Untitled

Mass Communication 53
house or province. Common though they still are, there may have
been a hundred times more of them, or still more than that, at the
start of the fourteenth century.
Production of manuscripts by friars
If so many manuscripts have been lost, they must have been first
produced. How could they have been produced in such numbers
without the help of printing? In essence, the answer is that a double
labour force was at work. On the one hand, there were professional
scribes. There has been an idea in the air in the oral culture
of modern manuscript scholars that such commercial scribes took
over the work of monastic scriptoria entirely. However it may be
with monastic scriptoria, which lie outside the scope of the present
study, it is a mistake to think that the new orders of friars relied
only on the products of commercial scribes. They certainly got
many of their books this way. (Other books originally copied by
paid scribes for someone else would have been passed on as gifts
to mendicant convents.) There is no doubt that very many manuscripts
used by friars were produced by this first labour force of
paid scribes. However, the second labour force consisted of the friars
themselves, who copied their own manuscripts. It also included
any other literate priests who copied sermon collections for their
own use and—this is important—the use of others.
There is a good deal of direct evidence for the copying activity
of friars: chronicle evidence and their own regulations. Then
there is a quite di·erent kind of evidence which converges towards
the same conclusion: the nature of variants in many sermon manuscripts.
In some manuscripts there are many free and independent
variants: not mistakes but voluntary changes that make sense. They
represent an independent attitude on the part of the scribe, and this
has considerable implications.
Such variants may be found in the critical apparatus of Medieval
Marriage Sermons,moreorlesspassim. They are also more clearly
D’Avray , ‘Portable Vademecum Books Containing Franciscan and Dominican
Texts’.
M. Mulchahey, ‘More Notes on the Education of the Fratres communes in the
Dominican Order: Elias de Ferreriis of Salagnac’s Libellus de doctrina fratrum’, in
J. Brown and W. P. Stoneman (eds.), A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of
Leonard E. Boyle, O.P. (Notre Dame, Ind., 1997), 328–69 at 338.
Collected in d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 25–8.