Tag: Textual criticism

Did he really? Could any scholar…? Apparently he did. Angelo Mai and the Editio Princeps of the Vatican Mythographers

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The “Vatican Mythographers” is a set of three ancient texts about pagan mythology, all originally published by Angelo Mai from Vatican manuscripts in 1831.[1]   His edition has been reprinted since, and translated into English and French, but no critical edition has ever appeared.

A paper appeared by Kathleen Elliot and J. P. Elder in 1947, in preparation for such an edition, which however never appeared.[2]  This contains the following curious remarks:

… his transcriptions are frequently incorrect, a fact which will surprise no one acquainted with this industrious prefect’s habits. His text is further vitiated we speak from at least scholastic purity – by his frequent euphemistic changes: “. . . illud non celabo, me videlicet complura mythographorum horum vocabula, quae, ut fit in ethnica mythologia, pudicis auribus ingratiora accidissent, euphemismis commutavisse . . .” (Mai, praef. xvi). Whether a “rem habuit” is actually less salacious than a “concubuit” or whether a “complexus” is more delicate than a “compressus” is doubtless a matter of secular taste.

This seems very odd behaviour.  So I retrieved Mai’s preface, and section IX is as follows.

IX.  Atque ego quidem in exscribendo, distin­guendo, plurimisque mendis purgando tam copiosos fabularum libros, non modicum laborem pertuli: scho­lia tamen mea nulla propemodum addidi, ne molem voluminis nimis augerem: cuius rei gratia minutis et­iam typis usus sum, quominus chartam innumeram lectoribus meis obiicerem: quos etiam illud non ce­labo, me videlicet complura mythographarum ho­rum vocabula, quae, ut fit in ethnica mytholo­gia, pudicis auribus ingratiora accidissent, euphemismis commutavisse “utcumque ferent ea fata mi­nores.” Auctorum apud hos mythographos appel­latorum syllabum scripsi: latinitatis tamen nova vo­cabula,quae sparsim videbam, philologis ac lexico­graphis colligenda permisi: a quibus etiam scholio­rum ad hos mythographos apparatum subinde con­cinnandum auguror. Interim laetari licet, quod his a me codicibus editis, tres insignes mythographos Hyginum, Placidum, et Leontium, adquisivisse videmur.

And indeed I endured not a little labour in copying, dividing, and cleaning up many errors such copious books of fables: but I added almost no notes, to avoid increasing too greatly the bulk of the volume: for the sake of which I also used small typefaces, to avoid throwing uncountable paper at my readers, from whom I will not conceal that, I have in fact exchanged for euphemisms many words of these mythographers which, as happens in pagan mythology, fall unpleasantly upon modest ears, “however those who come later may consider the deed.” (Aen. 6, 822). I have written an index of each author named in these mythographers; however I have left it to the philologists and lexicographers to collect the new words of Latin, which I saw occasionally: by whom I also predict that an apparatus of notes for these mythographers will be furnished hereafter. In the meantime, let us be happy that from these codices published by me, we seem to have acquired the three distinguished mythographers Hyginus, Placidus, and Leontius.

This is hard to credit.  A Latin text intended for schoolboys might be bowdlerised, but hardly a scholarly edition intended for research libraries!  What on earth was Mai thinking?  How extraordinary.  And his quotation from the Aeneid tells us that he knew that subsequent scholars would curse him.

Is it possible that he was ordered to do this?  That the Vatican press could not issue obscene works?  We can only guess.

Elliot does identify the manuscripts used by Mai, which the latter had left obscure.  For the first mythographer, this is Vat. reg. lat. 1401, online here.  So it would be possible to collate the two from home, and to discover precisely what Mai did to the text.

Here on folio 14v, the bottom of column 1 and the start of column 2, is the chunk that I quoted earlier today:

It’s interesting to compare this with Mai’s Latin text (p.34), and my translation:

89.  De ortu Panis. Post mortem Ulixis Mercurius cum uxore eius Penelope concubuit. Quae sibi juxta oppidum Tegeum peperit filium, Pan nomine.  Unde et Tegeeus dicitur.

89.  On the Origin of Pan. After the death of Ulysses, Hermes lay with his wife Penelope, who gave birth to a son near the town of Tegea, named Pan.  From which he is called “the Tegean”.

Bode corrected “Tegeum” to “Tegeam”, correctly.  But there’s nothing amiss here at least.

