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52 Chapter 1
certainty. Still, it fits very well with the other evidence and adds
significant support to an already strong case.
Here the subject is sermon manuscripts and model sermons,
but it should be said again that the implications extend to other
genres of manuscripts of this period, some of which survive in
far more copies than the sermon collections studied here. The
implication is that their original di·usion was proportionally larger.
So the concept of late medieval mass communication should not be
confined to the friars or to model sermon collections and preaching
aids—though it should be remembered that only these were further
systematically multiplied by repeated oral events.
Convergence
Each of the foregoing arguments—the great book massacre, the vanished
mendicant libraries, books without libraries, quaterni without
books, pecia inferences—has considerable force, but they also
support one another more or less independently. The onus of proof
should be on those who deny a colossal loss rate of mendicant manuscripts
like model sermons, and other manuscripts facing similar
perils. Quantification would be quite artificial, but, despite the talk
of tips of icebergs, one in ten would surely be too optimistic by far.
It is perfectly possible that only one in fifty got through to our day:
perhaps even fewer. Even with fifteenth-century printed books,
the survival rate averages only about 1.2 per cent for small-format
books, and these books have had fewer centuries to survive and
would have been less attractive to bookbinders seeking strong scrap
materials. The low figure is eloquent. It is all the more remarkable
that we still have so many thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sermon
collections in books of this format: just the size that friars
could have carried easily with them when they moved to a di·erent
This was stressed in Robert Lerner’s review of Medieval Marriage Sermons in
Speculum. He intended it as a reductio ad absurdum: the absurd conclusion being that
medieval books which survive to this day in hundreds of manuscripts could have
originally been transmitted by thousands of manuscripts. But in fact there is nothing
absurd about this conclusion, though it runs against some assumptions which are as
prevalent as they are ungrounded in evidence.
‘. . . bei Oktavb•anden allerdings nur bis zu 3% (Durchschnittswert 1,2%)
[erhalten]’ (Neddermeyer, Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch, 75); ‘Schmale
B•andesindfastausnahmslosnurnochvereinzeltvohanden....Oktavb•ande [sind]
heute in jedem Fall sehr selten’ (ibid. 76).