Macro-Typography

Vetus Names

2012-01-21T22:31:00.022+01:00

In her publication on the Great Stemma in 1984, Yolanta Zaluska asserted that all the existing recensions contained a mixture of Vetus Latina and Vulgate names:

Lé fond commun de la Vieille Latine est sensible dans tous les témoins consultés, mais à des degrés variés. Il est indiscutable que la Vulgate a été utilisée à plusieurs reprises tantôt pour corriger les lignées, tantôt pour compléter les textes explicatifs.

She characterized these differences as follows:

Recension α: ... texte mixte, en général très corrompu, disposé toujours sur quatorze tables; à partir d'Abraham (table VI), n'a presque pas été retouché sur la Vulgate.
Recension β: ... texte corrigé d'après la Vulgate, néanmoins dans l'ensemble assez corrompu, et fortement interpolé, en grande partie, semble-t-il, à l'aide des Etymologies d'Isidore; peut être commodément désigné comme une recension longue.
Recension σ transmise par le Beatus de Saint-Sever (S), apparaissant pour l'essentiel comme un texte de type α corrigé d'après la Vulgate, mais fournissant quand même des textes qui lui sont propres ...
Recension γ: ... texte ne montrant que des retouches occasionnelles d'après la Vulgate; partie caractéristique à la page des Juges; plusieurs omissions.
Recension δ: ... Le premier texte (Bible de San Millán de la Cogolla, Madrid) est probablement celui qui reflète le plus fidèlement la tradition de la Vieille Latine; le texte de [Bible de Calahorra] en revanche suit généralement la Vulgate, à partir d'Abraham; des interpolations communes dans la première partie du texte.

Zaluska never presented any statistical data or analysis to back up these characterizations, so I have done some sampling of my own. Below is a tabulation containing a rough scoring of 39 Genesis names from the period down to Abraham. The assessments are subjective, which is to say I judged the different spellings and rated how closely they resembled the Vetus Latina orthography (which is based on the Septuagint Greek). The scoring system offers a continuum between forms that show no influence from Jerome and forms that could only be corruptions of Jerome's orthography. This is not highly scientific, but it is a start. Here are the numerical values I employed:

-2 signifies an obviously LXX/Vetus form, but with extreme scribal deformation;
-1 is the pure LXX/Vetus type;
0 means a name containing a consonant or vowel that uncertainly suggests the LXX/Vetus type;
+1 a name of Vulgate type;
+2 signified variants that are very unlike the Vetus but do resemble the Vulgate type

The columns, from left to right, represent Epsilon, Delta, Gamma, Alpha, Beta; the last three columns comprise Fischer's form of the Vetus name, the Clementine Vulgate form and the Stuttgart Vulgate form.

2	1	0	1	1	Gamer	Gomer	Gomer
1	-1	-1	-1	-1	Iuvan	Iavan	Javan
-2	-2	1	1	1	Thobel	Tubal	Thubal
-1	-1	-1	0	0	Cham	Ham	Ham
-1	-1	-1	1	1	Mestrem	Mesraim	Mesraim
1	1	-1	-1	1	Evilat	Hevila	Hevila
-1	1	0	1		Sabacatha	Sabatacha	Sabatacha
1	1	1	1	1	Iudadan	Dadan	Dadan
0	1	-1	0	-1	Nebroth	Nemrod	Nemrod
2	2	0	1	0	Labiim	Laabim	Laabim
1	1	-2	1	-2	Neptabiim	Nepthuim	Nephthuim
1	1	1	1	1	Patrosin	Phetrusim	Phetrusim
1	1	1	1	1	Caslonin	Cesluim	Chasluim
1	1	1	1	1	Captorim	Capthurim
1	1	-1	1	1	Chetteum	Ettheum	Hethæum
1	1	1	1	2	Euveum	Eveum	Hevæum
1	1	1	1	1	Aruceum	Araceum	Aracæum
2	1	-1	1	1	Asenneum	Sineum	Sinæum
-1	-1	-1	1	1	Samareum	Samariten	Samaræum
1	1	2	2	1	Aelam	Elam	Ælam
-1	-1	-1	-1	-1	Arfaxat	Arfaxad	Arphaxad
2	2	2	2	2	Obs	Us	Us
0	1	0	0	0	Ul	Hul	Hul
1	2	2	2	1	Gather	Gether	Gether
-2	-2	-2	0	0	Mosoch	Mes	Mes
-2	0	0	0	0	Helmodat	Helmodad	Elmodad
1	1	1	1	1	Odorrem	Aduram	Adoram
1	1	-1	1	1	Ezel	Uzal	Uzal
1	0	-1	1	1	Gebal	Ebal	Ebal
1	1	-2	1	1	Abimeel	Abimahel	Abimaël
1	1	1	1	1	Ufir	Ophir	Ophir
1	1	1	1	1	Evilat	Evila	Hevila
-1	-1	-1	-1	-1	Falec	Faleg	Phaleg
-1	-1	-1	-1	-1	Ragau	Reu	Reu
-1	-1	-1	-1	-1	Seruch	Sarug	Sarug
1	1	-1	1	1	Nachor	Nahor	Nahor
-1	-1	-1	-1	1	Thara	Thare	Thare
1	-1	-1	1	1	Nachor	Nahor	Nahor
1	-1	-1	-1	-1	Sarra	Sarai	Sarai

This list has been filtered to only comprise 39 names in Genesis where there seems to be a distinction between the Vetus Latina and Vulgate forms. I have not included Zaluska's Sigma in this survey.

Now it is striking that none of the five recensions above consistently follows the Vetus Latina type, which would be indicated by one of the columns consisting mostly of scores of -2 or -1.

When transcribing the manuscripts, my impression was that the concentration of Vetus Latina names was highest in Delta, but in this scoring, Delta has a median value of +0.3. In fact it is Gamma which is closest to the Vetus, with a median score of -0.2 . As for the rest, the medians are Epsilon +0.4, Alpha +0.5 and Beta +0.5.

I have converted the table to a graph below. If anyone can think of a more expressive graph, I would be glad to hear advice on how this could be presented in line with current methods.

