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Mass Communication 51
likely that anyone since has developed such a sharp eye for a pecia
indication. He published a big book long before his manuscript
work was complete, and so many of his later findings never got into
print, but fortunately he left his voluminous notes in good order,
and they may be consulted today in the Dominican study centre of
Le Saulchoir in Paris.
Since Destrez, scholars have worked out some more details of
how the system worked. They have been able to show how some
pecia exemplars had to be duplicated, presumably because of demand,
and how others had to be remade in part, presumably because
some parts had become soiled or damaged by over-use. The
Franciscan sermon collection called Legifer is one such collection.
We have an exemplar and a copy, but the marginal numbers in the
copy do not coincide with the quire numbers of the exemplar all the
way through. The natural inference is that the original exemplar
was so heavily used that parts had to be remade.
If so, many copies were made from it. However, Destrez found
only one pecia copy. Now, he must have missed some manuscripts
with pecia indications. As indicated above, manuscripts copied from
pecia exemplars did not necessarily have the tell-tale numbers in
the margin, and the other pecia indications are easier to miss. Still,
Destrez had the best eye in the world for such indications and
devoted his working life to looking for them. Thus it is thoughtprovoking
that he did not find more pecia copies of this work. The
natural explanation is that many others have disappeared: again, an
indication of a high loss rate.
There is a second step to the argument. Pecia transmission accounts
for only a small proportion of surviving sermon manuscripts.
So one may say this: if surviving pecia manuscripts represent
only the tip of the small iceberg of those that once existed,
surviving sermon manuscripts tout court represent only a tiny proportion
of the number of sermon manuscripts tout court that once
existed. This complex argument would not be overwhelming on
its own. There are too many links in the chain of inference for
J. Destrez, La Pecia dans les manuscrits universitaires du XIIIe et du XIVe si›ecle
(Paris, 1935).
I set out a converging argument about the pecia transmission of the sermons of
Pierre de Reims in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 17–18. It is not the only hypothesis
that fits the data, but it is the hypothesis with the most comfortable fit. As an
argument for a large loss rate it would not stand on its own, but it reinforces and
draws strength from the other arguments.