay, so ancient Egypt makes me think
about hieroglyphics. Yes, the earliest writing that we have deep
(03:04):
knowledge of were at least enough to like understand what
they were saying, and so in ancient Egypt, actually just
one percent of the population was literate according to most estimates,
so nobody could read. That's what kind of made scribes
an even more important job because you had to be
(03:26):
educated and not just able to read, but able to
put a sentence together, be educated in the arts. It
was a family tradition, usually from father to son, and
then the sun would inherit the father's positions upon entering
the civil service, and it was part of the royal court,
so very dignified. They had special privileges, like they didn't
(03:49):
have to pay taxes or serving the military celebrities sometimes. Yeah,
so that was ancient Egypt, but it wasn't just there.
All over the world we have scribes, but yeah, ancient
Israel they had. They were also distinguished professionals there in
Imperial China and neighboring countries and Asia, scribes also had prestige.
(04:10):
I know about this from Korean dramas. Do tell historical
Korean dramas. They would always have the guy in the
fancy outfit who's like off to the side of the
king and he's like furiously scribbling down the rules from
the king, and he's like very hunched over and he's
got the he's got the quill in the ink and
the whole thing. Yeah, well, it was a high paying
(04:32):
job in Imperial China and most of these other countries
in Asia's it was usually for official government business. So
we're not talking about is anything that they're right now,
and like this is like laws and stuff and protocol codes,
stuff that everybody would have to know about in society.
And then we're gonna jump ahead to the Middle Ages
(04:55):
in Europe, which I think is where we get more
people from earlier with that occupation. You think of the
Middle Ages in Europe, maybe I do. I was thinking
from what I've learned in school, the Bible was a
thing that was very most commonly copied back then, and
it was like monks and stuff, right, Yeah, there were
(05:16):
three types of scribes, so the one that you're referring to,
those were the monastic scribes, So usually monks that were
copying passages from the Bible, but there were also court scribes,
so similar to Imperial China with the official government documents,
and then there were professional scribes did everything else. And
we're paid like typically we're talking contracts. Contracts, of course, contracts. Buddy,
(05:41):
you owe me for geese because I gave you two ducks.
Oh yeah, that's a fair trade. And and we have
it in writing similar to ancient Egypt in the Middle Ages.
In Europe, we don't know exactly for sure, but there
are estimates, but anywhere from one all the way up
to literacy rates, and so we still have the majority
(06:04):
of the population who can't read or write, so scribes
are definitely needed. Though it was a more common job
in the Middle Ages, but we're going to find out
that it became rare after a significant event. And so
now it's time to hear from somebody else. Yes, this episode,
we have a guest. It is Dr Richard Scott Noakes.
(06:25):
I'm professor awesome also Dr Richard Scott and Oaks. I'm
a professor of medieval literature at Troy University. I'm also
the founder of Wittan Publishing, which is the oldest publisher
of medieval e books. Medieval e books, well, it's old
and new. That's an oxymoron. Get your ancient books on
(06:49):
your mac book? Am I right? Pretty cool? Actually, yeah,
to preserve that stuff that way. I know you mentioned
ancient Egypt, but people writing things down must go even
further back than that. Don't you think we've had scribes
as long as we've had literacy through most of the
well really through all the time that we had manuscript
(07:11):
culture before print culture, most people were not literate, but
often people would need things that were written down, so
you always had someone who would write things down. Haven't
we found like ancient parchment from in Sanskrit that people
can't even decipher, like it's so old the language is
completely dead. Yeah. Yeah, like I said about ancient Egypt,
(07:34):
like at least we can translate some of that stuff,
whereas there are stuff that goes back much further. We're
just like, wow, this, We think that there's a message here,
but we don't know exactly what it is. And then
some people, some people say aliens, but that's not People
found these old things in sanscrit and they're like, oh
my gosh, this must be an amazing proclamation from the king.
(07:55):
In Meanwhile, it's like a coupon from like the dollar
store of the day. Do we know what like the
first pieces of writing were about. We don't, but we've
had writing what's called cuneaform. I believe so I pronounced it.
It dates back all the way to but we have
(08:19):
kind of a famous thing written about seventeen fifty BC
on a clay tablet. It's one of the few things
we know essentially what they were saying. It's a pretty
interesting actually, it's called the complaint tablet to yah yadness, sir,
is you have this but anyway, it's it's a clay
(08:39):
tablet and there's a complaint to a merchant who apparently
is named Eadnes, sir, And it's from a customer named Nanni,
and it's considered to be the oldest written complaint that
we know of. That is so funny and makes so
much sense that the first, one of the first pieces
(09:01):
of writing that we have in human history is essentially
a negative Yelp review, like some customer was like, I
hated this business and I need to write it down
in stone. I will learn how to write and learn
how to cune e a form into this stone tablet,
because that's how mad I am. I'm so mad. They'll
(09:23):
be reading about this in thousands of years, They'll still
be reading this. Yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense.