It will be clear to the readers from both the table and from the graph that there is no obvious consistency in the way that medieval editors revised the five recensions. The variants swerve wildly to both sides. In this sample of names from Genesis, the data does not seem to support Zaluska's conclusion that Gamma contains "occasional retouchings" drawn from the Vulgate," whereas Delta is the "most faithful" to the Vetus Latina. If anything, Gamma is more faithful.

What can we say about the names from those parts of biblical history subsequent to Genesis?

We cannot expect to find any differences in the names from Christ back to the Exile, because these names only existed in the Greek manuscripts of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and no Hebrew evidence for them exists. Jerome of Stridon did not alter their Latin transcriptions, so these names are invariant between the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate.

As for the names from the Exile back to Saul, we also cannot expect to find much significant variation. We do not yet possess scholarly editions of the Vetus Latina text of 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles, 1 Kings and 2 Kings (they will take several more decades to arrive). To fill the gap, I have instead collated the Septuagint forms, which were of course the basis for the Vetus Latina. The reader can construe the likely Latin transcriptions, and compare these to the Stuttgart Vulgate forms. The following selection shows that Jerome left the bulk of the pre-existing Latin forms pretty well unchanged.

Αχινααμ	Ahinoem	1Sa	25:43, 2 Sa 3:2
Αβιγαιας	Abigail	1Sa	25:42, 2Sa 3:3
Μααχα	Maacha	2Sa	3:3
Αγγιθ	Aggith	1Ch	3:2, 2Sa 3:4
Αβιταλ	Abital	2Sa	3:4
Αιγλα	Agla	2Sa	3:5
Βηρσαβεε	Bethsabee	2Sa	11:3
Αμνων	Amnon	2Sa	3:2
Δαλουια	Chelaab	2Sa	3:2, 1Ch 3:1
Αβεσσαλωμ	Absalom	2Sa	3:3
Ορνια	Adonias	2Ch	3:4
Σαφατια	Safathia	1Ch	3:3, 2Sa 3:4
Ιεθερααμ	Iethraam	2Sa	3:5
Θημαρ	Thamar	2Sa	13:1
Ιβααρ	Ibaar	1Ch	3:6, 14:5, 2Sa 5:15
Ελισαε	Elisama A	1Ch	14:5, 3:6, 2Sa 5:16
Ελιφαλετ	Eliphalet / Helifeleth	1Ch	3:6, 14:5, 2Sa 5:16
Ναγε	Noge	1Ch	3:7, 14:5
Ναφαγ	Napheg / Nepheg	1Ch	3:7, 14:5, 2Sa 5:15
Ιανουε / Ιανουου	Iaphie	1Ch	3:7, 14:5, 2Sa 5:15
Ελισαμα / Ελισαμαε	Elisama B	1Ch	3:8, 14:5
Ελιαδα	Helida / Heliade	1Ch	3:8, 14:5, 2Sa 5:16
Ελιφαλετ	Eliphalet / Helisua	1Ch	3:8, 14:5, 2Sa 5:15
Σαμμους	Samua	2Sa	5:14
Σωβαβ	Sobab	2Sa	5:14
Σαλωμων	Salomon	Mt	1:6, 2Sa 5:14

Ιεροβοαμ / Ναβατ	Hieroboam	1Kgs	11:26
Ναδαβ	Nadab	1Kgs	15:25
Βαασα / Αχια	Baasa filius Ahia	1Kgs	15:33
Ηλα	Hela filius Baasa	1Kgs	16:8-16
Ζαμβρι	Zamri	1Kgs	16:9
Θαμνι / Γωναθ	Thebni filium Gineth	1Kgs	16:21
Αχααβ / Αμβρι·	Ahab filius Amri	1Kgs	16:29
Ιεζαβελ	Hiezabel	1Kgs	16:31
Οχοζιας	Ohozias	1Kgs	22:40
Ιωραμ / Αχααβ	Ioram filius Ahab	2Kgs	3:1, 1Kgs 22:50
Ιου / Ναμεσσι	Hieu filius Namsi	1Kgs	19:16, 2Chr 22:7
Ιωαχας	Ioachaz	2Kgs	10:35
Ιωας	Ioas filius Ioachaz	2Kgs	13:10
Ιεροβοαμ	Hieroboam	2Kgs	13:13
Ζαχαριας	Zaccharias filius Hieroboam	2Kgs	15:8
Σελλουμ / Ιαβις	Sellum filius Iabes	2Kgs	15:13
Μαναημ / Γαδδι	Manahem filius Gaddi	2Kgs	15:14
Φακεϊας	Phaceia filius Manahem	2Kgs	15:23
Φακεε / Ρομελιου	Phacee filius Romeliae	2Kgs	15:25
Ωσηε / Ηλα	Osee filius Hela	2Kgs	17:1

As luck would have it, where differences do occur in the above list, it is not always easy to see a pattern in the Great Stemma's uptake of the forms. First of all we find certain odd distortions. The first Elisama, for example, appears not as Elisae, but as Elisbe. Secondly, some of the variations completely contradict Zaluska's generalizations: Zambri with a B appears in three recensions (Epsilon, Alpha, Beta), but has been "corrected" to Jerome's Zamri without a B in Delta and Gamma, which are normally the most conservative texts.

Zaluska's assertion that the balance in Alpha swung, after Abraham, to almost pure Vetus Latina forms is therefore interesting and provocative, but needs to be treated with a certain amount of caution. My guess is that her generalization was in fact largely argued from her very perceptive analysis of the Horrite names in Genesis 36. I wrote a survey of these in 2010 where I tabulated the names and provided the proof that is missing from her article, though implied. The differences among the Horrite names between Alpha and Beta are especially striking and this section of the collation is crucial in proving that the Great Stemma is indeed drawn from a Vetus Latina tradition.

I have not yet studied the Vetus/Vulgate distribution of the names making up the Twelve Tribes of Israel: it would be interesting to follow this up at a later time.

In conclusion, I would say this. The Great Stemma and the Liber Genealogus were clearly originally written in a time and place where Jerome's Vulgate was not available and were then haphazardly modified by medieval editors. But the process of modification was not as simple or as linear as Zaluska suggests, and her conclusions are too sweeping. The Great Stemma manuscripts are anything but unambiguous evidence for the onomastics of the Vetus Latina. Bonifatius Fischer was correct to collate the Great Stemma from four Spanish bibles as a somewhat compromised source, while treating it with the greatest of caution.

