The beauty of blunders
Some of the most fascinating examples of marginalia were inspired by attempts to correct scribes’ errors
Medieval scribes made mistakes. They misspelled words, they repeated themselves, they forgot to include entire paragraphs. That’s where another form of marginalia – the ‘gloss’ – came into its own. Glosses were added by later users to correct errors or even translate text. The three images right (taken from a 10th or 11th-century version of Pope Gregory I’s Pastoral Care) show the gloss work of one of the best-known of all medieval scribes: the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, so-named for their shaky handwriting. The Tremulous Hand’s edits and annotations – visible on numerous manuscripts – are unmistakable. They are also intriguing. What condition, historians asked themselves, was this prolific scribe suffering from! The answer was provided in 2015 by Deborah Thorpe and Jane Alty, who combined neurological studies with handwriting analysis to conclude that the Tremulous Hand had an ‘essential tremor’ (a type of uncontrollable shake or tremble of part of the body). Thanks to Thorpe and Alty’s research, we now know a lot more about the life of a 13th-century scribe, and the history of the condition from which they suffered.
Gloss work often involved one scribe editing another’s text. But it could also see scribes correcting their own work – and, as the image below right proves, they often did so with no little imagination and humour. The image shows a section of Thomas Hoccleve’s The Regiment of Princes, written in the early 15th century. Scribes would have been tasked with painstakingly copying the text to parchment. But there’s a problem: a stanza of text has accidentally been omitted during the copying process. The scribes, as the image shows, have corrected themselves by adding the missing stanza in the blank space of the right-hand margin. But what is striking about the correction is the decoration produced to accompany this error: the limner (the painter of portraits and miniatures) has added a man beside the stanza, and depicted him lassoing the stanza back into its correct position. Similarly, in the Book of Hours shown full page, far right, marginal figures and maniculae work together to drag a missing line into its rightful place. Both of these examples suggest that, rather than attempt to cover up their mistakes, medieval scribes were often happy to highlight them and the effort they had to take to put them right.