I've just seen the movie A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, about the career of Bob Dylan. He copies folk music, then blues music, then rock music, etc. Similarly, medieval monks in scriptoria copied manuscripts endlessly - the Bible, then Greek philosophy, then Greek plays, etc. Compare Bob Dylan to medieval monks.
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That’s a fascinating and surprisingly rich comparison—Bob Dylan and medieval monks. On the surface, it sounds like a collision of opposites: the wandering, cryptic folk-rock icon vs. cloistered scribes bent over vellum by candlelight. But dig a little deeper, and it starts to hum with resonance.
Both are vessels of cultural transmission.
Medieval monks in scriptoria weren’t just preserving the past—they were actively curating it. By copying texts, they decided what survived and what didn’t. Dylan, similarly, doesn’t merely imitate musical traditions—he absorbs, transforms, and recasts them for new audiences.
Just as a 13th-century monk might copy a Roman treatise and annotate it with Christian interpretation, Dylan takes old folk songs or blues riffs and filters them through his own poetic and often prophetic voice.
They both work in palimpsest.
A palimpsest is a manuscript with layers—old words scraped off, overwritten with new. Dylan’s music is full of these layers: biblical allusions, Civil War ballads, Beat poetry, Woody Guthrie’s ghost. His work feels like a sonic manuscript overwritten again and again, with traces of the originals always showing through.
They embody a paradox: copying as creation.
To modern ears, copying sounds unoriginal—but for monks and Dylan alike, it was a sacred task. Monks copied to commune with God and preserve wisdom. Dylan copies not out of lack of ideas, but because in echoing others, he finds his own voice. He’s like a troubadour monk with an electric guitar.
Time collapses in their work.
A monk in 1100 might be copying a play written in 400 BC. Dylan, in 1965, is channeling ballads from the 1860s, chain-gang laments from the 1930s, and lines from Rimbaud. Both reach across centuries and make distant voices feel strangely present.
And both are a little unknowable.
Medieval scribes are largely anonymous, absorbed into the mission of preserving collective memory. Dylan, even as a celebrity, remains elusive—his public persona a shifting mask, his private self hidden behind layers of borrowed voices and cryptic lyrics. A complete unknown, you might say.
In short: Dylan is a modern monk of the American canon, not copying out of obedience, but out of reverence—and with a wink.