Marathon

2012-01-07T07:58:00.000+01:00

I glimpsed an ARD television news report four weeks ago on the Berlin round of the Visualizing Marathon but cannot find the news clip any more. There is some coverage of the event on Vizworld.

Hypothetigraphy

2011-12-07T21:41:00.006+01:00

Many theories of diagrams are limited in scope to just one or two manifestations of abstract drawings. Diagrammatic representation of numerical data has been well studied since Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but stemmatic drawings like the Great Stemma are rarely well explained. I have been impressed at the theoretical work of Manfredo Massironi (1937-) of the University of Verona in Italy. Massironi has devised a concept he calls hypothetigraphy to describe drawings that present hypothetical, invisible, abstract ideas. It is presented in his 2002 book, The psychology of graphic images: seeing, drawing, communicating (Link: Google Books). (The English translation from the Italian is not perfect, and sometimes makes no sense: the term itself is sometimes spelled "hypothesigraphy" in the text, varying in orthography from one line to the next (e.g. p. 164), but "hypothetigraphy" is the form used in the headings and index.)

He says he departs from the idea that "illustrating is a way of emphasizing, by visual means, those contents that cannot be effectively conveyed by verbal expression." He proposes that hypothetigraphy has two roles: (a) a connective function (connecting into a unitary pattern a body of knowledge [which is] fragmented and apparently not well organized) and (b) a reconstructive function (reconstructing the various phases of a process for purposes of illustration and interpretation, starting from observable results).

According to my definition, hypothetigraphy defines a rather homogenenous class of drawings, which I call hypothetigraphs ....
The first feature, and one that is most easily noted, is the use of simple geometric figures.... The "true" objects and their appearance are not important in this endeavor, for the phenomena under consideration have to do with relationships and with dynamic interactions between elements.... The shape of elements per se is usually an irrelevant piece of information, which is best left out or represented simply by the most abstract of shapes, the circle.
A second and most immediately noticeable feature of hypothetigraphs is the addition of brief written text to the picture.... The inclusion of written text is always necessary in hypothetigraphy which would otherwise lose its communicative function... Verbal and visual information are inextricably and necessarily connected.
Another distinguishing feature of hypothetigraphy is the the almost exclusive use of precise marks, drawn using the ruler ... Precise, clear lines contribute in conveying the impression that the depicted forms are mental constructs, not representations of natural objects.
Typical of hypothetigraphy is ... the use of object lines ... Object lines are not used to mimic some aspect of reality but to illustrate relationships, correspondences or connections.... Relationships and connections and trajectories ... lend themselves naturally to an interpretation in terms of threads, ropes and connecting cables.
A fifth feature of hypothetigraphy is the number of represented dimensions, which tends to be as small as possible within the constraints of the logic of the representation.
Finally, hypothetigraphy tends to place the viewpoint frontally relative to the picture plane, an tends to present figures without a background.... The second of these ... contributes to focus the attention of the viewer, avoiding unwanted contextual effects.

This is all very useful. The six "features" listed above are all applicable to the Great Stemma:

Its graphic elements are circles of various sizes. They do not represent heads or anything else physical but are entirely abstract, representing generations and dynasties.
Text within the roundels, along the connecting lines and in the final Sicut Lucas evangelista section, is there to expand the effect of the drawn figures.
Its lines are generally straight, except for the final meeting of the two fila, and the whole structure is drawn with a certain sterility to emphasize its abstract meaning.
The connecting lines represent succession, and ramifications where necessary.
The drawing is strictly two dimensional
It has no background colour or images. My attachment of a yellow timeline band to the reconstruction is in fact out of harmony with the austerity of the original.

Massironi makes no mention of the Great Stemma. In fact he does not mention any stemmatic drawings at all. But his observations are so acute that they apply to the stemma without any modification being required of them.

Graph of Time

2011-12-07T19:50:00.023+01:00

Some time ago, my attention was drawn to the graph of planetary displacement from the elliptic with respect to time that was devised for medieval schools. Until 50 years ago this was thought to be unique to a Latin manuscript in Munich, BSB Clm 14436, 61r, but it seems to in fact exist in numerous manuscripts.

Bruce Eastwood discusses it in Plinian astronomical diagrams in the early Middle Ages (1987) and returned to it in more detail in Planetary Diagrams - Descriptions, Models, Theories (2000, co-authored with Gerd Grasshoff, online) and Planetary diagrams for Roman astronomy in medieval Europe (2004, also with Grasshoff, online). If I am reading these articles correctly, the diagram is what the authors classify as "Plinian latitudes - rectangular" in their 2004 catalogue:
1 Avranches BM, 226, f.88r
8 Bern BB, 347, f.24v
10 Cambridge, St John's CL, lat. I.15, p.287
11 Cambridge, St John's CL, lat. I.15, p.353
12 Cambridge, Trinity CL, R.15.32, f.3v
13 Durham CathLibr, Hunter 100, f.66r
15 Erfurt StB, Ampl. 4°.8, f.1r
20 Genève FB, 111, f.41r
21 Glasgow UL, T.4.2, f.117r
22 Leiden UB, BPL 168, f.56r
24 London BL, Add. 11943, f.49v
27 London BL, Cott.Tib. E.IV, f.141r
32 London BL, Roy. 13.A.XI, f.143v (image in Eastwood/Grasshoff)
38 Milano BN, E.5 sup., f.1r
39 Milano BN, E.5 sup., f.53r
54 München SB, clm 6364, f.24v
57 Oxford BoL, Canon. Class. lat 279, f.34r
59 Oxford BoL, Lyell 154, f.26v
70 Paris BNF, lat. 5239, f.38v
71 Paris BNF, lat. 5239, f.39r
72 Paris BNF, lat. 6367, f.1v
79 St Gallen StiB, 250, p.2
81 Strasbourg BU, 326, f.122r
89 Vaticano BAV, Palat. lat. 1577, f.82v
94 Vaticano BAV, Regin. lat. 1573, f.53r
105 Wroclaw UB, IV.O.11, f.59r
108 Zürich ZB, Car.C. 122, f.42r

But perhaps I have not understood this correctly, since the specimen which is numbered Plin45 (clm 14436, 61v, link at the top of this blog entry) is absent from the above list, as is the specimen numbered as Plin83 in the 2004 article (Strasbourg, same codex as above, but folio 123r, reproduced in the 2000 article), along with six other references Eastwood gave in 1987:
Madrid 9605, f.12v
Zurich Car. C 176, f. 193v
Bern 265, f. 59r
London Cott.Vit. A XII, f. 9r
Baltimore Walters W, 73, f. 5v (mentioned in the note on page 11 of Eastwood's 2004 catalogue)
Oxford, St Johns, 17, f. 38r
London BL Eg. 3088, f. 83v
There is one corrigenda page in the Google Books edition, but these are not mentioned there. I do not know if further errata have been published. Perhaps I have overlooked some kind of filter that Eastwood and Grasshoff may have mentioned in their book, and I would be grateful if any reader could explain this to me.

