Curse thee, Titivillius!
Feb. 14th, 2026 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseIn the Middle Ages, most if not all occupations had their own patron saint. (I'm rather pleased, though a little flummoxed, to discover that St Peter is the patron saint of mathematicians; while he has a great deal to commend him, I'm pretty sure he wasn't actually a mathematician, but there you go.) The patron saint of scribes, as it turns out, was St Catherine of Alexandria, about whom I know precisely nothing, but I am rather happy that she was female. Did you know there were female scribes in the Middle Ages? I even have a few illustrations of them in my extensive research collection, and I suspect quite a few of them were self-portraits. Given that so few professions were open to women at the time, that's a little ray of light.
Yes, but... scribes didn't just have a patron saint. They also had a patron demon.
I'm not kidding. His name was Titivillius, which is much too euphonious a name for a demon, but so it was. Titivillius was said to be responsible for causing scribal errors (not that the unfortunate scribes didn't still get blamed for them, of course), blots, ink spills, and other things you don't want in your quiet but probably rather chilly scriptorium. I do not know of a single other mediaeval profession with a patron demon, but I do know I'm going to research St Catherine a little and then I'm going to work on a small piece of marginalia in which she is battling Titivillius, since that would be immensely appropriate.
You would think that when the profession of scribe finally died out, Titivillius would have hung up his goad and retired to an obscure existence in one of the nine circles of Hell; but no, he's much more enterprising than that. He must have rubbed his little hands with glee at the invention of the printing press. No longer did he have to content himself with odd errors here and there; once he got into this machine, he could cause widespread chaos. I have no doubt he was entirely responsible for the "Wicked Bible", in which two letters underwent a thoroughly unfortunate transposition, so that the phrase "sin no more" was rendered as "sin on more". Although he's evil, he's not devoid of a sense of humour, and I have an entire book of text snippets displaying his interference... although the funniest of those I've ever seen was actually in the wild, in the local newspaper, when I was in my late teens. There was an article about a local couple who had recently set up a school of modern dance, and Titivillius had slipped in and ensured that this couple were also described as "both very keen amateur ballroom dangers".
And then someone invented autocorrect, and Titivillius must have been rejoicing in the depths of his twisted little heart ever since. You know exactly who's typing on a keyboard and who's using a phone with autocorrect; and on our scribal server (of course), not so very long ago, someone typed something which was such incomprehensible word salad (apparently about beans, which didn't seem at all relevant to the rest of the conversation) that I had to ask her gently if Titivillius had got into her phone.
He had. She retyped it. Just for starters, the word "beans" should have read "brands" (we were having a rather technical discussion about pigment to binder ratios in various different paints).
Oh yes, indeed. Titivillius never died. But I suspect his legal name is now Autocorrect.
Yes, but... scribes didn't just have a patron saint. They also had a patron demon.
I'm not kidding. His name was Titivillius, which is much too euphonious a name for a demon, but so it was. Titivillius was said to be responsible for causing scribal errors (not that the unfortunate scribes didn't still get blamed for them, of course), blots, ink spills, and other things you don't want in your quiet but probably rather chilly scriptorium. I do not know of a single other mediaeval profession with a patron demon, but I do know I'm going to research St Catherine a little and then I'm going to work on a small piece of marginalia in which she is battling Titivillius, since that would be immensely appropriate.
You would think that when the profession of scribe finally died out, Titivillius would have hung up his goad and retired to an obscure existence in one of the nine circles of Hell; but no, he's much more enterprising than that. He must have rubbed his little hands with glee at the invention of the printing press. No longer did he have to content himself with odd errors here and there; once he got into this machine, he could cause widespread chaos. I have no doubt he was entirely responsible for the "Wicked Bible", in which two letters underwent a thoroughly unfortunate transposition, so that the phrase "sin no more" was rendered as "sin on more". Although he's evil, he's not devoid of a sense of humour, and I have an entire book of text snippets displaying his interference... although the funniest of those I've ever seen was actually in the wild, in the local newspaper, when I was in my late teens. There was an article about a local couple who had recently set up a school of modern dance, and Titivillius had slipped in and ensured that this couple were also described as "both very keen amateur ballroom dangers".
And then someone invented autocorrect, and Titivillius must have been rejoicing in the depths of his twisted little heart ever since. You know exactly who's typing on a keyboard and who's using a phone with autocorrect; and on our scribal server (of course), not so very long ago, someone typed something which was such incomprehensible word salad (apparently about beans, which didn't seem at all relevant to the rest of the conversation) that I had to ask her gently if Titivillius had got into her phone.
He had. She retyped it. Just for starters, the word "beans" should have read "brands" (we were having a rather technical discussion about pigment to binder ratios in various different paints).
Oh yes, indeed. Titivillius never died. But I suspect his legal name is now Autocorrect.
