One scribe, many hands: the polygraphism problem
Abstract. Polygraphism — the ability of one scribe to move between different scripts — provides a fundamental challenge for palaeographical identification. This paper considers this issue by working out from a single example, providing new evidence from a known English humanist scribe of the Quattrocento, Thomas Candour. The intention is to consider what tactics have and can be used to attribute scripts with few similarities to a single scribe — and to recognise when we must refrain from claiming certainty.
There are several ways in which a scribe’s writing may change over the course of their career; age and health are naturally factors, as is the process of mastering a new style of script. A different category is provided by the ability of one professional scribe to write several scripts. It is well known that this was prized in the later middle ages, as is shown by the few advertising sheets that survive, parading for potential customers the mastery of styles the scribe-for-hire had achieved. There are obvious problems of identification of a copyist’s oeuvre when they can, as it were, switch hands — problems for both the human eye and AI. These difficulties are reflected, for instance, in the work done in the past couple of decades in the field of Latin palaeography as it relates to late medieval English vernacular texts: there have been attempts to make use of the insight that a copyist who (as it were), by day, undertook secretarial work could, by night, produce literary manuscripts, sometimes in a different style of script. Those studies, by the likes of Linne Mooney, have proven both important and controversial. This paper will take a different approach to the polygraphism problem, while continuing to consider the fifteenth century. It will move out from the example of another scribe of English stock, though this man’s work was (as far as we know) entirely in Europe’s main language of Latin. The mid-fifteenth-century English clerical diplomat Thomas Candour was not a commercial scribe but he was undeniably accomplished in the new humanist style, so accomplished that (as A. C. de la Mare demonstrated) he moved between three styles. Notably, as I have argued before [English Manuscript Studies, xii (2005)], those styles do not reflect different stages of his career: this was synchronic polygraphism rather than chronological progression. Candour’s known range has remained within the single script system of humanist littera antiqua and, up to now, we have not seen this scribe essay a gothic bookhand. The new evidence which will be provided reveals Candour’s ability to work within that tradition. This paper will take the process undertaken to identify his move between humanist and gothic in order to propose some tactics for identifying a polygraphic scribe, and, in conclusion, to propose some principles for considering this phenomenon.