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The Definable Characteristics of Late Manuscript Culture
The period of "Late Manuscript Culture" dates from roughly the mid-fourteenth century to the fifteenth century, preceding and existing alongside print. While embodying all of the ideals and adhering to the regulations observable in the Devotio Moderna, there are many clear characteristics of Late Manuscript Culture. For instance, careful attention was paid to the to the punctuation and layout of texts, with readability and specifically reading aloud taking preeminence. Meaning had to be clear in every sentence, with as little room left to interpretation as possible (compared to the lack of spaces in text and any markings for the purpose of aiding in enunciation), due preachings' rise in popularity after the Fourth Lateran Council. Correct orthography was attempted whenever the necessary exemplars made it possible to emend earlier texts, especially bibles, and this correction made many texts uniform. We thus only observe in this period of Manuscript Culture the emendatiora, manuscripts which combined surviving texts of the oldest available exemplars with the manuscripts that had been currently acceptable and prominent.

Aids to find one's way about the text are prominent features in these manuscripts. While none were invented solely in fifteenth century, they are used with increasing frequency and become more complex. These include


 * tables of contents
 * lists of chapters, either at the beginning of each book or gathered at the beginning of the whole work (if it is a collection of works)
 * running headlines
 * extensively detailed colophons
 * page numbers in Arabic numerals.
 * the appearance of subject indexes

We may also observe the enlargement of the rubric from one to two lines in the university manuscript to eight or ten, and distinction of it by separate letter-form, in this period. The rubric also changed in regard to the categories of information included in it. An earlier rubric might have contained a title of the particular section or article, and a description of the ending of the preceding one. A fifteenth century rubric would add information about the translator or translators, the original writer if they were not particularly well known. A brief description of their content, or even detailed information considering the date or conditions of the works creation is also occasionally seen, though not as frequently. These changes exemplify the desire for uniformity, ease of access, and strict regulation of a given work and its subsequent correction. These are many of the same goals attributed to the uniformity exemplified by the printing press.

The Production of Manuscripts at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century
The emergence of new standards in manuscript production, beginning in the Low Countries at the end of the fourteenth century, clearly marked the beginning of a new epoch in manuscript culture. Uniformity would result from the desire for clarity, both in terms of bibliographic accuracy and the reproduction and correction of the text itself. It necessitated greater organization, specifically within the monastic scriptoria. These had lost pre-eminence in medieval Manuscript Culture, characterized by the university, but had begun to undergo a rebirth in the fourteenth century. This period has often been characterized as chaotic, with very poor quality paper manuscripts being held as a standard; while this was true, the varying quality of materials did not affect the quality of the text contained on it, as the transition was made from parchment to rag paper. For instance, there was the formation of a new script called hybrida, that sought to combine the traditional cursiva script with the script used in printed books. There was little loss of legibility, due to the use of sharp angles instead of loops. Additionally, in the first half of the fifteenth century the practice of using a hierarchy of scripts to demarcate different sections of a given text was re-instituted. Rubrics and colophons were clearly set off from the remainder of a text, employing their own unique script. All of these changes resulted from a desire for improved accuracy, and led to the creation of complex codification rules, and were in stark contrast to a decline in the quality of materials.

Uniformity Amidst Variety
Within Late Manuscript Culture, a wide variety of manuscripts that had differences in terms of size, layout, script, and illumination, that were based on the same text while being created by many different scribes, were produced. Yet, they were meticulously corrected, to the point that very few differences in terms of the text itself can be observed among them. This implied not only a direct authority that could maintain some sort direction over the scribes, but also a newfound pursuit of scholarly accuracy that had not been present with the university book sellers, and was emphasized by the new religious orders that had been created in the fourteenth century. Correction and emendation would be held in the same esteem as copying itself. This was characteristic of Northern Europe as a whole, until and during the rise of the printing press.

Codification Rules and the Opus Pacis
Written in 1428 by the German Carthusian Oswald de Corda, prior of the Grand Chartreuse, the Opus Pacis consists of two parts. One deals primarily with orthography and accent, where oswald states that his motive in creating these codification rules was to dispel the anxiety of his fellow Carthusians. Many members of the order were worried about the omission of single letters, not just phrases, words or syllables within copies of a given text (demonstrating the new concern for uniformity taken to an extreme). It is clear that his audience was composed of scribes, specifically those meticulous to “the verge of neurosis”. He seeks to reinforce the importance of older statutes regarding manuscript production, such as the Carthusian statutes, and the way in which he seeks to correct them.

The Statuta Nova of 1368
Oswald specifically wanted to reform the statuta nova of 1368, which stated that no one could emend copies of the Old and New Testament, unless they were doing so against exemplars that had been prescribed by their order. Following this, anyone who corrected texts in a manner inconsistent with those exemplars was publicly acknowledged to have corrupted the text, and subsequently punished. Oswald answered this with his Work of Peace, stating that correctors should not engage in pointless labor by over-correcting. In it, correcting was not a command, but an indulgence; it was practiced for the improvement and glorification of a text, and while it would follow a set of rules, they would not be so strict as to stifle emendation. This is a transition from older works with large amounts of lists and regulations that mandated every action a scribe could take in correction, and had been widely ignored in Medieval Print Culture. Oswald was rejecting a system in which one must simply pick one exemplar and correct according to it, or reproduce portions of texts which you know to be in error due to a proper exemplar not being attainable. Before Oswald, many believed these were the only available options under the older, strict rules.