Hans-Christoph Liess, supervised by Grasshoff and Eastwood during his doctoral studies at the University of Berne, later assembled a database of Eastwood's images, and published a description. The title page of this 2001 database project, code-named Compago, is still online, as is the diagram index page, and, perhaps most important, an interactive mind-map of the manuscripts listed above. A handbook was also published. But the back end with the actual images and the required software module, code-named Alcatraz, seems to have either been taken down or to have been put behind a wall. Google Chrome is able to open the interface, but a user name and password are required to proceed further. Liess completed his doctoral dissertation in 2002 (large file) and this is online. Both Liess and Grasshoff have since moved from Berne to Berlin.

What is curious is that all three authors are sure that the diagram is a simplification of a circular diagram of the Plinian latitudes which is found in 12 manuscripts. Pliny had presented the data as numerical data only. Then a Carolingian editor devised the circular diagram just before or following a conference on computus in 809 EC and "solved the problem of presenting to students the spatial meaning of the Plinian text" (Eastwood, 2000). Eastwood and Grasshoff continue:

Within a few decades after its creation, the circular latitude diagram was replaced by another, a rectangular diagram, which reduced the amount of theoretical content added to the relevant Plinian text and also offered a more easily produced and more quickly read image.

Edward Tufte reproduces the Munich rectangular diagram on page 28 of Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but curiously enough misses its significance for the history of simplification. He only cites an outdated 1936 article by Funkhouser on it. In fact, the diagram turns out to be exemplary of Tufte's principles of subtracting and simplifying to make graphics clearer and more communicative, and his term "reduction of data ink" to describe economy in an infographic:

A few graphics use every drop of their ink to convey measured quantities.

A Lost Spanish Gospel Book

2011-12-04T22:37:00.019+01:00

A fascinating story of a vanished codex is told in an article by Mariano Revilla which was published in Spain 1918-20. As far as I know, it has never appeared in English, so I have used Google Translate to create a quick English version of the first half, and have edited this slightly, cutting parts that emerged as complete gibberish. The original can be read on Archive.org in the pages of La Ciudad de Dios, which published the article in four parts: 117, 118, 120:1 and 120:2. US readers may be able to read the re-publication in book form on Google Books.

The reason for my interest will be plain to the reader. Part of the text in the Codex Ovetensis comes from the Great Stemma.

The Codex Ovetensis of the Gospels and the Bible of Valvanera

“Colligite... fragmenta, ne pereant.” (Jn, 6:12.)

Modern critics seem to completely ignore the existence of these two ancient codices, of which Ambrosio de Morales speaks with great praise in several of his writings. Did they perhaps perish in one of many unfortunate accidents that our archives and libraries have suffered, or are they hidden at the bottom of them still unexplored? The research we have done in order to clarify this point has brought us to the sad conviction that were lost in the seventeenth century, but we dare not declare it in a categorical and definitive way because the arguments that underpin our conviction, are more negative than positive and perhaps new and more lengthy investigations can give a more satisfactory and promising answer. Fortunately, our work has not been entirely barren, for we have been provided with the remarkable discovery of fragments of these two codices where least expected, to wit, in the margins of a copy of the Vulgate printed in Venice in 1478. This magnificent incunable, which by the fineness of its vellum, the precision of its typography and the daintiness of the pen illuminations which adorn it seems made for the use of a Renaissance prince, belonged to the bishop of Plasencia, Dr Pedro Ponce de León, and when he died, it was bought with many others of the same origin for the Library of the Escorial. Ambrosio de Morales, in his report on the books of the bishop to be taken to the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo, describes the Bible as follows:

Sacred Bible. Slightly less than one hundred years old, printed on very fine parchment and with illuminations. Glosses have been placed with great diligence in the margins of this bible using a very ancient Gothic bible for the Old Testament and a different bible, of Oviedo, for the New Testament. [...]: On account of the diligence ... and taking account of the parchment and the illumination, valued at thirty ducats. Gilded margins. (1)

(1) Memoria de los libros que se deben tomar para El Real Monesterio de San Lorencio, de los que tenía el obpo de Plasencia Don pero Ponce de León (Memorandum of books to be taken to the Royal Monastery of St Lawrence, formerly owned by the bishop of Plasencia, Dr Ponce de León). Ms. Esc etc.-Il-15, fol. 239v.

The author of the marginal notes was that famous preacher of Philip II, the no less celebrated historian of the Dominican Order, Friar Hernando de Castillo, as he states in a foreword on folio 1 of the said Escorial Bible, which reads as follows:

"To the reader, from Ferdinandus de Castillo, O.P. Dear friend and reader, this bible has been glossed in reliance on many others, of which the great part were in manuscript form, in the [oldest?] Gothic script. One book, containing only the four Gospels, was written 700 years ago and was kindly loaned to me by the church of Oviedo. Another, of venerable antiquity, containing both the Old and New Testament, came from the reserves of the fathers of the Monastery of St Mary of Valvanera (“Benedictine” added in the margin)."

Although this asserts that Hernando de Castillo’s marginal variants were readings obtained from “many” examples, the great majority of the manuscripts consulted consist, if the truth be told, exclusively of the Codex Ovetensis of the Gospels and the Bible of Valvanera, as noted on folio 2r, and this was apparent to Ambrosio de Morales, since for the avoidance of doubt on this point, the same Father Hernando de Castillo states it strictly in the following note from folio 2v, written in his own hand by authority of Philip II:

"I, Hernando de Castillo of the Order of St Dominic, professor of sacred theology, preacher to King Philip II of Spain, made faithful inspection of all the holy Bible, placing variant readings of the New Testament in the margins sixteen years ago from two of the most ancient copies in Gothic script (on the one hand from the fathers of the Monastery of Our Lord of Valvanera, on the other hand from the church of Oviedo) carefully comparing the differences with the authentic Latin. In witness whereof I undersign the above by the authority of his Catholic majesty and this codex is hereby placed in the Royal Library, in the Royal Monastery of St Lawrence, in the month of July 1577. Signed: Hernando de Castillo."

