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tabular form. The manner of indicating sources became the ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes.99
As the market for books widened, booksellers in the vicinity of at least eleven universities, including those in Bologna, Padua, Florence, Naples, Salamanca in Spain, Paris, and Oxford, introduced a system called pecia in which they divided the copying of a single manuscript book between vari- ous scribes in order to speed up production of reliable copies of works of contemporary scholastic authors in law, theology, philosophy, and aids to preaching. The pecia system might be viewed as a small step toward the mass production of books that would later be introduced in the process of print- ing. The earliest surviving evidence of this system of providing “certified texts” of manuscripts in university bookstores is the Vercelli contract of 1228 from the University of Padua.
Under the pecia system, the university bookseller (stationarius) first ob- tained a reliable exemplar of the work. From this exemplar the bookseller
99 “In the twelfth century the principal apparatus for the academic reader was the gloss, and the principal developments in the mise-en-page of the book in the twelfth century centred on the presenta- tion of the gloss. Inherited material—the auctoritates [authorities]—was organized in such a way as to make it accessible alongside the text to be studied. During the course of the twelfth century the content of the gloss to the Bible became stabilized and producers of books introduced refinements of presen- tation culminating in the layout of copies of what are probably the most highly developed of glossed books, the commentaries of Peter Lombard on the Psalter and the Pauline Epistles. The whole process of indicating text, commentary, and sources was incorporated into the design of the page, presumably by a process of careful alignment marked out beforehand in the exemplar. The full text of the Psalter or Epistles was disposed in a larger, more formal version of twelfth-century script in conveniently sited columns, and the size of the columns was determined by the length of the commentary on that partic- ular part of the text. In the commentary itself the lemmata were underlined in red. Each of the auctores [authors] quoted in the commentary was identified by name in the margin, again in red, and the extent of the quotation was also marked. As the final refinement each of the auctores was given a symbol con- sisting of dots or lines and dots which was placed both against the name in the margin, and against the beginning of the auctoritats or quotation in the body of the commentary. The practice of indicating sources in the margin derived from earlier manuscripts is here systematized, and becomes the ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes (Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Alexander and Gibson (eds.), Medieval Learning and Literature. Essays presented to Richard William Hunt [1976], pp. 116-17).
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