Mark Thakkar

@brunellus

Medieval Latinist · Postdoc in the History of Maths, Logic and Philosophy, working on Cardano, the impossible and the medievals:

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Mark Thakkar@brunellus· 11d

I have all the “treat me like an adult” options turned on by default in my browser, but sometimes I do a search directly on the Google website by mistake, and the results are so bad that I don’t understand how people can still use it in “treat me like a fuckwit” mode. Still get offered slop though:

Verbatim non-AI search on Google for “cum isto casu” (with quotation marks). Above the list of genuine results is the suggestion: “Did you mean: ‘cum into cash’”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· 11d

“Mediaevalia (often misspelled as mediavevalia)” #AIoverspew

Google AI Overview for the search term “mediavevalia” (in quotation marks) beginning with the false claim quoted in my post.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· 13d

Batman and Robin meme: Robin says “I asked ChatGPT…” and Batman slaps him with “SLOP!”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· 28d

A dark warning from a search results page with its listings upgraded from stodgy verbatim extracts to predigested robovomit. (Source: “When George Molland died in September 2002, it was a great loss to the history of medieval science and mathematics, especially of the fourteenth century.”) #progress

Screenshot of a Google search for ‘george molland’. The results list begins with a death notice by John Murdoch, which Google has auto-summarized as follows: “George Molland died in September 2002, of medieval science and mathematics, especially of the fourteenth century.”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jul 16

Gosh, I’ve never seen a text with such clear & sustained structural markup (visible on the recto too). Well done that reader! I hope your efforts were appreciated before some goon consigned them to the binding waste basket. Text in case anyone’s interested: www.digitale-sammlungen.de/view/bsb1014...

Close-up of the flyleaf at the start of a section headed ‘Mevius’ (on Digest book 31, law 66 or 68). This shows a divisio textūs where the reader has marked each new subsection with a top-left half bracket, underlined each lemma, and dissected each sentence with thin slashes, e.g.: “Debitor partis fundi / si creditori sub eadem condicione / qua debebat / legavit / intelligitur aliam partem / non illam / quam debebat / legare.” Image source: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1029.pt.2/0004

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jul 13

I thought ‘Codex brevion’ was a strange name for the Franciscan collection, and it turns out to be an OCR or transcription error for ‘Codex brevior’. Which leaves me wondering: do they OCR or type out the titles rather than copying or extracting them more directly? doi.org/10.1353/frc....

Partial scan of first page of the article “The *Codex brevior*: For the Total Study of a Total Object” by Jacques Dalarun. The Introduction begins: “The object of this article is the manuscript NAL 3245 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. To present it, we will successively ask the questions *ubi*, *quando*, *quomodo*, *quid*, *qui*, and *cur*, then attempt a final hypothesis that will allow us to catch a glimpse of the micro-fraternity of Friars Minor who produced and used this tiny book of 122 leaves…”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jun 21

Too kind as always! I’m reminded for very different reasons of two DMLBS entries. One is ‘zingar’, which is the worst mistake I know I’ve made in print (recte ‘zinjar’). The other is ‘thacharius’, cross-referenced under ‘thakkarius’, where our editor kindly allowed a self-indulgently long quotation.

DMLBS entry for ‘thacharius’ [ME ‘thache’ + -arius], meaning ”thatcher”. The only supporting quotation is from a 15th-century manuscript (Emmanuel College Cambridge 142, f. 79r) and it reads:
Quidam thakkarius existens supra tectum domus deridebat grammaticos venientes per viam ac versificantes, quibus dixit ”Compleatis versum istum: Hec domus est alta.” Quidam pravi ingenii sublevando scalam a domo clericus finivit: ”si vis descendere, salta.”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jun 11

The 25th European Symposium on Medieval Logic & Semantics will be held in the Netherlands on 23–25 June. Please email esmls25@proton.me if you’d like to attend online. The programme is as follows (on Central European Summer Time, with some titles trimmed and names omitted to fit): #medievalSky

