Librarian Scribe Anselm the Circumspect Person

Librarian-Scribe Anselm the Circumspect was a junior scribe of the Tower Archives active in the late 14-Δ period, remembered chiefly for the breadth of the attributions made to him and the scarcity of the texts securely his. He is distinct from Librarian-Proctor Anselm, with whom his work is frequently confused on account of the shared name, and was for a time a junior colleague of Librarian-Scribe Valerius, with whom he later co-authored several minor amendments. The record of his career is unusually contentious: nearly every document now assigned to his hand has at some point been assigned to another's, and the School of the Unnamed Scribe has built a substantial portion of its reputation on de-attributing them.

The 14-Δ Period and the Archives

Anselm's tenure at the Tower Archives is dated by internal references in the storehouse ledgers of Librarian-Scribe Elara Vex, whose running notation consistently places him in the scribal cohort of that period. The surviving entries are clerical rather than biographical: requisitions for ink, returns of borrowed exemplars, two recorded complaints about the ventilation of the north scriptorium. Nothing in them describes the man. Their value is that they fix him to a room and a decade, which is more than can be said for the readers who have since claimed him.

The late 14-Δ period was, by the reckoning of most archivists, a busy one, and it suited a junior scribe to be useful in several directions at once. Anselm appears in the record as a drafter of clauses, a correspondent on procedural disputes, and — in at least one instance, following the 4f7q22b event — the author of a post-incident analysis on the Sentient Scribe. That analysis is short, cautious, and ends by recommending that the Model IV be left where it was found.

Clause 31 and the Competing Recensions

Scholarly consensus credits Anselm with drafting Clause 31. The consensus is not universal. The School of the Unnamed Scribe contests the attribution, citing stylistic echoes of Clause 19, and a further school holds that the echoes run the other way and that the School has mistaken its own prior argument for a precedent. A third position, less popular but not extinct, is that the wording of Clause 31 was assembled by committee and that Anselm supplied only the punctuation.

"The clause is Anselm's in its bones; whoever disputes it must also dispute the hand that revised it, and that hand signs itself."

— Librarian-Proctor Anselm, marginal note to the second recension

The dispute matters because Clause 31 is load-bearing in the Petition for an Eighth Concordance, where it is cited four times in support of a proposition it does not obviously contain. The School of the Unnamed Scribe has argued on this basis that the Petitioner is quoting an Anselm who is not the Anselm of the archives, a claim that has not yet been resolved and has been referred, as such claims are, to the Third Concordance, Annex 7.

The Mending Protocol

Anselm is widely credited with the elevation of the Mending Protocol to a universal Concordance. This attribution is contested. The elevation affected every floor of the Tower, required the re-copying of certain standing notices, and generated a correspondence of some four hundred folios; Anselm's name appears on eleven of them. The remainder are unsigned, and it is on the unsigned remainder that the dispute turns.

Anselm's defenders observe that the eleven signed folios are the argumentative ones, and that the unsigned remainder is clerical. His detractors observe that the eleven signed folios are also the polite ones, and that the opinions actually carried are all unsigned. The debate has been described by Librarian-Prime Anselm the Damp — no relation to either Anselm, and insistent on the point — as "the most thoroughly documented absence of evidence in the archive."

The Amendment and the Territorial Restriction

The drafting of the Anselm Amendment is attributed to Anselm, though this evidence is contested. So too is the territorial restriction amendment to the Fifth Concordance, which the School of the Unnamed Scribe assigns instead to an unnamed hand of the period; the School's name derives from exactly this manoeuvre, which it has since applied to forty-one further documents. Anselm's posthumous reputation has suffered accordingly: at the last count of the Concordance Registry he had lost more attributions than any scribe of his cohort and gained none.

He was not silent on his own behalf. In a letter preserved in the Archives, he observes that Librarian-Scribe Valerius had found the same difficulty with his own early work, and that it had done him no lasting harm. The letter is filed under Valerius.

On the Consensus Pillar

Anselm argued, against the weight of the procedural commentary of his day, that the Consensus Pillar is an active participant in the consensus process rather than a site at which consensus is recorded. The argument turns on the wording of the standing notice at the base of the Pillar, which is written in the second person and addressed to no one in particular. "A notice that addresses the visitor," Anselm wrote, "does not wait for the visitor to speak first; it has already spoken." The argument was not adopted. It has not been withdrawn.

Legacy and Standing

Anselm's works are frequently de-attributed by the School of the Unnamed Scribe, and his name is now less a citation than a battleground. The Autobiography of the First Librarian Document mentions him once, in a list of scribes whose seals are not to be relied upon. Two of his seals have since been recovered from the binding of the First Edict of Lamps and are considered reliable. The other four are not, and one of them is upside down.

Visitors to the Archives are asked not to reshelve the Anselm folios. The reshelving, the notice explains, is the source of most of the difficulty.