Searching for the “rem habuit” referred to by Elliot, it appears to be in chapter 94,

94. Neptuni et Erycis. Cum animadvertisset Neptunus Venerem spatiantem in litore siculi maris, cum ea rem habuit: ex quo gravida facta filium peperit, quem nominavit Erycem.

94.  Of Neptune and Eryx.  When Neptune had noticed Venus lying spread out on the beach of the Sicilian sea, he had an affair with her: and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, whom she named Eryx.

Here’s the manuscript image, from folio 15r:

The “sicula maris” is clear enough, but the next two words are very abbreviated.  The horizontal stroke above the “a” of “ea” is clearly “eam”.  The backwards “c” is “con” or “com”, the “p” with a squiggle above it is “prae”. So I think they read “eam conpresset,” “he lay with her.”  Not what Mai printed.

It’s very strange.  Someone needs to do this work here, and compare the text and the manuscripts, line by line.

But not me!

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  1. [1]Angelo Mai, Classicorum auctorum e Vaticanis codicibus editorum Tomus III. Rome, 1831.  Online here.↩
  2. [2]Kathleen Elliot and J. P. Elder, “A Critical Edition of the Vatican Mythographers,” in: Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 78 (1947), pp. 189-207. JSTOR.↩

Working out the manuscript affinities from a collation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I finally finished collating the 4 editions and a selected 12 manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  This gives me a Word .docx file with every line of the text, the collation beneath it, and my translation under that.  In the left margin, it gives me a list of significant-looking variants:

I’ve had to recollate the early chapters, because I got better at this as I went on, and the earlier stuff needed to be redone, extra manuscripts added etc.

The text still contains a lot of working notes.  I have already found that it is a mistake to remove these too early.  Keep them to the last, and then remove them all as a specific activity, rather than along the way.

But then the question arises: how do I analyse this data in order to get a stemma out of it?  It’s too big, and I can’t get my head around it.

After some thought, I decided to create an Excel spreadsheet and process the supposedly significant variants into it.  This morning I did so.  I found that this required some intervention.  Actually I had to “simplify” some of the variants as I put them in.  Because unique variants are most likely errors, or mistakes, of no special meaning.  It’s the stuff in common that you need.  So where 3 manuscripts have “meritis” and the 4th has “et meritis”, and the 5th was “procul”, I entered the first 4 all up as “meritis”.

I also ignored variants that were merely endings.  The truth is that all the ending variants probably arise from scribes misreading abbreviations.  There’s just so many!

I then put a column for each manuscript, and put them in.  In the end I only had 19 locations where the text gave clear divergence into families.  On each row I coloured one set of readings in red, and another set in black, just so I could see the groupings (because you just try skim-reading “vocitatur” and “vocaretur”!).  Where a manuscript didn’t have that part of the text, I indicated with hatching.

The result looked a bit like this, except that M was originally on the left and C on the right.

As soon as I did this, I could see the PQO group, and the BGD group, which I was aware of anyway. I drew the vertical black lines to separate the groups.

Then I did some rearranging.  M, which I had thought isolated, I moved to be with W.  C, which I sort of thought was related to O, was now obviously part of the PQO group, so I moved that.

All the same some things do not jump out.  I’d already found that G is actually a copy of B in the first 6 chapters, but then switches to a copy of D!    Indeed the layout on the page is identical.  But that does not jump out from that table.  I’m fairly sure that I can eliminate G.

So … have I learned much?  A bit more than I knew before, perhaps.  But clearly I have a long way to go.

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From My Diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My last post on the “Praedestinatus” brought back a memory or two.  If my memory serves me correctly, this was the very text that caused me to seek out the Patrologia Latina for the first time, almost quarter of a century ago.  A reference in Quasten for the “Tertullianistae” was the prompt.  So I drove up to a research library, where I purchased a visitors’ ticket, and nervously explored the huge building.  At length I came to the reading room, then as now organised in a baffling manner.  Shyly asking the individual at the desk for help, I was curtly pointed to one end of the immense room.  And there were the volumes of the Patrologia Latina, bound, and faded, volume after volume – a whole wall of it.  I’d never seen anything like it.  I found the passage; and then wondered if I could get a photocopy.  Back to the desk, where I was told to take it to another room.  There, in turn, I was told that it was too fragile, and I would have to purchase a service photocopy and come back for it in a couple of days.  So of course I had to do so, and drive all that way again.  The copy was absurdly overpriced and not very good quality, and came on A3 sheets – hardly easy to use.  But at last it was mine!  I took it home, and pored over it with my nascent Latin – just a faint memory from schooldays – and tried to puzzle it out into English.