But yeah, let's jump back ahead to the Middle Ages,
and there was something that definitely up the prestige again
of scribes during the Middle Ages. I mean that was
the Black Death. You know why that it would make
(09:45):
scribes a bigger deal because everybody was dying. And yeah,
I just laughed when he said here when I was dying,
jobs were opening up. The jobs were just opening up
left and right because people were just dropping like flies. Yes,
that would be it's the labor shortag because a third
of the population is gone. And so the heyday for
(10:05):
scribes where you can make more money in Europe anyway,
was the thirteen fifties up to the fourteen fifties. And
we're gonna find out later in the show why the
fourteen fifties marks the beginning of the decline. But before
we get there, it's time for qualifications. Yeah, what did
(10:33):
you need to be able to do to get a
job as a scribe? There was vocational training in some regard.
I feel like all the jobs back then, you that's
how everyone got the jobs. Back then, right, if you
were like a sword maker, you had to apprentice under
a master sword maker. If you were a butcher, you
(10:53):
had to apprentice under a master butcher. I feel like
all the jobs back then, like you needed to be
an assistant to someone to learn how to do the job.
I would say many of the more respected jobs, definitely,
I'm sure the less glamorous jobs. No. Ancient Egypt, as
I said earlier, like, of course, it was a prestigious
job there, and there was actually a special school for
(11:14):
scribes in ancient Egypt, and you actually did learn how
to read and write hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts, and it
was really hard work. It was pretty complicated. I feel
like with ancient Egypt with hieroglyphics, I think about each
letter was like its own little illustration. It was, Yeah,
it was. It's really it's pretty cool looking. I mean
(11:35):
you see it at first, it just looks like a
bunch of random images, and then you like notice patterns.
I think it would be fun just to kind of
look at hieroglyphics and try to decipher them. Really, it's
like solving a puzzle. I actually know a little bit
from what I watched in historical Korean dramas that if
you were a scribe in an ancient king's court in Korea,
(11:57):
and I'm assuming probably similar in China, that you were
actually an important person, like you had to you addressed
in a really nice outfit, and you went to school
and you were considered upper class essentially. Oh yeah, you
were one of the elites in China, Imperial China. There
were civil service exams where this was over hundreds of years.
(12:20):
These civil service exams you took as a teenager usually
and however you scored on that exam determined what you
would do as a career. And so you took this
and if you show that you could write well, you
usually were chosen to be a scribe in China and
this awesome, Yeah, like you said, it carried over. This
tradition carried over to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and then many
(12:43):
women were scribes in England. Really wow. You never see
that in the movies, you don't, do you. Yeah. So
they usually were religious women, so they were in convents typically,
and they all were literate there whoa. So the nuns
could all read and write, and they were doing a
(13:05):
lot of the similar stuff that the monks were doing. Yeah, yeah,
so it was all religious text, but it was still
pretty cool that they were an extreme minority often and
like sometimes the only people in the village that could
read or write. They were the the gateway to all
this knowledge. We know that sometimes scribes would put copies
(13:27):
of their work and hang them outside their shop to
try to get business. And occasionally in a manuscript you'll
find maybe near the end of the manuscript a little
advertisement at the end where a professional scribe has written
this manuscript was copied by so and so. That's a
weird quandary because if you're talking about a time where
(13:49):
only one percent of the population could read and write,
and you're advertising for reading writing in the window of
your shop, but most people don't know how to read
and writ, how are they know to hire you? If
you're like, oh, man, I need to scribe to do
this contract because I can't read and write. This guy
says he can read and write, so I'm just gonna
trust him because it looks legit on the page, and
(14:11):
who am I to say? It's one of those things
where you can do it or you can't, definitely, and
whoever's hiring you either knows you can do it or
they don't. Because if you're getting hired by someone who
can read, obviously that it's they can tell very quickly
whether you can do it. But if they can't read,
they're like, uh, sure, looks yep, you're hired. It looks
(14:36):
look it looks good to me. So, Helen, what do
you think would be the most important skill for a scribe.
You'd have to know how to read, and I'm assuming
you'd have to have a pretty steady hand. Every case
I can think of, the scribe came out of having
apprenticed under some other scribes. If you entered into the
(14:56):
church and you entered into a monastic order where they
are coppying bibles for prayer books or things like this
as part of their mission, you'd be taught there how
to read. You'd be taught how to copy. That's crazy.
So ascribe could become a scribe and not even know
what they were writing. They're just literally copying characters or
(15:19):
letters like just just oh, that's what an a looks like.
It looks like a round thing with little tail. So
that's what I'm gonna na. I'm gonna make a little
round thing with a little tail. Or they may not
know it's inn a. They're just like that that thing
I'm going to duplicate it. Yeah, the circle with the
tail goes here. Wow, that's crazy. We take these things
(15:40):
for granted as adults. We learned this stuff when we're
in kindergarten, first grade, second grade. Yeah, like you could
break it down to spelling a grammar, like just being
able to remember how when you were in first grade
you had the lines and the dotted lines on the
paper you had it was so hard to get the
letters written. In the art of writing letters down and
(16:03):
then putting connecting them and it's just really so much
more than writing, I guess, is my point. I would
say that the skills were more in line with a
modern day author or journalist. I never even thought about
a world where someone can read but not right. But
you're right. Writing is a skill that we acquired when
we were little. But that's something that's learned. It just
(16:25):
doesn't come automatically once you know how to write. It
doesn't just come automatically once you know how to read.