Conference poster for XXV European Symposium on Medieval Logic and Semantics, entitled “Logic and the Sciences”, to be held at Villa Vennendal in Nunspeet from 23 to 25 June 2026. The poster image is a detail from a mid-15th-century painting of the Seven Liberal arts by Francesco Pesellino and his workshop (currently housed at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama) showing Musica, Astrologia and Logica.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· May 21

Jacques de Crozals, our Chortlemuffin, didn’t fart out the idea ex nihilo. He conflated two stories from the section on “copistes” in Le Clerc’s survey of C14th literature for the Histoire littéraire de la France (1862), repr. in Larousse (1866) s.v. écritoire. www.google.co.uk/books/editio... (3/5)

Excerpt from Victor Le Clerc, “Discours sur l’état des lettres en France au quatorzième siècle” (1862): “Il y avait un démon appelé Titivitilarius ou Titivillus … ce démon apportait tous les matins en enfer un plein sac des syllabes que les moines avaient passées dans leur psalmodie de la nuit. Mais une autre tradition … raconte que chaque lettre des ouvrages qu’ils avaient transcrits, produite par leur ange gardien devant le tribunal du souverain juge, leur remettait infailliblement un péché. … Nous aimons à croire, pour eux et pour nous, que les lettres comptées par l'ange protecteur l'ont toujours emporté sur les syllabes recueillies par l'ennemi.”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· May 21

The erroneous association with scribes has since been traced further back by the art historian Julio Ignacio González Montañés in his Spanish booklet on Tutivillus (2015, usefully revised in Italian in 2018) to Jacques de Crozals’s biography of Lanfranc (1877): www.google.co.uk/books/editio... (2/5)

Excerpt from González Montañés, Tutivillus (2015): “añado la que … es … probablemente la primera referencia concreta del asunto en la bibliografía francesa, datada en 1877: ‘…la superstition s’en mêla: on inventa un démon: Titivitilarius, ou Titivillus, qui emportait les sacs de syllabes oubliées par les moines dans les psalmodies nocturnes **ou dans les copies des libres**.’” (Yes, ‘libres’ is just a Spanish mistranscription of ‘livres’.)

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· May 21

PSA: Titivillus was *not* associated with scribal error in the Middle Ages. This was dismissed as a chortlemuffin in 1958 by André Vernet, who pointed the finger at the entry on scribes in Franklin’s Dictionnaire historique des arts, métiers et professions (1905): archive.org/details/dict... (1/5)

Excerpt from Vernet’s 1958 article on Titivillus, “démon des copistes” (in scare quotes): “L’étymologie proposée [barb of a wood pigeon feather] … a le tort de voir en Titivillus un “démon des lapsus, non plus *calami* mais, *pennae*”, alors que Titivillus, dans les textes médiévaux, est un démon des chantres, et non des copistes: ceux-ci apparaissent, dans l’état actuel du dossier, en 1906 seulement, sous la plume d’A. Franklin, dont s’inspire la préface de la Vie de Jeanne d’Arc par Anatole France (1908), qui a vulgarisé l’historiette. La fonction essentielle de Titivillus est de recueillir et de conserver les parcelles, les miettes de mots, thème évangélique du “Colligite fragmenta ne pereant” (Joh. VI, 12), dont les termes=clés (colligere, fragmenta) se retrouvent dans toutes les versions que résume ce vers proverbial: ‘Fragima psalmorum (verborum) Titivillus colligit horum.’”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· May 16

Some of us will sympathize with Nycticorax, the night-raven, who takes refuge in his tower during the daytime and apparently removes the stairs to his front door just in case. #medievalLatin