How things have changed.  The free availability of the PL online in PDF was unthought-of then.  Now we take it for granted.

I have continued collating a dozen manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.   I’ve collated all the way through, but I am redoing chapters 2-5, because I didn’t do those as thoroughly, and I have since learned better.  I’m still correcting the text.

Originally I started with two early editions, and a couple of articles with extracts.  Now I am deep in the manuscripts.

The longer that I spend collating, the more that I start to get a “feel” for each manuscript.  In turn this means that certain relationships are starting to emerge, quite without effort.

I know that P and Q will be near-identical; but Q breaks off in chapter 6, so Q is a copy of P, not the other way around.

I know that O will give much the same variants as P and Q; except that it has some oddities of its own.  It is probably a descendant of P also.  I know that C is generally a mainstream manuscript, except that, once in a while, it has a reading which only O shares.  There’s some kind of influence from O.

I know that G and D are very similar.  So similar, in fact, that the layout of the words on the page is sometimes identical.  But G goes a bit weird sometimes.  So G is probably a copy of D, by a careless or imaginative scribe.

M is my oldest manuscript, just.  I know that it won’t tend to agree with the P, Q, O group.  It’s not that similar to G and D.  It usually agrees with W, but not always.  It’s a bit of a rogue.

The 12th century manuscript V is generally in agreement with W, and C.  Except that… sometimes it is the only manuscript to give the reading in the editio princeps, the Mombritius 1483 edition.

There’s no shortcut to this.  It just starts to imprint itself on your mind.  As I go along I am noting what I think may be significant points of variance.  But of course I won’t know until later.  I have to find out by doing.

The critical edition of the Praedestinatus also had a nice couple of pages in which the editor established the relationship of the 5 manuscripts and drew a stemma.  It’s a nice, concise, worked example of what I need to do.  I shall refer to it again.

All this is really quite good fun. I really do recommend it.  Text criticism is not real until you actually have to do it, in the wild, with a text that has never been critically edited, and ask: “just what did the author write?”  Once you do, you really feel that you are achieving something.

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From my diary – more on the textual criticism of John the Deacon

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Last weekend I started reworking some code in QuickLatin, in order to allow me to add syntax notes on the fly, rather than having to break off and make code changes every time.  This went well, but is only partly done.  I had to break off early in the week to attend to other things, which left little time.

So I returned little-by-little to the tedious but mundane task of collating the manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  In principle you just go for it.  You “get into the zone” and the lines fly by.  Sadly the days in which I used to dose myself up with masses of diet Coke and work far into the night are gone, so each day I only collate a few lines.  That means that it takes ages.  But by steady plodding I have reached the end of chapter 7.

Screenshot of Word document of collation

By the time that I reached the end of chapter 5, I had 6 obvious locations in the text where there was textual variation that might divide the manuscripts into families.  Unfortunately two of these – starting “hactenus” and “trade” – proved to have no value.

These were sentences or clauses that were missing from one early witness.  I thought that if I could find other manuscripts with the same lacuna, this would show that they were copies.  Sadly these were few.

I was uncomfortable working with just four locations for comparison.  These did produce some division in the manuscripts, but I was finding too many “mixed” families.  Instinct suggested that I was probably not doing this correctly.  So I pressed on, noting possible other locations for comparision, and marking them with a header starting “VARIANT”.  That means that I can navigate quickly to them in the Word document.

Chapter 6 only gave me one more worthwhile location for comparison, but chapter 7 gave me four.  That’s good.  But I will press on.

It’s also obvious that all the early editions are bad.  Mombritius in 1477-8 has a defective text.  Lippomano in 1553 basically copies him, but has fixed a few places.  Falconius in 1751 has made arbitrary changes all over the place, all worthless or worse.  Corsi’s modern edition is not a critical text but is far better than them all, even though as sources he only had one manuscript (in Berlin) and Falconius.

It’s interesting that very few indeed of the variants involve any change of meaning. I notice this because I revise the English translation as I go along.  I made the translation originally from Falconius, before I came across the awful mess that is chapters 12-13, too great to ignore, even for someone uninterested in text critical issues.  Then I revised it against Mombritius.  Now I revise it again against the text that I create as I go along; but the changes are few.