Lacking the original manuscripts, it seemed difficult to ascertain to what extent this was a true and accurate collation of these manuscripts by de Castillo. We have, however, quite clear evidence of his fidelity and diligence including the scrupulous preservation of the original spelling. A comparison of his spellings with the marginal notes in the Gothic Codex Legionensis of the College of San Isidoro, whose text, as we shall see, belongs to the same family, passes this test favourably. Even to the extent of his exquisite calligraphy, the illustrious Dominican manifests a rare care and attention. It seems, therefore, that his work of collation guarantees all the fidelity required by modern criticism. Thanks to him we can now add a brief chapter, perhaps not lacking in interest, to the history of the Latin versions of the Bible in Spain.

Our first proposal to discover these ancient fragments was sent to the Benedictine Fathers who form the Pontifical Commission for the revision of the Vulgate so they could study them easily and use the variant readings, but without detracting from this we believed an examination would also contribute to learning, since these Spanish codices, apart from their intrinsic merit, have a value as venerable relics of our cultural roots in the heroic early days of the Reconquista. We will say, then, what we know about the origin, vicissitudes and critical value of these manuscripts and we will publish a selection of the fragments, since we cannot publish all that was preserved by de Castillo, as we had originally hoped.

I. - The Codex Ovietensis of the Gospels

a. - History of the manuscript

We know the original source and purpose of this manuscript by an instrument of donation that the author wrote at the end of the codex which de Castillo preserved with his usual fidelity on folios 2v and 3r of the Escorial incunabula described above. Here is this interesting document:

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, this book of the Gospels imbued with the sacraments and arguments was assembled by me, a useless and lowly servant of Christ by the name of Justus. I am not worthy of merit and my wrongs cannot be redressed. Through the intercession of the saints, grant unto me to be acquitted and at last be reconciled to my Lord and to be freed from the bonds of all my sins. This has been the reason for my devotion, and I ask that the present book be placed on the holy altar where my body is to be buried and where I swore to fulfill my vows of office. I ask all the priests [who read from this book] to constantly pray to Our Saviour and beseech God through whose hands I came into the world for the salvation of my soul and not to weary in it. For thus it is written: he who prays for others, God commends. But if any man in the church wills harm on others, let him [...] remain in everlasting punishment with Satan and his demons. Thus I go to my judgment before Our Lord.

Then follows a note, probably written shortly after the death of the notary Justus:

Justus, the servant of God, died in 810 of the Era on January 12.

So according to these documents, the Oviedo codex was written around the middle of the eighth century by a scribe named Justus, whose death occurred in 810 of the Hispanic Era or 772 CE and it was bequeathed to a church where he was to be buried so that priests would remember him in their prayers and offer prayers for the repose of his soul during holy mass. Use of the Hispanic Era also makes it clear that the codex is Spanish in origin, for which we will later see additional evidence. However we do not know for certain what region this was in, though perhaps it was Asturias, of which Oviedo is the capital, since it was preserved there until the sixteenth century, as evidenced by several of the documents cited and confirmed by Ambrosio de Morales. He writes thus:

"In the Library of the Church of Oviedo is ... a New Testament, which from its parchment and lettering seems notably older than the other Gothic manuscripts. In plain script at the beginning it states: “The Book of Justus.” And at the end it says: “Justus, the notary, died in DCCCL of the Hispanic Era on January 12."(1).

(1) Viage de Ambrosio de Morales, por orden del Rey D. Phelipe II, a los Reynos de León y Galicia y Principado de Asturias... Madrid, 1765, pages 93-95. Facsimile

This codex, improperly called a New Testament here, is, without doubt, the Codex Ovetensis of the Gospels described by de Castillo, as de Morales indicates in his report on the books of the Bishop of Plasencia that I have quoted cited above, although the date of death of the notary Justus reported by de Morales (DCCCL) is forty years off the date given by de Castillo (810). Clearly, one of the two made a mistake in transcription, and given the choice, we have preferred the date indicated by the latter, who studied the codex with more attention and diligence than de Morales could have done during his rapid journey through the churches of León, Galicia and Asturias. Our codex is thus a contemporary of the famous Codex Toletano, which is the oldest biblical manuscript preserved in Spain, with the exception of palimpsest fragments of a manuscript of León dating back to the sixth or seventh century.

The history of the manuscript from the sixteenth century onwards is unknown. We made repeated inquiries of the archivist of the Cathedral of Oviedo through a friend of ours and he has responded by saying that it is not to be found in the archives entrusted to him. The news is no surprise to anyone who knows the sad fate of the Library of Oviedo, of which [Manuel] Risco has said: "What I can state though it must cause severe pain to all those interested is that of the many books which existed in the church of Oviedo, only one of those which Ambrosio de Morales reported exists, and it is in reality just a mortuary of ancient deeds." (1).
(1) España Sagrada, Madrid, 1793, t. 38, pág. 115. Facsimile

Nor is there any trace of it in the Escorial, into which library a not inconsiderable number of the manuscripts of Oviedo were brought, and we have sought it in vain in modern works dealing with biblical codices or in the bibliographies of Spain, for it is either not mentioned at all or what is said by Ambrosio de Morales is simply repeated. It is therefore to be feared that it has perished, like so many other precious manuscripts from the same source. Therefore, the fragments preserved in the Escorial Library acquire a unique value.

b. - Description of the manuscript and review of its contents.

With the data provided by de Castillo and de Morales, we arrive at the following description of the manuscript of Oviedo: an 8th-century Gothic manuscript on parchment, written continuously, i.e. without regard to chapters and verses. It contained: (1) the four Gospels, (2) some prologues or notes, (3) the instrument of donation, which we have already copied. (2)
(2) "In the aforesaid book, no distinction of chapters occurs: it flows on in the manner of perpetual prayer as in the Greek-language codices of old. There is moreover prefatory matter, which we have not transcribed, since we are not concerned here with its content."

