THE SCRIBE WILHELMUS DE PREDIO

It may strike us as incredible in our digital age, but the four volumes of the Geraardsbergen Breviary were copied out entirely by hand by a scribe or copyist, a craftsman whose specialism was writing. He would employ what was known as textura: dignified, extremely neat and legible, Gothic lettering which was ideally suited to a liturgical work. It must have been an extraordinarily time consuming business to set down on the page hundreds of thousands of letters on all of the manuscript’s 1700 pages, doing so slowly, methodically, one after the other.

The handwriting of Wilhelmus de Predio, detail. Each sentence begins with a coloured initial encased in filigree work. The text has been aligned in columns. Geometric motifs and elongated dragons decorate and fill any blank sections in lines of text

(ms. F°/3/1, fol. 3r)

Colophon, at the very bottom of the page in a smaller font, from volume 3 (ms. F°/3/3, fol. 205v): ‘Scriptum per me Wilhelmum de Predio Anno Domini 1449° in vigilia vigilie Nativitatis Domini’ (Written by me, Wilhelmus de Predio, in the year of Our Lord 1449, on the eve of the Birth of Our Lord)

We are able to estimate quite easily how long this drudgery might have taken, because two of the four volumes contain their dates of completion: 23 December 1449 in volume 3 and 1 July 1450 in volume 4. In other words, the transcription of each volume took six months, which means that on the basis of 250 working days a year, the scribe would have three to four pages each day. He began this work in mid-1448, at the start of the term of office of Nicaise de Frasne (1447–1461), an abbot who had close ties with the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good.

The four volumes of the Geraardsbergen Breviary were copied out entirely by hand by a scribe or copyist, a craftsman whose specialism was writing.

To bring a commission on such a scale to a successful conclusion, the work would often be shared among several copyists. However, that did not happen in this case. The writing is clearly the work of one hand alone. We even know the name of that person, because he has left us his signature: Wilhelmus de Predio. We know nothing about his background and education, but we do know something about him as it was not only the Geraardsbergen Breviary that he signed.

His name can also be seen in a further four Latin manuscripts. The first of these is a copy of The Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, held nowadays in Bethesda (Maryland). It dates from shortly after the Breviary and was produced for an unknown client. The second book is Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar, a text with which Belgian schoolboys are extremely familiar (Cambridge, Massachusetts). The Public Library of Bruges possesses a third manuscript by Wilhelmus, a Pantheology by the Dominican monk Raniero Giordani da Pisa: a theological dictionary in four volumes, copied between 1457 and 1459. Finally, on 6 June 1466, De Predio completed an anthology of letters by St Jerome, one of the most important Early Church Fathers. This book, presently kept in Wooster (Ohio), was ordered by the Priory of Saint-Léonard of Herstal, near Liège.

Colophon, at the bottom right in a smaller font, from volume 4 (ms. F°/3/4, fol. 200v): ‘Wil. De Predio me scripsit et finivit anno Domini 1450mo in vigilia Visitationis beate et gloriose Dei genitricis Marie’ (Wilhelmus de Predio wrote and completed this in the year of Our Lord 1450, on the eve of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary, the holy and glorious Mother of God).

What do these manuscripts tell us about Wilhelmus de Predio? Above all else, we know that he had a comprehensive knowledge of Latin; he was as fluent when copying works by classical authors as he was with works by the Church Fathers or medieval doctors and theologians. Moreover, we can see that he was highly mobile and may even have travelled about.

When copying the Geraardsbergen Breviary, he probably had a base in the neighbourhood of the abbey, perhaps Ghent. Some fifteen years later he appears in Liège, where once again he was working for a religious institution. Was he a cleric or clergyman in his own right? Whatever the case, he had access to such circles.

Dominique Vanwijnsberghe

Bibliography

Albert Derolez, 'Gand comme centre de diffusion d’une édition revue et indexée de la Pantheologia de Rainier de Pise (1459)', in Scriptorium, 60, 2006, p. 227-240.