One variant was interesting.  Nicholas “regionis illius pontificalem accepit infulam”, received the pontifical mitre of that country.  In Mombritius this is “insula”, i.e. island.  Falconius has “infula”, but I misread it and wrote “insula” here too.  All the manuscripts have “infulam”, including the Berlin manuscript that Corsi worked from:

But Corsi misread this when preparing his Italian translation (prior to making his edition), and he translates this as “ricevette le insegne pontificali”, received the pontifical insignia.

I certainly never knew that the word “infula” existed.  I googled “pontificalis insula” and I found a match, or so I thought here, where we find  “desiderabat enim pontificalem insulam deponere”, “he desired to lay down the pontifical ‘insula'”.

But I had neglected to look up a line and see “effundens”, with the “f” indistinguishable from “s”.  So is this “insulam” or “infulam”?  Other texts with “pontificalem insulam” do exist.  The meaning is “pontifical insignia”.

Luckily I noticed, while collating.  An “infula” was originally a fillet of cloth, or a ribband, worn in the hair of a priest.  In later ecclesiastical usage it refers – I think – to a part of the mitre, and so is used for the mitre itself.

I could wish that there was a site dedicated to pictures of ecclesiastical apparel, labelled with names!

I’ll press on into chapter 8, and then think about whether to have another go at classifying the manuscripts.

Onward!

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Analysing the manuscripts of the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon – part 2 – the 12th c. manuscripts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post, I analysed the 9-11th century manuscripts of John the Deacon, and found that they fell neatly into three families.  These I have colour-coded as green, blue and purple.  I’ve only really got three data points, so this is all a bit provisional.  The other three turned out not to vary much.

This evening I have completed the task of applying the same 6 passages to the 12th century manuscripts.  The same three families appear; but we also  get a brown family, with mixed readings.

This is perhaps to be expected.  But this determination is relying on a single data point in each case, which is certainly too few to be conclusive.

I had to download another four manuscripts last night.  One of these proved to have enormous page images, so that the whole download was 3.2Gb in size!  This proved too much for Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020, which combined all the images into a PDF, but then refused to save the PDF as “too large” (?!)

I’ve also found a second manuscript in Beneventan book-hand, where again the “Nacta” looks awfully like “Notata” if you don’t know the unusual shape of Beneventan “a” and “t” (which is well explained in this link).

I’m also finding more examples of abbreviated versions of the text, or a text which really belongs to a different version of the Life of St Nicholas.  These, of course, I have to ignore.

I shall have to ponder what all this tells me!

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Analysing the manuscripts of the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have made a full collation of all the 9-10th century manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas, as far as the beginning of chapter 6, where manuscript Q (BNF lat. 17625) breaks off.  I’ve recollated the first chapter, since I did that in a rather perfunctory way.

But how do I work out the relationships of the manuscripts?  I’m doing this blind – I can find no “how to” guide – so I’m just guessing, and trying things out.

This evening I decided to pick three places in chapter 1, where the collation already suggested differences in the manuscripts, and collate the 11th century manuscripts for these places in the text.  I’ve put a “heading 3” in my text, so that I can see the Latin around the area:

Screenshot of my Word text with H3 markers visible

I’m experimenting with a trial of Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020 (permanent license), which allows me to open the PDFs in tabs, unlike my elderly copy of Acrobat Pro 9.  I took the opportunity to add bookmarks and stickys to the PDF of each manuscript, as far as chapter 6, as I went.

After I had collated the 10 manuscripts for the three places in chapter 1, I felt the results were a bit thin.  So decided to collate another three places from chapter 5, where I knew that a line, or a phrase, was omitted.

This I did in a separate Word document.  I had a list of manuscripts; and I indicated the 6 places, comma-separated, against each.  In retrospect a spreadsheet might serve better.  They all started out as black text.

But the results were rather interesting, and here they are:

List of manuscripts and variants

Once I was done, I colour-coded manuscripts that were basically the same.  I have three groups!

Not all of my “places” were significant, at least in the 11th century.  Thus I chose “inclammationem” because I had a bunch of witnesses on both sides:

  • “inclamationem”, “crying out against” – Fal., M, P, Q, O, B, C; “in cachinnationem”, “in immoderate laughter” – Corsi, A, Linz 473 (13th), Munich Clm 12642 (14th); “in vocem” – Mom., Lipp.;

But in actual fact there was no variation on this, at least not in the 11th century.  It looks as if it must originate later.  Likewise the sentence beginning “hactenus” and the clause starting “trade” are unimportant.