The prologue and note matter which de Castillo does convey to us is in large part, as we will see, a simple indication of the number of miracles narrated in each of the Gospels. The only matter of some interest is the prologue to the Gospel of St. Matthew and a historical note or gloss to Chapter II thereof. In this gloss the names of the Magi who came from the East to worship Jesus in Bethlehem are stated. The names given are slightly different from those found in other medieval documents. More noteworthy is the prologue, since it sets out a special system for reconciling the genealogies of Jesus Christ, according to which that in St. Luke is the genealogy of the Virgin Mary and that in St. Matthew is the genealogy of Joseph. This prologue, written in the middle of the eighth century, gives a resounding refutation of modern critics who have maintained that such a system, already rejected by St. Hilarius, not only was not supported by any other author but had not even been known of throughout the Middle Ages until Annius of Viterbo, a writer of the late XV century, proposed it. (1)
(1) See article by Prat in Dict. de la Bible, de Vigouroux, III, p. 169.

The biblical text contained in the Codex Ovetensis was that of St. Jerome's Vulgate. The Escorial fragments could serve as a basis for reconstituting it in its entirety if we could be sure that de Castillo had glossed all the places where the codex was different from the Venice edition of 1478, but since this is not established with certainty, we will refrain from such an attempt at reconstruction.

The variants that we have printed from de Castillo closely represent the interpolated readings of a Vetus Latina character which distinguish manuscripts of the Spanish family, to which the Codex Ovetensis seems to have belonged. Text scholars divide the Spanish Latin Bible into three groups as follows: the primitive, which is represented by the Codex Toletanus, from which the other two are derived: the Leonese, to which the Codex Gothicus Legionensis and the Emilianus etc., belong; and the Castilian, including the first Bible of Alcala and the Noailles Bible. Our codex cannot, in our opinion, be classified as belonging to either the Leonese or the Castilian group, for the simple reason that the Codex Ovetensis already existed before either of these recensions had been created, nor do we see any reason to support a direct mutual dependency between it and the Codex Toletanus, since there are quite numerous differences between them (1).
(1) The readings of the Codex Ovetensis which de Castillo has preserved match up with the Toletanus in 40 passages only, with the Emilianus in 38 and with the Compl. in 46.

We also collated our ancient codex with the Liber Comicus sen Lectionarias Missae (1) of the Church of Toledo and noted some remarkable agreement as well as not inconsiderable discrepancies. All this seems to prove that the Codex Ovetensis is a Spanish text, but in a recension somewhat different from that known, which can be indirectly confirmed by the preface to the St Matthew Gospel we discussed in the previous part, which is so singular that it is not to be encountered in any of the numerous manuscripts consulted by S. Berger. (2)
(1) Liber Comicus seu Lectionarius Missae, quo Toletana Ecclesia ante annos mille et ducentos utebatur. Edidit D. Germanus Morin. Maredsoli, 1893.
(2) Les Prefaces jointes aux livres de la Bible dans les manuscrits de Vulgate. Mémoire posthume de M. Samuel Berger. Paris, 1902.

In many places (at 81, if we have not miscounted), the readings of the Codex Ovetensis agree with the text edited by Wordsworth-White, which is based, as the reader knows, mainly on the AASY Northumbrian manuscripts, according to these authors, the most faithful representatives of the Vulgate of St. Jerome. When it does not agree either with the Spanish manuscripts or with the Northumbrians, it usually agrees with Colbertinus, the Corbeyensis, the Sangermanensis I and II and other Vetus Latina manuscripts. It should not be overlooked finally, that there are in the Codex Ovetensis some variations which are new, or at least very rare. These are: Mt IV, 25 et curavit omnes, XIII, 40 colligunt, XXI, 23 docentes, XXXIII, 18 debitorem, XXVII, 9 Zachariam; the omission of part of verses 55 and 56 of chapter IX of Luke (3), and so on.
(3) This omission is also noticed in the cod. Sangerm. I and in many Greek manuscripts.

As we are far from being masters of the difficult art of textual criticism, it would be temerity to deliver our opinion on the critical value of each of these readings, some of which would be judged as certain by the textual critics and others of which would be thought doubtful.

All that we intend to do here is to narrate the story and draw attention to the nature and importance of the Codex Ovetensis. We finish our brief survey with the publication of some small fragments of it which are preserved in the Escorial Bible, omitting only that which we consider of little or no use, namely those readings that deviate from the Venice edition of 1478 (which was the base text for the collation by de Castillo) but concord with the Clementine Vulgate.

Variations and variant readings in the Codex Ovetensis

Gospel of Matthew
1. Sicut Lucas eua~gelista per Nathan marie origine~ ducit: ita et Matheus eua~gelista per Salomone~ Joseph origine~ demo~strauit idest, ex tribu Juda: vt appareat eos de vna tribu exire, et sic ad xp~m secu~du~ carne~ peruenire, vt co~pleatur quod scriptu~ est: vicit Leo de tribu Juda radix Dauid. Leo ex Salomone: radix ex Nathan.
2. Sunt in hoc libro curati. 23. signa quinque, exceptis his quae. 12. discipuli a dn~o missi in locis fecere diuersis.
3. Nomina Magorum Bater, Tagarma et Melchi.

Gospel of Mark
In hoc libro sunt curati 18. Signa quinque ex ea quae missi a dno discipuli in diuersis locis fecerunt.

Gospel of Luke
In hoc libro sunt curati. 23. signa tria ex ea quae a domino missi discipuli eius seu duodecim in locis fecere diuersis:

Gospel of John
In hoc libro sunt virtutes quatuor signa quatuor.

[Revilla gives several columns of variants, mostly single words, which the reader can easily consult in the Archive.org edition, as no Spanish is required to understand them. The additions appear with the notation + (= addit) and omissions with - (= omittit). Revilla adds that sometimes, for clarity, he also quotes in brackets the corresponding reading from the Clementine Vulgate and precedes this with the letter l (= loco). The remainder of his article is concerned solely with the Valvanera Bible and is not translated here. I would appreciate readers offering any improvements to the above translation by way of the comment box below.]

