Entering the Commercial Scriptorium

A significant portion of medieval literature owes its survival to professional scribes, whose contributions to textual transmission are only now being more fully recognised. This essay investigates the attitudes of such scribes toward literary texts by reconstructing the working methods of one of them — likely active in Ghent during the second decade of the fifteenth century. This professional scribe copied Die rose (a Dutch translation of the Roman de la rose) into the Comburg manuscript, a version that diverges notably from other known renditions. A close analysis of orthographic changes, textual variations, and scribal errors suggests that scribe A acted chiefly as a faithful copyist, with little critical engagement with the text or interest in correcting his exemplar through comparison with the French original of the Roman de la rose. The stark contrast between his approach and that of contemporaries such as Geraert van Woelbosch highlights the broad range of scribal involvement with literary texts. The article calls for a reassessment of textual variation in conjunction with archival research and codicological analysis to develop a more nuanced understanding of scribes — not simply as transmitters, but as individuals whose agency and involvement varied according to context, skill, and purpose.