Someone who makes copies of manuscripts by hand. A scribe.
"No one is claiming that anything in the holy scriptures is a lie, if that is the inference you draw, and none of this has anything to do with the personal conflict between Augustine and Jerome. But the truth demands, what is plain even for the blind to see, that there are often passages where the Greek has been badly translated because of the inexperience or carelessness of the translator, and often a true and faithful reading has been corrupted by uneducated copyists, something we see happening every day, or sometimes even altered by half-educated scribes not thinking what they do. Then who is giving his support to a lie--the man who corrects and restores these texts or the man who would rather accept an error than remove it?"
Erasmus, Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, (1515)
[translated by Betty Radice, notes by A. H. T. Levi (1993)].
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