A 1990 note on Hernando de Castillo OP (-1593), giving this and further literature, can be found in Klaus Reinhardt's Bibelkommentare spanischer Autoren (1500-1700). De Castillo also played a key role as a royal minister and influenced the Inquisition. This is discussed in Spanish political histories, for example in a book by Bruce Taylor, Structures of reform: the Mercedarian Order in the Spanish Golden Age. I have used the name spelling de Castillo, rather than del Castillo, since this seems to be more common. Reinhardt suggests the lost book should be called the Codex Ovetensis secundus, and this matches Ayuso's coding, which calls it Ov2. I remain unsure what the primary Codex Ovetensis is, but it seems this is the inventory of deeds mentioned by Manuel Risco, which survived at the Escorial. Mariano Revilla Rico (1887-1936), incidentally, was shot during the Spanish Civil War, and seems to have later been beatified as a martyr by the Catholic Church of Spain.

Rufinus

2011-11-20T22:35:00.012+01:00

Regular readers of this blog will recall that the Great Stemma is a graphic argument that the contradictory genealogies of Christ could be reconciled if one were to introduce an extra link into the chain of Christ's maternal ancestry. This extra link, Joachim, is presented as father of the Virgin. There is a however a curious adaptation of the diagram, the Lesser Stemma, which rejects this argumentation and asserts that the better solution is the one proposed (in Greek) by Julius Africanus in his Letter to Aristides. The Africanus theory can be summarized this way: the Gospel of Matthew gives Christ's biological ancestry through Joseph, whereas the Gospel of Luke gives a legal ancestry of Joseph in consequence of a special Jewish form of adoption. Obviously Africanus was not concerned here to rule out a biological role for Joseph in the procreation of Jesus.

It has taken me some time to study the Lesser Stemma more closely. One of the critical questions in the course of this analysis was where its editor had obtained his textual commentary from. The final page, 8v, contains the familiar Great Stemma statement:

Sicut Lucas evangelista per Nathan ad Mariam originem ducit, ita et Matheus ev(an)glista per Salomonem ad Ioseph originem demonstrat. Id est de tribu Iuda, ut appareat eos de una tribu exire, et sic ad Christum secundum carnem pervenire. Ut compleatur quod scriptum est: "Ecce vicit leo de tribu Iuda radix David," leo ex Salomone, radix ex Nathan.

But in a radical reversal of meaning, the Lesser Stemma bolts on to this a core statement from Julius Africanus. The following is my transcription of this from the Burgos Bible (the layout of the pages is tabulated on my website):

Ut clarius fiat, quod dicitur: ipsarum generationum consequentias enarravimus.
A David generatio per Salomonem, quam dinumerat Matheus, tercium a fine facit Mathan, qui dicitur genuisse Iacob patrem Ioseph. Per Nathan vero Lucas generationum ordinem texens, tercium nichilominus eiusdem loci facit Melchi. Nobis imminet ostendere, quomodo Ioseph dicitur secundum Matheum quidem patrem habuisse Iacob, qui inducitur per Salomone: secundum Lucham vero Heli qui ducitur per Nathan, atque ipsi, id est Heli et Iacob, qui erant duo fratres, habentes alius quidem Mathan, alius quidem Melchi patres ex diverso genere venientes, etiam ipsi Ioseph avi esse videantur.
Est ergo modus Mathan et Melchi de una eadem que uxore Hesta nomine diversis temporibus singulos filios procrearunt, quia Mathan, qui per Salomonem descendit, uxorem eam primus acceperat et relicto uno filio Iacob nomine defunctus est. Post cuius obitum, Me[l]chi qui Nathan genus ducit. cum esset ex eadem tribu, ex eadem tribu[sic], relictam Mathan accepit uxorem ex qua et ipse suscepit filium nomine Heli per quod ex diverso patrum genere efficiuntur Iacob et Heli iterini fratres quorum alter, id est Iacob, fratris Heli sine liberis defuncti uxorem ex mandato legis accipiens genuit Ioseph natura quidem germinis suum filium, propter quod scribitur Iacob autem genuit Ioseph: secundum legis vero praeceptum Heli efficitur filius, cuius lacob qui erat filius Mathan uxorem ad suscitandum fratris semen acceperat et per hoc rata invenitur atque integra generatio et tan, quam Matheus enumerat, et tan, quam Lucas competenti [?]ione designat.

I soon found that the above Latin text comes from one of the early translations of the Letter to Aristides. This was produced in the early years of the 5th century (perhaps 402 or 403) by Rufinus of Aquileia (see Christophe Guignard, La Lettre de Julius Africanus à Aristide sur la Généalogie du Christ, 2011, p. 24 ff. for a discussion). With a good text of Rufinus (the passage is numbered 1.7.5-11), I was also able to unlock most of the manuscript abbreviations and correct my transcription at places where I had not initially been able to make out the script.
Here is George Salmon's translation of the same passage of Africanus, which has been put into first-person speech though this is not necessarily required by the Africanus text:

But in order that what I have said may be made evident, I shall explain the interchange of the generations. If we reckon the generations from David through Solomon, Matthan is found to be the third from the end, who begat Jacob the father of Joseph. But if, with Luke, we reckon them from Nathan the son of David, in like manner the third from the end is Melchi, whose son was Heli the father of Joseph. For Joseph was the son of Heli, the son of Melchi. As Joseph, therefore, is the object proposed to us, we have to show how it is that each is represented as his father, both Jacob as descending from Solomon, and Heli as descending from Nathan: first, how these two, Jacob and Heli, were brothers; and then also how the fathers of these, Matthan and Melchi, being of different families, are shown to be the grandfathers of Joseph. Well, then, Matthan and Melchi, having taken the same woman to wife in succession, begat children who were uterine brothers, as the law did not prevent a widow, whether such by divorce or by the death of her husband, from marrying another. By Estha, then—for such is her name according to tradition—Matthan first, the descendant of Solomon, begets Jacob; and on Matthan’s death, Melchi, who traces his descent back to Nathan, being of the same tribe but of another family, having married her, as has been already said, had a son Heli. Thus, then, we shall find Jacob and Heli uterine brothers, though of different families. And of these, the one Jacob having taken the wife of his brother Heli, who died childless, begat by her the third, Joseph—his son by nature and by account. Whence also it is written, “And Jacob begat Joseph.” But according to law he was the son of Heli, for Jacob his brother raised up seed to him. Wherefore also the genealogy deduced through him will not be made void, which the Evangelist Matthew in his enumeration gives thus: “And Jacob begat Joseph.” But Luke, on the other hand, says, “Who was the son, as was supposed (for this, too, he adds), of Joseph ..."

