claim the standing of an ‘author’ of a new unit in the 
     chain of transmitted knowledge? We are guilty of an 
     anachronism if we imagine that the medieval student 
     regarded the contents of the books he read as the 
     expression of another man’s personality and opinion. He 
     looked upon them as part of that great and total body of 
     knowledge, the scientia de omni scibili , which had once 
     been the property of the ancient sages. Whatever he read 
     in a venerable old book he would take to be not 
     somebody’s assertion but a small piece of knowledge 
     acquired by someone long ago from someone else still 
     more ancient. (p. 113)

     Not only were users of manuscripts, writes Goldschmidt, 
mostly indifferent to the chronology of authorship and to the 
“identity and personality of the author of the book he was