That's so interesting. Let's talk about the tools of the trade.
I'm assuming that one needs paper of some form, maybe
a parchment or canvas perhaps, and a quill and ink. Yes,
(16:45):
But it wasn't just that you would sit at a desk,
and the desk, rather than having a horizontal top of
the kind that we think about today, it had a
top that was at a forty five degree angle. You
would then have a quill. Normally it would be a quill,
though there were sometimes metal pens or things like this,
(17:05):
usually made of goose feather if you could goose feathers
that were plucked from a live goose of a particular
kind of wing during a particular season were considered the
best because you wanted it to be just the right
amount of tension. So now let's look at a typical day.
(17:36):
It was very common for them to complain about the
way that their hands felt, about the poor lighting, thin ink,
bad parchment, bad quills that they're using. And at this time,
very few people could read silently. Silent reading really wasn't
a thing until pretty recently historically, and so you would
(18:00):
probably if you were a room full of other scribes,
you'd probably hear people quietly whispering the text themselves as
they are copying it down. Wow, that would get really old,
really fast. If I'm a scribe, and I'm concentrating really hard.
Perhaps I might not even be able to read that well.
And I'm like filling out my copying and next to
(18:23):
me is like five other people being like and then
he opened the door and then he pulled out like
shut up, Bart, shut up, I'm trying to write over here. Okay,
I honestly had no idea that reading silently was a
fairly new thing in history. Yeah, that is really weird.
(18:45):
I wonder why, like why that's a new thing. That's
so again we're taking we take it for granted. It's
really an amazing thing, reading and writing. Maybe it's because
all of reading was just it just wasn't as commonly
done as we do it out like when we learned
to Matt, you and I, when we learned to read,
we read things out loud. That's how we learned as kids,
(19:05):
like cat dog. That's how we learned, is like sounding
the words out. Maybe that was like the whole culture
at the time because just people just did less reading. Okay,
so there's it would be a tiresome job. Again, Carpal
tunnel probably is in there, but of course they didn't
(19:26):
know what carpal tunnel was back then, but you couldn't
run down to CVS and buy an wrist brace. I mean,
I can't imagine if I'm typing for an hour, my
whole Yeah, everything hurts. But if you're physically holding a
quill and you've got to constantly be dipping it in
(19:46):
the inch, and you're hunched over a desk, and the
lighting is bad because they didn't even have electricity, so
you're doing this all by candle light. Come on, I mean,
I complain about still having it to write the stuff
down with a pencil sometimes, like I how to write
a Grosser Realist the other day, and pencils weren't even
around til the end of the sevres. So yeah, it's
(20:07):
not fun, but it still had to look good. Every
manuscript was its own unique object, and the size of
the page, the number of lines on the page, and
sometimes even little holes and blemishes in the manuscript would
have to be accounted for. And so because of this,
first they would put little lines, this sort of scratch
(20:28):
little lines along it so that they could write evenly.
And in some cases we have places where there might
have been a little hole or blemish in the manuscript
that got pulled wide after the manuscript was stretched to
be flat, and so the scribe had to write around it. Wait,
what things could get moved around on the paper because
it's not just one person working on the page at
(20:51):
a time. You know, this is when they needed a
chip clip. What's a chip clip? You don't know what
a chip clip is. It's a clip that you buy
to make sure your potato chips. That like when if
you don't finish the bag, you fold up the top
of the potato chip bag and then you close it
with a chip clip. But in this case, you would
use the chip clip to fasten the parchment to the
(21:14):
desk that you're writing on so it doesn't move around.
Okay that chip clips. I totally did not connect that. Okay, Yeah,
imagine Helen going back in a time machine to the
Middle Ages and saying, hey, guys, no here, just I've
got a chip clip. I've got you. I know your
paper is moving around all over the desk because it's
medieval times, but man, I got you. I had this
(21:35):
chip clip. Just like print designers today, there were different
jobs on one page, so you had describe, but you
also had a separate job that was related. The illuminator
who added all the extra stuff on the page to
make it look cool, you are going to need to
leave room for illustrations, and that would be done after
(21:56):
the fact. So in movies you often see someone putting
a very beautiful letter uh, and then they write the manuscript.
But in fact, what they would do is they would
just leave a box where this thing is going to
be and they send it to the illuminator, who was often,
in fact, maybe even usually a separate person. Now there's
different kinds of illuminations. Probably the one that most people
(22:17):
are familiar with in terms of decorations are what we
call initials, and those are the really big letters that
start a section. And we do have some examples of
manuscripts where there's just an empty box where there was
supposed to be a picture that's so funny, so the
illuminator never got around to it. The first the scribe
(22:37):
was like, this is where the fancy first letter goes.
And then the fancy first letter guy was like, no,
I quit, We'll never know the first letter of that word. Now,
we usually have a notable person to bring up for
our occupation, but this episode is a little different because
the names of medieval scribes really all scribes in history
(23:02):
are lost to history, but we do have bits and
pieces and some that are they're well known as scholars,
but they're still anonymous. We do have some scribes who
are by themselves famous for their hand because of so
many things that they wrote, but we don't know their names.
