Pre-modern Western book production is first and foremost a matter of manuscript culture. Hence, the role of copyists – and in the early period of this tradition they were mostly monks – is of outstanding importance: no handwritten books without the dedicated work of scribes! In fact, instead of addressing the laborious physical effort of copying, the idealization of scribes tends to focus mostly on religious dimensions. The starting point of this tradition is the emphatic praise of handwriting by the late antique Roman statesman and scholar Cassiodorus, who spiritualizes scribal activity as a form of ‘manual’ preaching. The article attempts to trace the medieval reception of this seminal concept, particularly popular within the Carthusian tradition, up to Jean Gerson’s De laude scriptorum of 1423 and the homonymous treatise of the German Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, published in 1492 as a printed book (!).