Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England by Matthew Fisher (review)

In Scribal Authorship, Matthew Fisher examines the distinction between creation and inscription in insular history writing from Bede to the fourteenth century. Situated in the history of the book, Scribal Authorship complicates the notions of authorship and textuality by considering the generations of texts used by medieval history writers to create their own narratives. In so doing, Fisher makes visible the variety of ways medieval scribes transformed and transmitted texts.

Throughout Scribal Authorship, which is based on his thesis, Fisher points out that “history writing is always engaged with the historical moment of its writing” (60). In the Introduction and Epilogue, Fisher frames the book by relating the medieval move from “memory to written record” to our own historical moment and the twenty-first century movement from print to digital texts. In examining the medieval processes of textual creation, transmission, and inscription, Fisher encourages reflection on the changing processes of copying, compiling, composing, transmitting, and reading in our own context. He concludes that, particularly in their transmission of texts into new context, medieval scribes confronted “responsibilities and opportunities” (189) that modern writers forego. For example, although digital texts like Wikipedia entries also rely on generations of texts, the mechanics of transmission, the ways in which words move from fingers to screens to other screens, is no longer part of a writer’s purview.

In spite of relating the book to the present, Fisher’s project is to elucidate and commemorate the work of medieval scribes. To do so he focuses on manuscripts and contextualizes their material aspects in the contemporary political, religious and legal contexts. He supplements his manuscripts with a rich blend of sources from Magna Carta to saints’ lives, and skillfully utilizes close readings, source criticism, and transmission studies to demonstrate the blurring of scribal and authorial functions. Fisher begins his project by dispensing with the notion of “bad” scribes who unthinkingly copied words with no concern for meaning. Certainly scribes could be intentionally malfeasant or unintentionally careless, but Fisher identifies all of them as readers and as members of the small, literate elite they were.

In chapter 1, Fisher argues that modern editors of medieval manuscripts have exacerbated the tension between the physical work of scribes, i.e. copying, and the inventive work of authors, i.e. composition. The binary results from assumptions that demand consistent editorial approaches to all manuscripts—namely that scribes always intended to reproduce an exemplar, that an exemplar always existed, and that scribal work was always distinct from authorial work. According to Fisher, a better approach is to contextualize the manuscript and its text. Some manuscripts, works of theology or grammar, for example, required scribes to carefully copy or even correct the texts in order to preserve their usefulness or orthodoxy. Historiography, on the other hand, was a different story. Fisher points to the hundreds of manuscripts of both the Anglo-Norman and Middle English Brut that contain differences that are not easily attributable to the modern editorial terminology of “version,” “redaction,” or “group.” It is in the context of vernacular history writing that Fisher locates “scribal authorship.” Clearly Brut was copied, but, Fisher argues, “it was not only copied. Vernacular historiography in particular invited textual alteration, addition, supplementation, and other forms of composition” (28).

Terminology is part of the problem Fisher identifies, and throughout the book he creates terms that help clarify the more complex spectrum of copying and composition that he has discerned. For example, in chapter 1, Fisher distinguishes between “duplicative copying,” which was in effect the medieval equivalent of a photocopy of a page, and “replicative copying,” which was the reproduction of a manuscript’s text, not the copying of a page with all its extra-textual decoration or marginalia. Fisher’s terms underpin the range of writing activities he has identified, and a glossary would have been a helpful addition.

In chapter 2, Fisher moves to the question of authority in his...