So there's one scribe, for example, who we call the
Tremulous Hand because whoever this person was, they wrote for
(23:25):
decades and they had a tremor in their hand, and
we can identify them immediately from their hands. So if
you showed me today a manuscript from the Tremulous Hand
that I've never seen before, I would immediately know who
wrote it, even though we don't know anything about this
person's name. First of all, this poor guy, we don't
know his name. We just know him as the tremulous Hand. Yeah,
(23:48):
we we know that he lived in the twelve hundred's.
It was old English manuscripts, and he had a left
word leaning style and it was always light brown ink
and of course shaky. Yeah, the Tremulous Hand of Wooster
was that's what we call him. But that's also it's
also interesting that they didn't get to sign their work
(24:10):
because they weren't the authors they were just the copier.
So that's sad that they did all this. They spent
all this time and effort and energy, but we just
don't know who any of them are. Yeah, so in
in that way, not very glorious. So I'm gonna guess
that scribes started going away because of the printing press.
(24:33):
That is a good guess. But it was a slow decline.
When the printing press first started moving throughout Europe and
then eventually throughout the whole world, it wasn't clear to
people exactly how to use it, and you still needed
scribes to copy things that needed one or two things copied.
If you were going to print a book that you
(24:55):
wanted fifty copies a hunter copies, a thousand copies of
it was much better, much faster, much cheaper to print
it on the printing press. Would you look at something
like Bartleby the scriffner this, you know, nineteenth century Herman Melville,
uh story. You do have people who are still copying,
but no longer they're copying things that you need five copies,
(25:18):
ten copies, fifty copies, but more of things that you
need two copies for. Wow, I never thought about the
printing press when it first started out that it wasn't
just an easy thing. Okay, now everybody can stop writing
by hand. It still was an expensive and laborious thing
to run, so they wouldn't run it just to make
two copies of anything. That it was economical to have
(25:40):
to run it for a hundred copies. So if you
only needed two copies, you would still go to the
scry Yeah, that short story by Herman Melville about Bartleby
the scrivener still doing that in the eighteen hundreds. That
would be just making one copy of something, Yeah, because
it was more economical that way, And it makes sense.
It's just because you have the technolog doesn't mean it's
(26:01):
worth it for most people. Are it will be the
scrivener say that ten times fast. No thanks. Now the
printing press gets all the attention. But there were other
ways to copy printed material that came after ward. Actually,
there's a whole long list here that we're going to
go through in chronological order. There was etching, meso tint,
(26:23):
relief printing, aquatint lithography, chromo lithography, rotary press, pectrograph, offset printing,
hot metal type setting, miniograph, daisy will printing, photostat and rectograph.
That sounds bad. It sounds so bad. Screen printing, spirit duplicator,
(26:46):
dot matrix printing, xerox. Oh, we know that one, spark printing,
photo type setting, ink jet printing, die sublimation, laser printing,
thermal printing, solid ink printing, thermal transfer printing, three D printing,
and digital printing, which is where we are today. Wow,
(27:06):
there has been lots O kind's oh printing. If you're
reading something in written form today, ozar, it's it was
digitally printed and so yes ascribed today makes no sense
at all, or maybe it does. I feel like today
people still are into calligraphy, and so calligraphy owes its
(27:27):
history back to people who are scribes. Don't you think
that's part of the legacy of these scribes. Yeah, so
thank you scribes. Job Slete is produced for I Heart
Radio by Zealots Manufacturing hand Forge Podcast for You. It's
hosted by us Helen Hong That's Me and Matt That's me.
The show was conceived and produced by Steve Za Markey,
(27:49):
Anthony Savini, and Jason Elliott. Our editor is Tommy Nicole.
Our researcher is Amelia Pauca. Our production coordinator is Angie Hymis,
and the music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. A
special thanks to our I Heart Radio team, Katrina Norvelle,
Nikky Etour, Ali Cantor, Carrie Lieberman, Will Pearson, Connell, Byrne
(28:11):
and Bob Pittman.
This is job selete, where we talk about jobs that
are long gone today. We're looking at a job from
before the printing press, a time when you couldn't just
photocopy written material. Every copy of every letter, contract, book,
or piece of music had to be written by hand.
This episode, we're learning about scribes, calligraphy, historical Korean dramas,
(00:32):
a four thousand year old complaint, letter, monks and stuff,
plucking quills from a live goose, noisy script or hymns,
Am I right, medieval memes, and adult image doodles. So
what do you know about scribes, Helen? I don't think
(00:55):
I ever used the word scribe before, but I do
know that before the printing press, people definitely had to
write things out by hand, and I know it was
just like long, painstaking work and there was a lot
of hunched over being hunched over, you know. And not
only that, but of course there's the quill and the ink,
(01:16):
and it's you have to constantly dip it in the ink.
