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. The nature of these methods means that transcription is always figured as error. Against these ‘transcribers of the mind’ (to adapt D. F. McKenzie’s phrase), this article sets the real scribes whom scholars employed to reproduce historical documents in the early decades of the British Museum Reading Room, when transcribing an entire manuscript was still seen as mechanical. Museum records show that paid amanuenses were initially so ubiquitous that they had to be regulated. But they also reveal that some scholars began making their own transcriptions, and some scribes became so knowledgeable that they became celebrated as scholars themselves. The article uses these records to develop a thesis about the transformation of manuscript transcription during the eighteenth century: from outsourceable, unspecialised aid to many disciplines, into a discipline in its own right.