Franceso Giambattista Tastiere

Francesco Giambattista Tastiere was baptised on 24th September, 1313, in the village of Lete, near Bologna, Italy. His father was a vellum merchant who prospered from the explosion of scholarly activity in Tuscany during the period known as the Italian Trecento. Tastiere grew up on the road with his father, travelling between cattle farms, parchment producers and the great university towns of Bologna, Siena, and the then newcomer, Florence. They would also travel to numerous monastic scriptoria, and it was in one of these that Tastiere’s father decided to leave his son, at the age of just eleven, to complete his education.

Tastiere had a good fist for letters, and by the age of eighteen, he had been inducted into the scriptorium at Vallombrosa, to the east of Florence, where he worked as a scribe copying texts principally in Latin, but also in the vernacular as the Italian language grew in prestige. With the invention mechanical printing some decades away, demand for this kind of work was high, and scribes like Tastiere were under constant pressure. In this environment, mistakes were time consuming and costly. Scribes had two alternatives. One was to underline the error with a dotted line, a process called ‘subpunction’. The other was to take a scalpel and scrape the surface of the parchment until the error was removed - this was known as ‘erasure’. Tastiere favoured the latter approach, as it left a cleaner manuscript, but was constantly frustrated by the precision needed to scrape parchment without the sheet ripping. To this end, he experimented with narrow blades that would erase just the surface of the parchment, cutting only a fixed depth into the sheet. Eventually he produced a device not unlike a modern safety razor that could perform this operation reliably and quickly.

The invention of printing at the end of the fourteenth century rapidly made Tastiere’s invention obsolete. The process, however, of rapidly erasing a mistake, still bears his name. Like many intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance, Tastiere was known not by his surname but by his town of origin, Lete. Di Letione or Di Lezione was rendered by contemporaneous English scribes as deletion, and from this, we inherit the verb ‘delete’.