A scribal confession · Erfurt · 1457
MS ERFURTAUG. 12°47
Join us as we give an unwritten journal a visible form. As you explore, its question becomes ours: in this age of AI, what of us remains in the ideas we pass on?
The document
Seventeen folios, bound between two liturgical texts. Never indexed.
Recovered in 2019 while cataloguing the Augustinian archive at Erfurt: a private manuscript in a professional scriptorium hand of the mid-to-late fifteenth century, several passages damaged by moisture. The author does not fully identify himself.
He writes to God in the second person — and, at times, to someone else. This edition presents the leaves themselves alongside CLIO-7’s translation, with every uncertainty left visible.
- Extent
- 17 folios · 34 pages
- Language
- German, with Latin
- Support
- Calfskin, then offcuts
The folios
Every page, as it survives. Zoom to the stroke.
How to read this edition
Where the vellum is damaged, the type changes its face.
CLIO-7 reconstructs what water and age have taken, and marks how sure it is. Nothing reconstructed is presented as certain. Readers should treat it as interpretive rather than authoritative.
Mark
≥ 80%He stayed six years.
60–80%precise, almost courtly curiosity
< 60%He told me on a Thursday.
lacunaI said [—].
The slight thickening of a stroke when my attention deepened … Readers did not see it. But it was there. The page knew.
Colophon
A closing note follows the final folio.
It changes what you have read, and how these pages came to be in front of you.