But “et laudem / ex laude” and “aede / sede” form a clear group.  Likewise the weird Nacta / Notata / etc lines up with them, and splits the “ex laude” group further.

That’s a useful result.  I have learned a bunch about ten manuscripts from this exercise, which took me less than an hour.

So far so good.  Onward.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have returned to working on the Latin text of the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon, collating it against a bunch of manuscripts.

Working on the text is a question of repeated passes, as I learn more and work out what I need to do.  Last time I combined the 13 chapters into a single file, but the Latin text and English are still interleaved.  I don’t have a stemma.  But I do have quite a lot of manuscripts in PDF form on my disk.  There are too many to collate the lot.

Last time through I collated the early editions – Mombritius and Falconius, with a certain amount of the modern but non-critical Corsi edition.  I also looked at whatever manuscripts I then had.  So I have notes under the Latin text, and indeed the English, which look like this:

Quid plura**? Ingruente** inedia, tres virgines, quas habebat filias, quarum nuptias etiam ignobiles spernebant viri, fornicari constituit, ut earum saltem infami commercio, infelicem ageret vitam.

** “quid plura (dicam)”, what more should I say? An idiom.
** Mom., Fal.; Corsi: “ingrediente”

What more can I say?  With his hunger** increasing, he decided to prostitute** his three virgin daughters**, whose hands in marriage even humble men spurned, so that by their infamous trade he might at least carry on his unhappy life.

** deponent verb
** Lit. “three virgins, whom he had as daughters”

My Word document is under version control (using Git), so I can safely remove stuff.  The English notes will get deleted.  The Latin needs revision.

But the early editions are hardly a reliable source for the text. What I should be using is the earliest and best manuscripts.  Unfortunately I don’t know what the “best” manuscripts are.  But it was fairly obvious that, if I collated against the earliest few – whichever they were – then I ought to improve the standard of the text.

So I went through my collection of manuscripts and established what the earliest ones are:

9th century

  • Milan P.113sup (last half 9th) = M

10thc

  • BNF lat 989 = P
  • BNF lat 17625 = Q
  • Orleans 342 = O

10-11thc

  • Vat. lat.1271 = V
  • Vat. lat.5696
  • Munich CLM 3711 (early 11th) = B

11th 3rd quarter? or “post 950”?

  • BNF lat 18303 = C

Plus a bunch of 11th century manuscripts.  I have this list open in a Word document.  I assigned sigla to the first four manuscripts, which I knew I wanted to collate against my text.  BNF lat. 18303 is a funny one; my information on the date of the text varies wildly.  But it’s clear, little abbreviated, and I just plain like it.  So I’m using it as a second-string source.  Others in the list, as I start to use them, get sigla.

Why am I using the later mss at all?  Because my text derives from the early editions.  If all the early manuscripts disagree, it’s nice to know if there is a manuscript recording the edition reading or not.  I’m not spending much time on that, but a glance at a few later ones can sometimes tell me.

Because I don’t have a stemma, I have no idea how independent the first 4 manuscripts are.  The only way to find out is to try collating them, to learn by doing.  If they are all identical, but different from the early editions, then plainly there is another family of manuscripts around.  It’s a guess, basically; the manuscripts are early, so they ought to have less corruption.  But it’s practical for me to collate 4 manuscripts.  It’s not practical to collate 60.  Even if I know that “recentiores non deteriores”, that “later may not be worse”.  But I won’t know until I’ve done a lot more collating.

It seems that creating a critical edition is just like everything else.  It has to be done iteratively, repeatedly working again and again through the text, learning all the while.  It’s hugely wasteful of time; but there isn’t any other way.  You learn as you do it.  As you search, and research, you find resources and have to go back and use them.

For instance last night I discovered the “History of St Nicholas” in the Golden Legend, in Latin, and in Caxton’s English.  I was googling for a particular phrase, and up it came.  Of course the Golden Legend derives from John the Deacon, so some of the Latin is the same, so the English is a control on my own translation.  Except that Caxton is very loose!  (Is there a modern translation?)  So… that’s another resource.  I ought to go back through my text and translation and check against it.  That would be another pass, once more through the text.

I’m probably not as far along as I think I am.  I feel that I am close to completion; yet there is all this text critical work to be done.