And it's not like they can just type a hundred
and twenty words a minute here. They have so slow. Also,
I feel like the way that we write is much
simpler than the way that things used to be written
back in the day. There was a lot of like
(01:37):
flourishing of the F at the top of the F
or the bottom of the S has to be very
like rounded and flourished. Because it was slower, every word
was more thought out. It wasn't like today with B
R B L O L. In many ways more visually appealing.
And I would say artistic, yeah, yeah, yeah, because if
(01:59):
it was on by hand, it was like a little
mini work of art. It was, but we remember they
had to make every copy by hand, so very tedious.
And we have an audience question here from Katie Young.
The question is how long did it take to handwrite
a book or also how many people did it take?
What kind of resources went into it? If it's just
(02:21):
one person copying an entire book, we're talking about serious time. Here.
Is the book the Very Hungry Caterpillar or is the
book a Dostoevsky novel, because that is two different books. Yeah, yeah,
I haven't read the latter. I've read the former many times.
But right now, you know what time it is? Oh,
(02:42):
my favorite time. Are you guys ready? It is time
to hop into the jobs to lead time machine back
to ancient EGYPTO. Okay, so ancient Egypt makes me think
about hieroglyphics. Yes, the earliest writing that we have deep
(03:04):
knowledge of were at least enough to like understand what
they were saying, and so in ancient Egypt, actually just
one percent of the population was literate according to most estimates,
so nobody could read. That's what kind of made scribes
an even more important job because you had to be
(03:26):
educated and not just able to read, but able to
put a sentence together, be educated in the arts. It
was a family tradition, usually from father to son, and
then the sun would inherit the father's positions upon entering
the civil service, and it was part of the royal court,
so very dignified. They had special privileges, like they didn't
(03:49):
have to pay taxes or serving the military celebrities sometimes. Yeah,
so that was ancient Egypt, but it wasn't just there.
All over the world we have scribes, but yeah, ancient
Israel they had. They were also distinguished professionals there in
Imperial China and neighboring countries and Asia, scribes also had prestige.
(04:10):
I know about this from Korean dramas. Do tell historical
Korean dramas. They would always have the guy in the
fancy outfit who's like off to the side of the
king and he's like furiously scribbling down the rules from
the king, and he's like very hunched over and he's
got the he's got the quill in the ink and
the whole thing. Yeah, well, it was a high paying
(04:32):
job in Imperial China and most of these other countries
in Asia's it was usually for official government business. So
we're not talking about is anything that they're right now,
and like this is like laws and stuff and protocol codes,
stuff that everybody would have to know about in society.
And then we're gonna jump ahead to the Middle Ages
(04:55):
in Europe, which I think is where we get more
people from earlier with that occupation. You think of the
Middle Ages in Europe, maybe I do. I was thinking
from what I've learned in school, the Bible was a
thing that was very most commonly copied back then, and
it was like monks and stuff, right, Yeah, there were
(05:16):
three types of scribes, so the one that you're referring to,
those were the monastic scribes, So usually monks that were
copying passages from the Bible, but there were also court scribes,
so similar to Imperial China with the official government documents,
and then there were professional scribes did everything else. And
we're paid like typically we're talking contracts. Contracts, of course, contracts. Buddy,
(05:41):
you owe me for geese because I gave you two ducks.
Oh yeah, that's a fair trade. And and we have
it in writing similar to ancient Egypt in the Middle Ages.
In Europe, we don't know exactly for sure, but there
are estimates, but anywhere from one all the way up
to literacy rates, and so we still have the majority
(06:04):
of the population who can't read or write, so scribes
are definitely needed. Though it was a more common job
in the Middle Ages, but we're going to find out
that it became rare after a significant event. And so
now it's time to hear from somebody else. Yes, this episode,
we have a guest. It is Dr Richard Scott Noakes.
(06:25):
I'm professor awesome also Dr Richard Scott and Oaks. I'm
a professor of medieval literature at Troy University. I'm also
the founder of Wittan Publishing, which is the oldest publisher
of medieval e books. Medieval e books, well, it's old
and new. That's an oxymoron. Get your ancient books on
(06:49):
your mac book? Am I right? Pretty cool? Actually, yeah,
to preserve that stuff that way. I know you mentioned
ancient Egypt, but people writing things down must go even
further back than that. Don't you think we've had scribes
as long as we've had literacy through most of the
well really through all the time that we had manuscript
(07:11):
culture before print culture, most people were not literate, but
often people would need things that were written down, so
you always had someone who would write things down. Haven't
we found like ancient parchment from in Sanskrit that people
can't even decipher, like it's so old the language is
completely dead. Yeah. Yeah, like I said about ancient Egypt,
(07:34):
like at least we can translate some of that stuff,
whereas there are stuff that goes back much further. We're
just like, wow, this, We think that there's a message here,
but we don't know exactly what it is. And then
some people, some people say aliens, but that's not People
found these old things in sanscrit and they're like, oh
my gosh, this must be an amazing proclamation from the king.
(07:55):
In Meanwhile, it's like a coupon from like the dollar
store of the day. Do we know what like the
first pieces of writing were about. We don't, but we've
had writing what's called cuneaform. I believe so I pronounced it.