Image from a manuscript copy of the Contemptus sublimitatis (otherwise known as Dialogus creaturarum), showing the entry for Niticorax with its etymology from the Greek equivalents of ‘nox’ and ‘corvus’, accompanied by two pictures of the same tower, the first lit by the moon and the second by the sun. Outside the tower at night are two birds, one ordinary and the other with a strangely human face. The latter is inside the tower during the daytime, while the ordinary bird remains outside. For some reason the tower is approachable by an external staircase during the night but not during the day. The manuscript is BnF lat. 8507, fol. 31r, dating very roughly to 1400, and the image was taken from Gallica: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10027428m/f67.item.zoom

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· May 11

Intrigued to read of the Franciscans “Warechoiten, Corotoue, Almuuick,te & Hattan” in the 1535 edition of Woodford’s Contra Trialogum Wyclif. A quick manuscript check corrects them to “Ware, Chatton, Cowton’, Al<n>wyk & Okham”. What a world, where one can do a quick manuscript check! #medievalLatin

Close-up of a 15th-century manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 1401 fol. 5r) showing the sentence: “Inceptores etiam eiusdem ordinis qui egregie scripserunt super sentencias, Ware, Chatton, Cowton’, Alwyk et Okham, tenent illud idem.” The column is narrow, and entirely occupied on the previous line by the single unabbreviated word ‘transubstanciacionem’. Source: https://arca.irht.cnrs.fr/ark:/63955/md07tm70pz0f

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· May 4

Passing observations for which I’ll never have a proper outlet, #9494: in this C14th prescription for impotence, ‘veni’ (printed with a question mark by a modern editor) must be a miscopying of ‘rem’. So it’s possible that ‘penna’ is likewise an error for ‘-enis’. #birdbrainedbollocks #medievalLatin

Paragraph from the early 14th-century manuscript Corpus Christi College Cambridge 388, fol. 24ra: “Item ut penna viri erigatur (anglice pyntul) accipe cerebrum cornicis et illini inde testiculos tuos quando volueris habere veni cum ea incontinenti et nuncquam permittet alium habere cum ea.” The modern edition is “Three Receptaria from Medieval England: The Languages of Medicine in the Fourteenth Century”, edited by Tony Hunt with the collaboration of Michael Benskin (2001), p. 132. Image source: https://purl.stanford.edu/qb778vp9705

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Apr 28

Eco published a revised version of The Name of the Rose in 2012, and a few years ago the changes were collated for a PhD project by Christian D’Agata. His collation is available at the site linked below and he has now published a book analysing his findings 🤓 www.variantidellarosa.it/varianti/#po...

Book cover for Christian D’Agata, “Nel Nome della rosa: Apocalissi, genesi, varianti”, published by ELiPhi (Éditions de Linguistique et de Philologie). The cover illustration is a manuscript image of the first two horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Apr 27

I like this early relevant occurrence of ‘fragmentologist’ from 1987. As his 1995 obituary in the same journal explained, Raasted “combined knowledge, curiosity, and imagination in his work on fragments: identifying tiny pieces of parchment was a game he played with great skill and great pleasure.”

EDITORIAL
This is no Festschrift. But if it were one, it would be in honour of the author of its first paper, Jørgen Raasted, dr. phil., Director of the Institute of Greek and Latin Medieval Philology (since 1986), Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and possessor of several less official titles, such as D.D.B.F. (Dean of Danish Byzantinologists and Fragmentologists), …

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Apr 15

Ironically, @universitypress.cambridge.org has long recommended a book known as “Butcher’s” as a guide to CUP house style! Here’s a screenshot of the author's LinkedIn post taken by an understandably disgruntled copyeditor:

LinkedIn post by Alexander Martin Mussgnug:

My recent publication has several AI hallucinations. Including my own name (which is not "Anna Maria Mussgnug")
And no, this was not because I was carelessly using AI.
The paper went through copyediting at the publisher (Cambridge University Press). I had submitted my references with first names abbreviated (Mussgnug, A. M.). CUP house style asks for first names spelled out. It looks like, somewhere in copyediting, an LLM was used to expand them without sanity-checking the outputs. So "Alexander Martin" because "Anna Maria", "Moritz" became "Michael", and so on. None of these changes were clearly flagged in the proofs sent to me, so I did not catch them.
The irony is not subtle, given the topic of my paper. The paper argues that we too easily throw overboard established norms and best-practices when we turn to new and flashy AI applications. And this is exactly what happened: a tool dropped into a workflow without the verification practices that have governed copyediting for decades.
I work on critical AI studies and the philosophy of science, so I've been pondering this over the past weeks. There's a growing literature on AI in peer review, but copyediting is also part of the publication pipeline, and so far I haven't come across critical scholarship on the (apparently rather careless) use of AI at this step. It seems worth doing. My case is not the only one, many of my colleagues have recently had similar experiences.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Mar 25

This raised a wry smile. #onwardsandupwards

Cover of book entitled “Il latino per avere successo nella vita” (Latin for Success in Life) showing a businessman in a suit ascending a grand staircase towards a radiant classical portico in the clouds.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Mar 5

I just downloaded an article on a C19th mathematical controversy, and Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform popped up to suggest some PDFs for me to download from the Hellenic Journal of Cardiology, the International Journal of Cardiology, and Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 🤡

Screenshot of pop-up headed “Other users also viewed these articles”, with a button labelled “Download (6) PDFs” and a list of articles entitled “Influence of Genes on the Lifespan of Long- and Short-Lived Families”, “Clinical characteristics and outcome correlates of Chinese patients with takotsubo syndrome: Results from the first Chinese takotsubo syndrome registry”, and “Eastern Bering Sea shelf environmental and lower trophic level responses to climate forcing: Results of dynamic downscaling from CMIP6”. Faintly visible in the background are parts of the article that prompted these recommendations, on a Parisian mathematical controversy from 1843.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Feb 18

You can see both sentences here (first one 6 lines down, second one 8 lines up from the bottom). Would be interesting to know how they got mashed together in your quotation. Did the source manuscript have two columns that were mistakenly transcribed as one? www.digitale-sammlungen.de/view/bsb1101...

Folio 48v of the 1501 edition of the Dictionarius pauperum (aka Summa de abstinentia) attributed to Nicolas de Biard, from chapter 33 (De ebrietate), including the two sentences mentioned in the post.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jan 6

I’ve got used to having to wade through “AI” slop when doing online research – in the way that you can get used to a terminal diagnosis, that is – but this was a new low: clicking through to a few search results in quick succession, only to be temporarily banned as a potential scraper bot 😠

Screenshot from WorldCat search page with the title “Access denied”. The page is headed “Error 1015: You are being rate limited” and goes on to explain: “The owner of this website (search.worldcat.org) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website.”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jan 5

Richard’s brother? (I was very fond of his Busy, Busy World.)

Title page of Richard Scarry’s Postman Pig and His Busy Neighbors (1978).

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Dec 16

Right, that’s it. We need bounty hunters to track down the fake academics who are publishing LLM-generated bullshit and “retire” them, by which I mean mercilessly expose them until they’re ostracized by their genuine academic colleagues and ultimately kicked out of the jobs they don’t deserve. 🕵️‍♂️

Still from Blade Runner (1982) showing Leon undergoing an empathy test to see if he is a replicant. “I already had an IQ test this year,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve had one of these.”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Dec 12

British medievalists! With perfect Christmas timing, Bennett & Kerr are selling 30-odd second-hand OMTs (from the library of John Maddicott, nisi fallor). Their website has been practically dead for ages and doesn’t include the books listed here, but you can order them by email. www.benkerrbooks.com

First half of the list of Nelson/OMT volumes for sale at Bennett and Kerr. Too complex for alt text, I’m afraid, but do get in touch if you can’t read the images and would like a copy of the original PDF.