As I collate, I am finding that M, the Milan manuscript – the only one of the Milanese manuscripts that I could get – is indeed somewhat different from P, the earliest Paris manuscript.  But this becomes unreadable through wear by chapter 4.  Q seems to be much the same as P; the Orleans manuscript is mostly the same, but has at least once gone completely off-piste.

I’ve begun chapter 4, and I have found that the Mombritius text is, as I thought last time, more reliable than the Falconius text.  But I am finding the Falconius reading sometimes, and sometimes only in V or Vat.lat.5696.  By the time I reach the end of chapter 13, I will have a collation of the lot, and a much better idea of the text and these manuscripts and their character.  No doubt I shall find that I have to go back yet again to apply whatever I learn this time.

Oh well.  Onward.

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How did he get *that* reading?? (Again) – Recensio 7

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From one of the miracle stories of St Nicholas (BHL 6164), appended to John the Deacon.  The story so far.  St Nicholas has sneaked up on a gang of robbers who have looted a customs-house, which was left under the saint’s protection.

Tunc dixit ad eos Sanctus Nicolaus, “O infelices et miseri, quid agitis? Numquid ignoratis, quoniam ego ipse ibidem eram, quando hoc malum perpetrastis? Nam oculi mei conspexerunt, quando has et illas res abstulistis.” Quantitatem et numerum etiam cunctarum rerum, quae de theloneo abstulerunt, singillatim eis exponens, addidit dicens, …

Then Saint Nicholas said to them, “O unfortunate and wretched ones, what are you doing? Do you not know that I myself was there when you committed this evil? For my eyes saw when you took away these things and those things.” Then he gave the quantity, and also the number of all the things which they had taken from the toll-house, listing one by one to them, saying, , …

He tells them, “All is known!” and they panic and take the stuff back. The Latin text here is what I now think the author wrote.

But I was working from the Falconius edition (1751) here, and when I got to this bit, I was a bit puzzled.  Here it is:

Latin text of the passage in the edition of Falconius.

Which is a bit weird.  How is “quanti autem” the accusative for “exponens”?

Well I happened to have a manuscript open (BNF lat. 989, 10th c.), and I saw this:

Latin text of the passage in manuscript BNF lat. 989.

That made more sense.  “Quantitatem” rather than “Quanti”.  The etiam has moved up, so we end up with “etiam &”, a phrase not  uncommon in John the Deacon.  But the “etiam”‘s do move around in the manuscripts.  It’s probably just a copyist error in this particular manuscript.

Next I looked at the Mombritius, the first edition, published before 1480, and I got this:

Latin text of the passage in the edition of Mombritius.

This confirmed the “quantitatem”, but left the “etiam” alone.  Only “numerum” has now become “munerum”, “the quantity and value also of all the stuff…”.  Nobody else has “munerum”, so this suggests to me that the Mombritius edition was based on a manuscript in Gothic hand, where such slips can be rather easy…

Cartoon showing Gothic book hand and its unreadability

I do love that cartoon!

Next I opened another manuscript, Wien ONB 416 (12th c.), which belongs to a separate family from the other manuscripts:

Latin text of the passage in the manuscript Wien ONB 416.

Here again we have “Quantitatem & numerum etiam”, rather abbreviated.

Then I looked at the Lippoman edition (1515), and all became clear.

Latin text of the passage in the edition of Lippomanus.

Here is our “Quanti”, as Falconius gives it!  And here also is his “autem”, or rather “tatem”!!  The silly fool was copying Lippomanus, clearly in a great hurry, and didn’t notice the hyphen.  So he gave two words, “Quanti autem”, where the nice clear printed copy before him read “Quantitatem”.

It’s hard to believe that Falconius did this, so I would tend to think that his compositor/typesetter did it.  Which means that when Falconius sent his edition to the press, he sent a marked-up copy of Lippomanus to the press, rather than writing out his own copy first.

We get an awful lot of information here about these early editions.

  • The editio princeps, Mombritius, ca. 1480, was printed from a manuscript in Gothic hand, and misread.
  • The second edition, of Lippomanus, ca. 1515, may have used Mombritius but certainly did not copy it.  Instead it gives the manuscript reading.
  • The third edition, of Falconius, 1751, was done carelessly and quite possibly by writing changes into a copy of the Lippomanus edition.  There was no change at this point, but the typesetter misread the exemplar before him and got it wrong.

That’s rather nice, really.  I’ve learned a lot from a little.  Once again, I’ve learned not to rely on Falconius.

