Gordon Duff Prize

Winner of the 2024 Prize

Dr Ruth Abbott

Transcribers of the Mind: Copying Historical Manuscripts in the British Museum Reading Room, 1759-1795

Abstract: The discipline of textual criticism dominates conceptions of scribal activity, which it speculatively reconstructs for recension and emendation. Yet the nature of these methods means that transcription is always imagined as error. Against these ‘transcribers of the mind’ (to adapt D. F. McKenzie’s phrase), this essay sets the real scribes whom scholars employed to reproduce historical documents in the early decades of the British Museum Reading Room. Drawing on a series of barely known records that document the identities and activities of scribes working in the Reading Room in the four decades after its opening in 1759, the essay demonstrates that paid amanuenses were initially so ubiquitous that they had to be regulated. It shows that while the copying involved in eighteenth-century note-taking was increasingly personal, and admired for being customisable through selection, the transcription of entire manuscripts was still regularly delegated because it was understood as sheerly mechanical reproduction. It also shows how this began to change, as scholars began to transcribe historical manuscripts for themselves and scribes became sufficiently recognised for their expertise to be acknowledged as scholars in their own right. Finally, it develops a thesis about why this change occurred. Because seventeenth-century transcriptions were usually commissioned as ancillaries to specialist inquiries – to provide antiquarian precedents, for example, or collations for editions based on a textus receptus – expertise was attributed to the inquirers, not the scribes they employed. As eighteenth-century textual criticism began to challenge the reliance on received texts, and as the discipline of history was increasingly associated with archival research, scholars and scribes began to transcribe historical manuscripts as a method of personally studying those manuscripts: not to use them as evidence, or collate them, but to read them. The scribes who worked in the British Museum Reading Room in the last four decades of the eighteenth century – scribes who were increasingly scholars in their own right, and credited for their expertise – not only counter the error-prone, mechanical ‘transcribers of the mind’ imagined in the discipline of textual criticism. They also suggest that manuscript transcription itself was transforming during this period: from outsourceable, unspecialised aid to many disciplines, into a discipline in its own right.