Abstract
If the study day was given as central object of interest, around which the proposed contributions have to revolve, the question of memory as well as that of memorizing there is nothing, in the scriptural universe, which, originally, by its definition and by its primary intention, is further from the idea of a trace voluntarily left by the medieval copyist and falling within a chain of historical transmission than the pen tests or probationes pennae (probationes calami).
These pen trials were called upon to wipe off the excess ink, avoiding in this way making a stain or a smudge on the manuscript or calibrating the bevel of the copyist's pen.
The capricious little straight lines and strokes, the scribbles or a few chains of morphemes made each time the writer dips the pen into the inkwell to take up ink should a priori be synonymous with futile, fleeting and ephemeral, however properly questioning the teachings they convey, we see them retain a number of memories of another kind.
The graphologist and the paleographer discover in the probationes pennae the information that partially brings the person of the copyist out of the absolute anonymity of an unknown hand mechanically faithful to the textuality of the copied original; the codicologist, the textologist and the specialist of ecdotics complete the information about the stemma codicum and its dating; and the philologist can identify in it mensural notations of recopied chants or precious testimonies on the very ancient stages of the emergence of vernaculars such as the Riddle of Verona or the bilingual Alba of Fleury-sur-Loire.
Approaching in this way marginalia, illuminations and drolleries, the pen tests thus prove to be an artefact or a testimony to which the copyist has entrusted part of his reflections, his spontaneous ideas, his states of mind or his dialectal identities.