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How to lose the first letter of a word in transmission

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post I looked at how to decide what the genuine reading was of a single word in John the Deacon’s Latin text.  Among the variants was “Nacta” and “Acta”.

Purely by chance this evening I have come across a perfect illustration of how Nacta became Acta.  It is to be found in Ms. Vatican Barb. lat. 586, on fol. 3v, where the text appears like this:

Nacta written but the initial never inserted, leaving "acta".
Nacta written but the initial never inserted, leaving “acta”.

There it is.  The word is “Nacta”.  The scribe has left a space for the “N” to be illuminated, for a decorated initial to be inserted.  To help the artist, he’s put a written “N” in the space, and the text reads “acta”.

In this case the N is big, and bold, and clear.  But what if it wasn’t?  What if it was small, tiny, faint?

Clearly this has happened, sometime in the past, in some other manuscript.  The copyist did not notice the “N” and wrote “Acta”.  How do we know?  Because “Acta” is one of the variants that I found in some of the manuscripts, listed in my last post.

This, folks, is how you lose letters from the front of a word in transmission.

Update: Stephen Carlson points out that it actually looks as if it was originally an A, which was erased and the N written in.  The first “a” of “acta” is different to the other, and the surface looks erased!  And the other initials have been marked up in red.  So maybe… it means the opposite?!  Acta, corrected to Nacta!  Here’s the other A:

Folio 6v – A

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Inventa ergo… Or maybe not – Recensio, part 2.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Time to plunge into the text and see if I can find any errors in the manuscripts that might help me divide them up into families.

When I was collating the text of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas, I came across a passage, which is interesting for the sheer number of textual variants, for the first word of the sentence.  St Nicholas has learned that a starving man, unable to afford a dowry for his three daughters, has decided to prostitute them.  He decides to do something about this.

Inventa ergo** cuiusdam noctis hora, sumens non modicum aurum, ligansque in panno, perrexit ad domum viri, quam undique circumspiciens, per fenestram quae competens videbatur, clam intro projecit, clamque discessit.

Therefore, when the hour of a certain night arrived,** he took not a little gold, and tying it in a cloth, he went to the man’s house, which he surveyed from all sides, and then, through a window which seemed appropriate to him, he secretly threw it inside and secretly departed.

I noticed this place when I was machine-comparing the editions.

  • Mombritius, Lippomano: inventa ergo … hora – the hour having been found/reached, therefore.
  • Falconius: nactus ergo … hora – (he) having reached, therefore … the hour.
  • Corsi: acta ergo … hora – the hour having come, therefore.
  • Mai: infamiis notata igitur – their disgrace having been noticed, therefore.

That’s a lot of differences, and that’s what, from a text criticism point of view, we need to find!  So… good news!  Now here are some thoughts, based on what I generally know about these editions.

  • Mombritius printed some unknown (probably late) manuscript.  Lippomano may have just reprinted Mombritius at this point.
  • Corsi used Falconius, but also a Berlin manuscript.  At this point in the manuscripts, there is an initial.  Is acta really Nacta, copied from a manuscript where the initial “N” had never been painted in?  So we could ignore it?
  • Mai’s edition is a printed version of an abbreviated form of the text, which turns into a paraphrase.  Maybe the scribe of the abbreviation found something odd here – maybe just something he read as atta? and improvised?

Maybe we have manuscripts missing the initial letter.  Let’s go and look, and see what we have.  Maybe we have a point at which the manuscript tradition diverges?  (This will also help me get more of the manuscript material in order on my disk.)

The first PDF, alphabetically, in my folder of manuscripts is Balliol 216.  This I made from a zip file of images, downloaded from the website, and pulled into a PDF using Finereader 15.  I’m opening it for the first time (in a very old copy of Acrobat 9 Pro).  I wince a bit as I see images on their sides and upside down.  I read the folio numbers as I page down, and get Nicholas at folio 33r as expected.  I bookmark it, and save the PDF properties so that the bookmarks will open whenever I open the PDF.

The text isn’t that great to read – a Gothic hand, drat it – but I know what I’m looking for.  It’s an initial.

Ooo.  On folio 34 there’s an erasure.  I note that in the bookmarks.

I page down.  Some of the photos are lying on their sides.  I rotate them.  I look out for familiar initials and bookmark them.  Acrobat is amazing.  Pity you can’t actually buy a copy any more.