It dates back all the way to but we have
(08:19):
kind of a famous thing written about seventeen fifty BC
on a clay tablet. It's one of the few things
we know essentially what they were saying. It's a pretty
interesting actually, it's called the complaint tablet to yah yadness, sir,
is you have this but anyway, it's it's a clay
(08:39):
tablet and there's a complaint to a merchant who apparently
is named Eadnes, sir, And it's from a customer named Nanni,
and it's considered to be the oldest written complaint that
we know of. That is so funny and makes so
much sense that the first, one of the first pieces
(09:01):
of writing that we have in human history is essentially
a negative Yelp review, like some customer was like, I
hated this business and I need to write it down
in stone. I will learn how to write and learn
how to cune e a form into this stone tablet,
because that's how mad I am. I'm so mad. They'll
(09:23):
be reading about this in thousands of years, They'll still
be reading this. Yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense.
But yeah, let's jump back ahead to the Middle Ages,
and there was something that definitely up the prestige again
of scribes during the Middle Ages. I mean that was
the Black Death. You know why that it would make
(09:45):
scribes a bigger deal because everybody was dying. And yeah,
I just laughed when he said here when I was dying,
jobs were opening up. The jobs were just opening up
left and right because people were just dropping like flies. Yes,
that would be it's the labor shortag because a third
of the population is gone. And so the heyday for
(10:05):
scribes where you can make more money in Europe anyway,
was the thirteen fifties up to the fourteen fifties. And
we're gonna find out later in the show why the
fourteen fifties marks the beginning of the decline. But before
we get there, it's time for qualifications. Yeah, what did
(10:33):
you need to be able to do to get a
job as a scribe? There was vocational training in some regard.
I feel like all the jobs back then, you that's
how everyone got the jobs. Back then, right, if you
were like a sword maker, you had to apprentice under
a master sword maker. If you were a butcher, you
(10:53):
had to apprentice under a master butcher. I feel like
all the jobs back then, like you needed to be
an assistant to someone to learn how to do the job.
I would say many of the more respected jobs, definitely,
I'm sure the less glamorous jobs. No. Ancient Egypt, as
I said earlier, like, of course, it was a prestigious
job there, and there was actually a special school for
(11:14):
scribes in ancient Egypt, and you actually did learn how
to read and write hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts, and it
was really hard work. It was pretty complicated. I feel
like with ancient Egypt with hieroglyphics, I think about each
letter was like its own little illustration. It was, Yeah,
it was. It's really it's pretty cool looking. I mean
(11:35):
you see it at first, it just looks like a
bunch of random images, and then you like notice patterns.
I think it would be fun just to kind of
look at hieroglyphics and try to decipher them. Really, it's
like solving a puzzle. I actually know a little bit
from what I watched in historical Korean dramas that if
you were a scribe in an ancient king's court in Korea,
(11:57):
and I'm assuming probably similar in China, that you were
actually an important person, like you had to you addressed
in a really nice outfit, and you went to school
and you were considered upper class essentially. Oh yeah, you
were one of the elites in China, Imperial China. There
were civil service exams where this was over hundreds of years.
(12:20):
These civil service exams you took as a teenager usually
and however you scored on that exam determined what you
would do as a career. And so you took this
and if you show that you could write well, you
usually were chosen to be a scribe in China and
this awesome, Yeah, like you said, it carried over. This
tradition carried over to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and then many
(12:43):
women were scribes in England. Really wow. You never see
that in the movies, you don't, do you. Yeah. So
they usually were religious women, so they were in convents typically,
and they all were literate there whoa. So the nuns
could all read and write, and they were doing a
(13:05):
lot of the similar stuff that the monks were doing. Yeah, yeah,
so it was all religious text, but it was still
pretty cool that they were an extreme minority often and
like sometimes the only people in the village that could
read or write. They were the the gateway to all
this knowledge. We know that sometimes scribes would put copies
(13:27):
of their work and hang them outside their shop to
try to get business. And occasionally in a manuscript you'll
find maybe near the end of the manuscript a little
advertisement at the end where a professional scribe has written
this manuscript was copied by so and so. That's a
weird quandary because if you're talking about a time where
(13:49):
only one percent of the population could read and write,
and you're advertising for reading writing in the window of
your shop, but most people don't know how to read
and writ, how are they know to hire you? If
you're like, oh, man, I need to scribe to do
this contract because I can't read and write. This guy
says he can read and write, so I'm just gonna
trust him because it looks legit on the page, and
(14:11):
who am I to say? It's one of those things
where you can do it or you can't, definitely, and
whoever's hiring you either knows you can do it or
they don't. Because if you're getting hired by someone who
can read, obviously that it's they can tell very quickly
whether you can do it. But if they can't read,
they're like, uh, sure, looks yep, you're hired. It looks
(14:36):
look it looks good to me. So, Helen, what do
you think would be the most important skill for a scribe.
You'd have to know how to read, and I'm assuming
you'd have to have a pretty steady hand. Every case
I can think of, the scribe came out of having
apprenticed under some other scribes. If you entered into the
(14:56):
church and you entered into a monastic order where they
are coppying bibles for prayer books or things like this
as part of their mission, you'd be taught there how
to read. You'd be taught how to copy. That's crazy.
