Monastic Corruption

Scholars have always tried to find plausible explanations why certain sorts of error have occurred in manuscripts, and much progress has recently been made in trying to analyse such sources of corruption. However, it is not always remembered that scribes were usually monks and that their minds may often have been on higher things than copying Livy's history for the umpteenth time. Over the last few years I have been collating the primary manuscripts of the first five books of Livy and so large a number of revealing corruptions came to light that it seemed valuable to collect them together as evidence of subconscious or unconscious preoccupations of scribes. The result is important, because it means that editors must not be over-mechanical in their approach to the transmission of texts.