Excerpts. Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers.

  We know a good deal about the actual procedures that Thomas Aquinas followed in composing his works, thanks in part to the full accounts we have from the hearings held for his canonization, and in part to the remarkable survival of several pages of autograph drafts of certain of his early works. Both sources of material have received a throrough analysis from the paleographic scholar, Antoine Dondaine. Dondaine's work confirmed the existence, alluded to many times in the contemporary accounts, of a group of three or four secretaries who took down Thomas's compositions in a fair hand from his own dictation. The autographs are written in littera inintelligibilis, a kind of shorthand that fully lives up to its name (Dondaine says that the great nineteenth-century editor, Uccelli, lost his eyesight scrutinizing these draft) for it was not designed to be read by anyone other than the author himself. As Dondaine has reconstructed the process of composing the «Summa contra gentiles», an early work for which a number of autograph leaves exist, Thomas wrote first in literra inintelligibilis and then summoned one of his secretaries to take down the text in a legible hand while Thomas read his own autograph aloud. When one scribe tired, another took over.

  But no autographs are found of the later major works. Dondaine remarks this fact as curious, because one would expect these autographs to have been treasured at least as carefully as those of earlier works. He suggests that their nonexistence is due not to loss but to there having been none in the first place to save. "Le fait qu'il n'y ait plus d'autographes des ouvrages postérieurs invite à penser que saint Thomas ne les a pes écrits, sinon peut-être sous forme de brouillons, et qu'il les a dictés en les composant." Dondaine points out the tedium and waste of time involved for Thomas in writing out a complete text, even in shorthand, and then reading it aloud for it to be written again, this time in a fair hand.