So ascribe could become a scribe and not even know
what they were writing. They're just literally copying characters or
(15:19):
letters like just just oh, that's what an a looks like.
It looks like a round thing with little tail. So
that's what I'm gonna na. I'm gonna make a little
round thing with a little tail. Or they may not
know it's inn a. They're just like that that thing
I'm going to duplicate it. Yeah, the circle with the
tail goes here. Wow, that's crazy. We take these things
(15:40):
for granted as adults. We learned this stuff when we're
in kindergarten, first grade, second grade. Yeah, like you could
break it down to spelling a grammar, like just being
able to remember how when you were in first grade
you had the lines and the dotted lines on the
paper you had it was so hard to get the
letters written. In the art of writing letters down and
(16:03):
then putting connecting them and it's just really so much
more than writing, I guess, is my point. I would
say that the skills were more in line with a
modern day author or journalist. I never even thought about
a world where someone can read but not right. But
you're right. Writing is a skill that we acquired when
we were little. But that's something that's learned. It just
(16:25):
doesn't come automatically once you know how to write. It
doesn't just come automatically once you know how to read.
That's so interesting. Let's talk about the tools of the trade.
I'm assuming that one needs paper of some form, maybe
a parchment or canvas perhaps, and a quill and ink. Yes,
(16:45):
But it wasn't just that you would sit at a desk,
and the desk, rather than having a horizontal top of
the kind that we think about today, it had a
top that was at a forty five degree angle. You
would then have a quill. Normally it would be a quill,
though there were sometimes metal pens or things like this,
(17:05):
usually made of goose feather if you could goose feathers
that were plucked from a live goose of a particular
kind of wing during a particular season were considered the
best because you wanted it to be just the right
amount of tension. So now let's look at a typical day.
(17:36):
It was very common for them to complain about the
way that their hands felt, about the poor lighting, thin ink,
bad parchment, bad quills that they're using. And at this time,
very few people could read silently. Silent reading really wasn't
a thing until pretty recently historically, and so you would
(18:00):
probably if you were a room full of other scribes,
you'd probably hear people quietly whispering the text themselves as
they are copying it down. Wow, that would get really old,
really fast. If I'm a scribe, and I'm concentrating really hard.
Perhaps I might not even be able to read that well.
And I'm like filling out my copying and next to
(18:23):
me is like five other people being like and then
he opened the door and then he pulled out like
shut up, Bart, shut up, I'm trying to write over here. Okay,
I honestly had no idea that reading silently was a
fairly new thing in history. Yeah, that is really weird.
(18:45):
I wonder why, like why that's a new thing. That's
so again we're taking we take it for granted. It's
really an amazing thing, reading and writing. Maybe it's because
all of reading was just it just wasn't as commonly
done as we do it out like when we learned
to Matt, you and I, when we learned to read,
we read things out loud. That's how we learned as kids,
(19:05):
like cat dog. That's how we learned, is like sounding
the words out. Maybe that was like the whole culture
at the time because just people just did less reading. Okay,
so there's it would be a tiresome job. Again, Carpal
tunnel probably is in there, but of course they didn't
(19:26):
know what carpal tunnel was back then, but you couldn't
run down to CVS and buy an wrist brace. I mean,
I can't imagine if I'm typing for an hour, my
whole Yeah, everything hurts. But if you're physically holding a
quill and you've got to constantly be dipping it in
(19:46):
the inch, and you're hunched over a desk, and the
lighting is bad because they didn't even have electricity, so
you're doing this all by candle light. Come on, I mean,
I complain about still having it to write the stuff
down with a pencil sometimes, like I how to write
a Grosser Realist the other day, and pencils weren't even
around til the end of the sevres. So yeah, it's
(20:07):
not fun, but it still had to look good. Every
manuscript was its own unique object, and the size of
the page, the number of lines on the page, and
sometimes even little holes and blemishes in the manuscript would
have to be accounted for. And so because of this,
first they would put little lines, this sort of scratch
(20:28):
little lines along it so that they could write evenly.
And in some cases we have places where there might
have been a little hole or blemish in the manuscript
that got pulled wide after the manuscript was stretched to
be flat, and so the scribe had to write around it. Wait,
what things could get moved around on the paper because
it's not just one person working on the page at
(20:51):
a time. You know, this is when they needed a
chip clip. What's a chip clip? You don't know what
a chip clip is. It's a clip that you buy
to make sure your potato chips. That like when if
you don't finish the bag, you fold up the top
of the potato chip bag and then you close it
with a chip clip. But in this case, you would
use the chip clip to fasten the parchment to the
(21:14):
desk that you're writing on so it doesn't move around.
Okay that chip clips. I totally did not connect that. Okay, Yeah,
imagine Helen going back in a time machine to the
Middle Ages and saying, hey, guys, no here, just I've
got a chip clip. I've got you. I know your
paper is moving around all over the desk because it's
medieval times, but man, I got you. I had this
(21:35):
chip clip. Just like print designers today, there were different
jobs on one page, so you had describe, but you
also had a separate job that was related. The illuminator
who added all the extra stuff on the page to
make it look cool, you are going to need to
leave room for illustrations, and that would be done after
(21:56):
the fact. So in movies you often see someone putting
a very beautiful letter uh, and then they write the manuscript.
