This week, I got very excited about experiencing a mistake that medieval scribes often encountered: eye-skip. This phenomenon occurs when a scribe skips some text because two very similar words are close together. When this happens, scribes continue writing from the second occurrence of the word. That causes them to omit a piece of text as a result. It’s something that I discussed in bestiary update #02, but hadn’t yet experienced myself.
What happened
While copying the text about the peacock, I payed attention to the overabundance of the word ‘the’ in the translation. As a result, I missed that the word “signifies” appears twice in short order. This caused my eyes to skip from one instance to the next. As a result, two sentences got mashed together into: “But the sapphire colour of its breast signifies his love of contemplation.”
In hindsight, this could’ve been avoidable.
However, I should’ve written: “But the sapphire colour of its breast signifies that the preacher longs in his mind for heaven. The red colour in the peacock’s feathers signifies his love of contemplation.” In hindsight, this could’ve been avoidable. If I hadn’t forgotten to proofread this entry, I could have marked them on my exemplar. Whoopsie! That happens.🤷
Of the peacock
It is funny this eye-skip didn’t happen with the word ‘the’ in the story about the peacock. Especially considering how about every other sentence in this chapter begins with ‘the’. To illustrate my point, I featured the full text below so that you can read it for yourself. I marked all occurrences of ‘the’ in black and where I wrote the word ‘signifies’ I marked in red:
The peacock, as Isidore says, gets its name from the sound of its cry. For when it starts, unexpectedly, to give its cry, it produces sudden fear in its hearers. The peacock is called pavo, therefore, from pavor, fear, since its cry produces fear in those who hear it. When the peacock lives it Tharsis, it signifies the effete. But when it is brought by the fleet to Jerusalem, it represents learned teachers. The peacock has hard flesh, resistant to decay, which can only with difficulty be cooked over a fire by a cook, or can scarcely be digested in the stomach, because of the heat of its liver. Such are the minds of teachers; they neither burn with the flame of desire, nor are they set alight by the heat of lust. The peacock has a fearful voice, an unaffected walk, a serpent’s head and a sapphire breast. It also has on its wings feathers tinged with red. In addition, it has a long tail, covered with what I might call ‘eyes’. The peacock has a fearful voice, as does a preacher when he threatens sinners with the unquenchable fire of Gehenna. It walks in an unaffected way, in the sense that the preacher does not overstep the bounds of humility in his behaviour. It has a serpent’s head, as the preacher’s mind is held in check by wise circumspection. But the sapphire colour of its breast signifies that the preacher longs in his mind for heaven. The red colour in the peacock’s feathers signifies his love of contemplation. The length of the tail indicates the length of the life to come. The fact the peacock seems to have eyes in its tail, is a reference to every teacher’s capacity to foresee the danger that threatens each of us at the end. The colour green, [on the peacock’s serpent-like head], is also present in the tail, that the end might match the beginning. The diversity of the peacock’s colouring, therefore, signifies the diversity of the virtues. Note also that the peacock, when it is praised, raises its tail, in the same way that any churchman gets ideas above his station out of vainglory at the praise of flatterers. The peacock sets out its feathers in an orderly fashion; in the same way, a teacher believes that no matter he does, he has done it in an orderly way. But when the peacock lifts its tail, it exposes its rear, in the same way that whatever is praised in the conduct of the teacher is derided when he succumbs to pride. The peacock, therefore, should keep its tail down, just as what a teacher does, he should do with humility.
Entry on the Peacock based on translation of the Aberdeen Bestiary, folio 59v — 61r (re-used under CC-BY-4.0).
Fixing eye-skipped text
I’ve yet to decide on how I will ‘fix’ this page. Since I continued writing, I’m unable to simply scrape away the offending text and rewrite it. There simply isn’t enough space. Instead, I might take inspiration from a mid-13th-century manuscript (British Library, Royal 14 C VII) as medievalwriting.atillo.com.au presents. In that manuscript, a scribe inserted missing text into the outer margin.
Whatever the solution will be, for now, I’ll enjoy this medievally authentic scribal mistake. I’ll simultaneously rejoice that it’s one of only a handful of mistakes in just slightly over 100 pages of writing.