Titivillus

Titivillus is often referred to with the somewhat fanciful title of "The Patron Demon of Scribes". For much of human history the mechanical printing press did not exist, so any copies of a book or document had to be made by hand. Such copying was always done by professional scribes who were oftentimes monks in the Scriptorium of their monasteries. Except for the shortest of documents, the work was generally laborious. The text had to be carefully drawn and faithful to the original document. Consider the labor required to copy an entire Bible, for example!

As with even the best of us, minds can wander from time to time and the monks were no exception. When this happened, errors would be introduced into the text. No one likes to take credit for his own mistakes, and true to human nature the monks invented Titivillus. He was invented somewhat in jest by them, both to take the blame for their mistakes and as a warning to the hapless monk whose mind strayed from the task. Titivillus is first mentioned by name in the Tractatus de Penitentia, written around 1285 by John of Wales, and then again in the 14th century by Petrus de Palude, the Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The modern iteration of Titivillus has been much on my mind as I go through the editing of the novel. I wrote a versicle for him today: 

 My name is Titivillus;

my boss is the Dark Prince.

My job is most evilus --

to mess things up in print. 

Despite Titivillus and his efforts, I made some progress today. I was able to fill in the gaps of the story and went through and reviewed and revised (when necessary or desired) the spelling and grammatical errors flagged by the word processing software. This is not at all the same as a clean edit, which lies ahead.