But in fact, what they would do is they would
just leave a box where this thing is going to
be and they send it to the illuminator, who was often,
in fact, maybe even usually a separate person. Now there's
different kinds of illuminations. Probably the one that most people
(22:17):
are familiar with in terms of decorations are what we
call initials, and those are the really big letters that
start a section. And we do have some examples of
manuscripts where there's just an empty box where there was
supposed to be a picture that's so funny, so the
illuminator never got around to it. The first the scribe
(22:37):
was like, this is where the fancy first letter goes.
And then the fancy first letter guy was like, no,
I quit, We'll never know the first letter of that word. Now,
we usually have a notable person to bring up for
our occupation, but this episode is a little different because
the names of medieval scribes really all scribes in history
(23:02):
are lost to history, but we do have bits and
pieces and some that are they're well known as scholars,
but they're still anonymous. We do have some scribes who
are by themselves famous for their hand because of so
many things that they wrote, but we don't know their names.
So there's one scribe, for example, who we call the
Tremulous Hand because whoever this person was, they wrote for
(23:25):
decades and they had a tremor in their hand, and
we can identify them immediately from their hands. So if
you showed me today a manuscript from the Tremulous Hand
that I've never seen before, I would immediately know who
wrote it, even though we don't know anything about this
person's name. First of all, this poor guy, we don't
know his name. We just know him as the tremulous Hand. Yeah,
(23:48):
we we know that he lived in the twelve hundred's.
It was old English manuscripts, and he had a left
word leaning style and it was always light brown ink
and of course shaky. Yeah, the Tremulous Hand of Wooster
was that's what we call him. But that's also it's
also interesting that they didn't get to sign their work
(24:10):
because they weren't the authors they were just the copier.
So that's sad that they did all this. They spent
all this time and effort and energy, but we just
don't know who any of them are. Yeah, so in
in that way, not very glorious. So I'm gonna guess
that scribes started going away because of the printing press.
(24:33):
That is a good guess. But it was a slow decline.
When the printing press first started moving throughout Europe and
then eventually throughout the whole world, it wasn't clear to
people exactly how to use it, and you still needed
scribes to copy things that needed one or two things copied.
If you were going to print a book that you
(24:55):
wanted fifty copies a hunter copies, a thousand copies of
it was much better, much faster, much cheaper to print
it on the printing press. Would you look at something
like Bartleby the scriffner this, you know, nineteenth century Herman Melville,
uh story. You do have people who are still copying,
but no longer they're copying things that you need five copies,
(25:18):
ten copies, fifty copies, but more of things that you
need two copies for. Wow, I never thought about the
printing press when it first started out that it wasn't
just an easy thing. Okay, now everybody can stop writing
by hand. It still was an expensive and laborious thing
to run, so they wouldn't run it just to make
two copies of anything. That it was economical to have
(25:40):
to run it for a hundred copies. So if you
only needed two copies, you would still go to the
scry Yeah, that short story by Herman Melville about Bartleby
the scrivener still doing that in the eighteen hundreds. That
would be just making one copy of something, Yeah, because
it was more economical that way, And it makes sense.
It's just because you have the technolog doesn't mean it's
(26:01):
worth it for most people. Are it will be the
scrivener say that ten times fast. No thanks. Now the
printing press gets all the attention. But there were other
ways to copy printed material that came after ward. Actually,
there's a whole long list here that we're going to
go through in chronological order. There was etching, meso tint,
(26:23):
relief printing, aquatint lithography, chromo lithography, rotary press, pectrograph, offset printing,
hot metal type setting, miniograph, daisy will printing, photostat and rectograph.
That sounds bad. It sounds so bad. Screen printing, spirit duplicator,
(26:46):
dot matrix printing, xerox. Oh, we know that one, spark printing,
photo type setting, ink jet printing, die sublimation, laser printing,
thermal printing, solid ink printing, thermal transfer printing, three D printing,
and digital printing, which is where we are today. Wow,
(27:06):
there has been lots O kind's oh printing. If you're
reading something in written form today, ozar, it's it was
digitally printed and so yes ascribed today makes no sense
at all, or maybe it does. I feel like today
people still are into calligraphy, and so calligraphy owes its
(27:27):
history back to people who are scribes. Don't you think
that's part of the legacy of these scribes. Yeah, so
thank you scribes. Job Slete is produced for I Heart
Radio by Zealots Manufacturing hand Forge Podcast for You. It's
hosted by us Helen Hong That's Me and Matt That's me.
The show was conceived and produced by Steve Za Markey,
(27:49):
Anthony Savini, and Jason Elliott. Our editor is Tommy Nicole.
Our researcher is Amelia Pauca. Our production coordinator is Angie Hymis,
and the music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. A
special thanks to our I Heart Radio team, Katrina Norvelle,
Nikky Etour, Ali Cantor, Carrie Lieberman, Will Pearson, Connell, Byrne
(28:11):
and Bob Pittman.
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