Second half of the list of Nelson/OMT volumes for sale at Bennett and Kerr. Too complex for alt text, I’m afraid, but do get in touch if you can’t read the images and would like a copy of the original PDF.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Oct 28

Yes, I enjoyed that. Incidentally, the standard translation wouldn’t have helped him with the meaning of ‘tantus’ even if the two lines had been in the right order:

Stanza from the hymn “Pange lingua” in The Golden Manual (1850), with the Latin on the left and a free English translation on the right. The Latin begins “Tantum ergo Sacramentum / Veneremur cernui”, whereas the English begins “Down in adoration falling, / Lo! the sacred host we hail”.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Sep 19

Crest fallen.

The belted crest of Oxford University, with the usual motto DOMINVS ILLVMINATIO MEA altered to read DIABOLVS ILLVMINATIO MEA.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Aug 27

Here’s a photo of the manuscript for those who care about such things. You can also find a translation by searching for ‘brazen’ in the page linked here: antigonejournal.com/2025/08/o-te...

MS Prague Národní knihovna V E 14 fol. 52r

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Aug 27

New Wyclif polemic discovered! Only 250 words long, but not obviously detached from a larger work. It isn’t ascribed to him in the manuscript (no titulus or colophon) but the style is recognizably his. I’m posting it here because the content is eerily topical. #medievalLatin #medievalSky #genAI

Transcription: “Inter omnes cautelas diaboli per quas seducit hodie ociantes in scolis, nulla est detestabilior, fugibilior vel a veritate distancior quam istud caput eneum noviter machinatum. Quamvis enim laudetur a doctoribus novellis, de quibus loquitur apostolus Actuum vicesimo ubi signanter dicit quod ex vobismet ipsis exsurgent viri loquentes perversa, verumtamen patet non cecatis quod omne tale artificiale nedum est inutile sed nocivum. Nam tamquam Titivillus solummodo colligit fragmina scriptorum et indigesta evomit, nec intelligens scripta aliorum nec verba ex ore suo prolata, sed ad tantum infatuantur fautores eius quod credunt istis simulatis sentenciis ac si a deo procederent. Nec mirum si quandoque vera balbuciat per accidens, sicut dicit Crisostomus quod concessum est diabolo interdum dicere veritatem ut mendacium suum rara veritate commendet, quia non curat sive vera sive falsa dixerit dummodo servaverit regulas grammatice. Nec obest quod ei innitentes pompant se tempori parcere, quia noverunt experti quod, ut dicitur Ecclesiastes primo, qui addit scienciam addit laborem. Si ergo ad scienciam veritatis pervenire voluerimus, tempus impendere pocius quam reservare debemus; ymmo, ut dicit Ambrosius super Lucam, frustra congregat opes qui se his nescit usurum. Incidunt ergo tales sompniantes in illud ve propheticum Isaie quinto: Ve qui dicitis bonum malum et malum bonum, ponentes tenebras lucem et lucem tenebras. Et proch pudor verba ficta istius pseudocapitis sunt eo diligencius precavenda quo moderni doctores, eciam qui videntur esse aliquid, sunt iam proniores ad eius usui annuendum, tamquam canes muti non valentes latrare. Heu! ut dicitur Trenorum quarto, qui nutriebantur in croceis amplexati sunt stercora.”

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jul 6

I think the Black Gate cover is a mistake for first-time readers, as it constitutes a bit of a spoiler for anyone paying attention. I myself read a one-volume 1992 paperback with this cover, which didn’t have the same problem:

HarperCollins one-volume Lord of the Rings, with John Howe’s cover image of Gandalf the Grey striding downhill through the rain.

Mark Thakkar@brunellus· Jul 6

Snap! Well, I’m reading it to my son, who’s almost 13. (We’re on the road to Isengard, p. 576.) The text is indeed generously sized, and the maps benefit from the extra space too. The only downside for readers of a certain age – young or old, really – is that it’s uncomfortably heavy in the hand.