Knowledge Management in Late Medieval Manuscript Miscellanies: The example of Crux of Telcz (d. 1504)
Abstrakt
The paper discusses a specific case from late medieval Bohemia, that of an avid scribe, Crux de Telcz (1434-1504), whose activities had a large impact on the community of Augustinian Canons in Witingau (Třeboň, Southern Bohemia). Crux of Telč partly gathered and partly copied over 40 codices in his life.
He seems to have never simply copied a text, he always appropriated it, and the degree of his intervention is so high that in some cases it could be argued that he is actually authoring a new text. Before he entered the canonry in 1478, he worked as a teacher at several different places (Soběslav, Roudnice, Vyšehrad), and also studied at the Prague university.
Since his copies are usually accompanied by colophons with precise identification of time and place, it is possible to reconstruct what type of texts he was interested in at a particular point of his career, during a particular stage of his training. This paper will thus, on the one hand, present the shift of Cruxʼs interests in knowledge and knowledge management (with a special focus on classics, devotional treatises, religious polemics, and parody), and, on the other hand, it will show how this unique person influenced the composition of the library of the canonry at Witingau: what a substantial role an individual may play within a community.