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of simultaneous copies is unconfirmed, there is ample evidence that scribes in the ancient world copied manuscripts from dictation.25 Whether working from dictation would have been possible later in monasteries operated by religious orders that required a vow of silence is unclear. Benedictines took no vow of silence, and Saint Benedict, in his Rule, prescribed “four hours of daily reading, all of which was done orally by selected readers to the rest of the monks. This edict not only impelled copying and preservation of books in monastic libraries but also generated scriptoria in which books were copied.”26 In classical antiquity, before the production of books moved out of the private sector into monasteries during the Middle Ages, usually a bookseller would receive an order for a text from a client and hire a scribe to copy it out, an artist to produce images if required, and a binder to produce a cover if the book was in codex form. During the ancient world we also have evidence of booksellers (librarii) hiring copyists, and individuals such
25 “The preponderance of textual evidence suggests that the ancients copied manuscripts by dictation. Each copy of an ancient Latin book was before all else a record of a public or private oral performance of a written text. In his letter to Atticus, for example, Cicero spoke of dictating a text syllable by syllable to his secretary. Nevertheless, some students have proposed that scriptura continua was highly suitable for visual copying because its widely spaced letters could easily have been tran- scribed, sign by sign, by scribes unable to understand the meaning of the text. If ancient scribes had copied visually, rather than by transcribing texts read orally, one would anticipate encountering errors of transposition such as those that occur in the copying of large, unpunctuated numbers digit by digit. Such purely graphic errors are not in scriptura continua codices, which instead are marked by divergences explicable only by errors caused by copying from texts read aloud—errors of pronunciation, decoding, and memory due to either a lector dictating to a scribe or to a scribe pronouncing to himself. It is indeed possible that the scribe, and even the dictator reading to the scribe, might not have understood the sense of the copy being produced, but this is because scriptura continua is a particularly ambiguous medium for the transcription of oral speech, a problem augmented by the ambiguous script and syntax of a given exemplar. Several factors probably contributed to the preference for oral rather than visual transcription of texts, including the lack of specialized furniture in antiquity, which rendered the ocular gestures necessary for visual contact between exemplar and copy awkward and clumsy. The ancient posture of writing on one’s knee, which left little room for manipulating an exemplar, certainly would not have been conducive to such visual copying” (Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origin of Silent Reading (1997), p. 48.
26 Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (1998, p. 7. 54