Abstract

The subject of medieval scribes is bound up with the question of textual authority. Scribes not only left their marks upon the manuscripts they copied, they also functioned as interpreters, editing and consequently altering the meaning of texts. Writers, however, did not simply employ scribes as copyists; they elaborated upon the figurative language associated with the book as a symbol and incorporated scribes into their texts as tropes. Such “ghostly scribes” provided authors with figures through which they could project authorial personas, indicate what we would call generic categories, express a sense of community, or guide a reader's responses to a text. Though a writer like Chaucer employed scribal metaphors to signal his relative powerlessness, thereby indicating the outlines of a carefully conceived and concealed persona, women writers such as Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pisan exploited those same metaphors to signal both their sense of authority and their awareness of the social constraints placed upon it. The two most important English women writers of the late Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, seem especially aware of the ways in which the deployment of a scribe could be used strategically, as a means of maintaining control over texts they profess neither to control nor to aspire to control