New Rules of Corrections
Oswald specifically made sure to outline the proper way of correcting various readings of the same text, as observed in varying exemplars. He stated that scribes shouldn't instantly correct according to one or the other, but deliberate, and use proper judgment. Oswald also said that in the case of bibles, scribes shouldn't immediately modernize archaic spellings, because this had produced further variation within texts. However, he also stated that scribes should recognize national differences, particularly in light of the Great Schism. Scribes were right to correct texts with different dialects of Latin, specifically if they were using archaic forms of Latin verbs, however. .

Valde Bonum
In his prologue to the Opus Pacis, Oswald contrasts his work with the Valde bonum, an earlier handbook compiled during the Great Schism. It had attempted to set forth universal spellings for the Bible, and stated that the corrector need not emend to conform to an exemplar from a given region based on its perceived superiority, but could rather take local regional practice as a standard. It acknowledged that centuries of use, and transmission from nation to nation, had an effect on various spellings. He incorporated many of these elements into his Opus Pacis, which was copied and put to practical use, and had spread from Germany as far north as Ireland. By the 1480's it had become a standard, specifically for the Devotio Moderna and the Reformed Benedictines, where opus pacis became a generic term for any work of its kind. The latest surviving copy was written in 1514, indicating that manuscript correction remained an important subject sixty years into the printed era.

Manuscript as a Vehicle for Preaching
It was in Late Manuscript Culture that the written page took on a renewed meaning to religious communities. Scriptorias of Benedictine, Cisterican and Augustinaian houses had resumed after being suppressed by the production of university and mendicant books. Particularly, these scriptoria exemplified the idea that one shall live by the fruit of one's labors. Writing sacred books was the most fitting, suitable and pious task that one could undertake to do so. Also, copying these books was equivalent to preaching with ones hands. Sermons were only of moderate importance in the 1200's. By the 1400's, after the emphasis placed on preaching in the Fourth Lateran Council, they were of the utmost importance. The formation and expansion of preaching orders led to the proliferation of pastoral theology in schools, and preaching was now an indispensable part of the sacraments. As such, uniform manuscripts with many tools made for ease of reference, reading, and enunciation had become necessary.

The Devotio Moderna and the reformed Benedictines relied on reading devotional texts for instruction, and the written word was raised to a high level of importance not afforded by earlier religious movements. The writing was just as important as the word. In fact, monasteries bought many printed books, becoming the main market for the early printing press, precisely because of this devotion to preaching. Without the Devotio Moderna and orders that followed their example, the need for texts and printers would not have been present. Printing had exploded in Germany and the Low Countries, the home of the Devotio Moderna and Reformed Benedictines, as opposed to England and France. They were also the home to the beginnings of Late Manuscript Culture, because of the common desire for uniformity. Trimethius protested the invasion of the library by the printed book because of the missing aspect of devotion that had been present in preaching with ones' hands. Without the preaching possible as a scribe, manuscripts had a function that was lacking in a printed book.

Manuscripts and the Confluence of Print
By roughly 1470, the transition from handwritten books to those created by printing had begun. The book trade, in particular, underwent drastic changes. By this point German printing presses had reached the northernmost regions of Europe, and specifically Paris. By 1500, print had stopped imitating manuscripts and manuscripts had begun to imitate print. In the reign of Francis I (1515-1547) for instance, the king's handwritten manuscripts were based on Roman type. While quality rag paper had begun to appear before the arrival of the printing press, it was at this time that parchmenters lost most of their business. Paper was not only acceptable, it was preferable, and printers and scribes had both ceased to use parchment altogether.

Popular Assumptions and Historical Revision
Many scholars of Print Culture, as well as Classicists, have argued that inconsistencies among manuscripts due to the blind copying of texts and a static Manuscript Culture (specifically Medieval Manuscript Culture) existed at the rise of the printing press. The noted Classicist E.J. Kenney, whose work formed much of the early scholarship on this issue, stated that “medieval authors, scribes, and readers had no notion of emending a text, when they were confronted with an obvious error in their exemplars, other than by slavishly copying the readings of another text”. However, many historians and specifically medievalists argue that the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries allow us to observe reforms that accommodated many of the functions associated with print. Also, many Classicists naturally look to reproductions of Classical texts during the period, which are not necessarily characteristic of other work that was deemed more important. Universality, they feel could be seen among manuscripts, along with other changes typically associated with the printed book

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Much of the recent scholarship on Late Manuscript Culture was specifically generated by Elizabeth Eisenstein, a key Print Culture scholar (and arguably creator of the "Print Culture" model), and her assessment of manuscripts.

Eisenstein argued that the invention of the printing press eventually led to the Renaissance, and the social conditions necessary for its occurrence. The printing pres allowed readers to free themselves from many limitations of the manuscript. She did not detail the state of Manuscript and Scribal Culture in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however. She describes in depth the conditions present in Germany at the time of the printing presses' invention in Germany, while describing scribal culture in England and France in order to compare Print Culture and Manuscript Culture. She does not describe Italian humanists in Florence and renewed religious orders of the Modern Devotion in the Low Countries and Germany, such as the Windesheim Congregation, of which Oswald de Corda was a memeber. Many medievalists, specifically Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, responded by attempting to  create a more detailed account of Late Manuscript Culture, defining its distinctive characteristics and changes that occurred during it (which they felt Print Culture scholars such as Eisenstein ignored).