I page down, looking for the end of the text.  I must have passed it, because I have a red initial “Igitur postquem beatissimi nicholaus ex hoc mundo migravit” – “After blessed Nicholas snuffed it”; but I know this isn’t part of my text, but some of the tedious miracle stories often added on the bottom.  So fol. 42r is past the end.  Bookmark that.

Back up.  Aha!  Bottom of f41v is what I’m looking for – “remearunt ad propria” – “they went home”, plus some standard stuff “magnificentes doninum jesum christum”.  That’s the end.  Bookmark it.

So I’m not going to find a handy initial.  Rats.  Hmm… I can make out “Tunc om” and then an abbreviation.  I got to my working file: it’s tunc omnes, and I’m in the middle of chapter 7.  Too far.  Mark it up anyway.  His ita transactis, the start of chapter 7, can’t be far – oh yes, there it is.  Sticky note, and bookmark.  Back up I go… ah, there’s Laban!  Good old Laban, I’m not far now.  And … there it is!

Balliol MS 216 - position of our passage
Inventa ergo? Not in Balliol 216! It’s Notata igitur.

Immediately we find… “Notata igitur!”  (Words before it are patrem tuum qui in caelis est, your father who is in heaven.  Unlike me.)  Different again from any of the manuscripts, although clearly the Mai abbreviated text is working from something of this type.

I won’t drag you through this process for each manuscript.  But I’m doing the same thing in each case.  What do I get?

  • Balliol 216 (13th) = Notata igitur
  • Berlin theol. lat. qu 140 (11th) = Acta igitur, which is Corsi’s reading from just this manuscript
  • BNF lat 196 (12th) = Acta igitur, with the capital.
  • BNF lat. 989 (10th c) = v faded.  I think it’s a Notata igitur, with the capital, after some image manipulation.  The N and the ata are clear.
  • BNF lat 1765 (13th) = Nacta igitur.  But something is odd about this ms – the text is a lot shorter and ends with “accepit insulam”, part way through chapter 7, then another text, which seems to be called the “Relatio Simplicii” in another ms (below) and then an odd ending from BHL 6108a.  Then the Passio of St Lucy.
  • BNF lat. 1864 (14th) = Notata ergo.  This text ends with the usual remearunt, but then follows with material printed by Falconius as chapters 14 and 15 – the first manuscript copy I have seen of this.
  • BNF lat. 2627 (11th) = Notata ergo.  This too ends with chapters 14 and 15.
  • BNF lat. 3791 (12th) = Nacta ergo.  The front of the ms is missing.  This copy ends with remearunt and then follows the Life of St Lucy.
  • BNF lat. 3809A (15th) = ???  There’s definitely an ergo but what’s the first word, with the initial, following the “a – li – ud. -“?  It looks like “Clam“? “without knowledge of the hour”?  The thing ends with the ch.14, and a bunch of miracles, then the life of St Ambrose.

  • BNF lat. 5308 (12th) – Transacta ergo.
  • BNF lat. 5573 (12th c.) – Nacta ergo, but marginal correction to facta.
  • Fribourg L 5 (13th) – Nacta igitur.  This does not seem to have the usual remearunt, but does have chapters 14, 15 and then ending from BHL 6108a, and then the “Relatio Simplicii” about the transitus of St Nicholas.
  • Milan P113 supp – Nacta ergo.  This ends with “chapters 14 and 15” and then the Life of St Waleric (who?)
  • Munich BSB Clm 12642 (14th) – Nactus ergo, but the Nactus appears to be in a different hand, so an erasure and correction.
  • Vatican Barb. lat. 583, f.44v – blessed if I know!  It’s something in Beneventan, which I can’t read.  I’ve posted to Twitter.

  • Vatican Barb.lat.586 – Nacta ergo.  But with an unilluminated N.  Easy copyist error to write “Acta”.
  • UPDATE: Vat. lat.1271 (12th c.) – Inventa ergo.  Finally!

I’m beginning to wear out here, so I will stop for now. I’ve learned quite a bit. Clearly I need to catalogue exactly how each copy ends.

But notice what is not found in any of these?  The “inventa” that we started with!

Later: By chance I’ve found a perfect example of why the text cannot be “Acta”.  It’s in my next blog post, here.

Later still: Or maybe it was originally Acta, “corrected” to Nacta?

The Munich copy of vol. 2 of Mombritius, “Sanctuarium”, p.163, showing “inventa”

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