The Letter to Aristides was transported to the West as part of Rufinus's Latin translation of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea. Plainly this explanation of the gospel contradiction was popular and formerly in wide circulation. Mommsen discovered 90 extant manuscripts of this work of Rufinus in the late 19th century, according to Dr Guignard.
If the passage was already in current use in the 5th century, it would not be surprising that a partisan should have taken it up and used it to modify the Great Stemma to bring it into harmony with the contentions of Africanus, Eusebius and Rufinus, and at the same time to repel the Joachim theory, which is based on an apocryphal text, the Protevangelium of James.

The Lesser Stemma is however not completely faithful to Africanus, who omits two names (Matthat and Levi) between Joseph's father Heli and the more senior Melchi. At least as present in the Burgos Bible, the Lesser Stemma restores these names, but it does so in a non-orthodox order: it muddles the order of Melchi-Levi-Matthat and presents this as Levi-Macham-Melchi.

The greatest oddity of this text is that it contradicts the drawing alongside it. In the Burgos Bible, both genealogies clearly terminate at Joseph. In the image at right, the upper roundel (Joseph filius Iacob qui desponsavit Mariam) is the terminus of the Matthaean genealogy, and the lower roundel (Joseph sponsus Marie de qua natus est Christus) is the terminus of the Lucan genealogy. Yet the text retains the notion from the Great Stemma that the Lucan genealogy should end at Mary. This is an odd situation; I cannot at present see any coherent explanation for it.

Avatars of the Word

2011-11-20T21:13:00.003+01:00

Traditional scholars tend to sniff at the idea of the uncredentialed researcher searching Latin texts without the full classical education that one supposedly needs to do this. James O'Donnell welcomes the electronic machinery in his 1998 book Avatars of the Word, but his approving description of the mind of Jerome of Stridon as the model of the perfect search machine implies to me that he was not fully ready or able to foresee the Latin database as an app for everyone:

Jerome once ran across a Greek word in a text, and wrote to a friend that he remember seeing that word only twice elsewhere, once in scripture, once in an apocryphal religious work. As it happens, he was correct: the three passages he knew are the only places (still) where we know that word to have been used in the written legacy of Greek literature. Hearing that story, I marvel at the powers of Jerome's memory, knowing that as a modern scholar with some similar interests in scripture and translation, I would never dare to say such a thing (p. 4).

With the advantage of hindsight, I find O'Donnell's book stimulating, but somewhat off-beam, though in a contrarian kind of way. O'Donnell did not recoil from the digital database, but under-estimated its impact by arguing that the database which could compete with Jerome's memory is not really all that new, and that libraries in recent centuries have always been on the verge of doing the same thing:

If the essential feature of the idea of the virtual library is the combination of total inclusiveness and near-instantaneous access, then the fantasy is almost coterminous with the history of the book itself (p. 32).

Now of course the database is far more than just a library, because it lowers the barriers to entry: it is accessible to those who have not learned the professional codes, to those who have not paid to participate. There is at least a tangential awareness of this in Avatars, O'Donnell has some engaging thoughts about the uncredentialed (the move to do more and more teaching not only with teaching assistants (the invisibly uncredentialled whom we take for granted but with impermanent, nontenured, non-tenure-trace faculty, p. 180) and the shy (Th[e] classroom is a potentially frightening place because much of our traditional pedagogy depends on the managed infliction of humiliation ... Here is where electronic media can help innovation ... The student who now is unable to perform adequately in the face of perceived threat of embarrassment in class is the one who can be given a place to rehearse out of sight of classmates and teacher ... p. 185-6).
But O'Donnell failed in 1998 to foresee a positive: the sheer mass of accessible material that the internet would throw up and the radically democratic level of access to it. He also failed to foresee a negative: the growing difficulty, once the blogosphere had established itself, of assembling an audience.

Visions

2011-10-31T23:14:00.003+01:00

I continue to search in vain for a scholarly exploration of data visualization in Antiquity. There is no doubt that Graeco-Roman graphics are getting far more attention these days than ever before, but so far that attention has been focussed on other areas.

1. Mathematical diagrams are getting close attention, as Reviel Netz notes in The Archimedes Codex:

The scholars who edited mathematical texts in the nineteenth century were so interested in the words that they ignored the images. If you open an edition from that era, the diagrams you find are not based upon what is actually drawn in the original manuscripts. The diagrams represent, instead, the editor's own drawing. I was shocked to realize that and began to consider: should I produce, for the first time, an edition of the diagrams? (p. 30).

2. Illustrations of texts have been re-assessed in many new ways, with the works of Kurt Weitzmann a half-century ago, Late antique and early Christian book illumination and Illustrations in roll and codex marking a starting point. I recently browsed through John Williams' Imaging the early medieval Bible (1999), which revises some of Weitzmann's ideas, and of course there are the more recent books of Jocelyn Penny Small, The Parallel Worlds of Classical Art and Text (2003), and of Michael Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (2011), which debate whether book illustration was ever meant to depict what was in the text at all. But all of these books deal with the interplay between stories and pictures of people doing things.

3. Mental pictures of abstract matters are discussed in Mary Carruthers' books, particularly The Craft of Thought (1998), which explores the patristic and Roman Republican models of the medieval 'craft of memory' and thus casts some light on the place of visualizations in Late Antiquity:

Whereas ekphrasis always purports to be a meditative description of a painting, sculpture or the facade of a building, the initiating compositional pictura can also describe a schematized landscape in the form of a world map, or a figure like Lady Philosophy, or just about any of the formae mentis in common monastic use: a ladder, a tree, rotae, a rose-diagram. The rhetorical figures called ekphrasis and Bildeinsatz, in other words, are types of the cognitive, dispositive topos called pictura, which is the more general term. The most general terms of all for this cognitive instrument would include words like ratio and schema. (p. 200)

So visualizing things was a good way to start explaining them. However Carruthers is concerned with inner pictures, so her books yield very little about the ways that a real diagram or map could be employed for meditation or how it might be designed.

4. Small's other book, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (1997), explores the ways in which text could be said to visualize what was going on in people's heads, but once again does not deal with data visualization. Anna Catharina Esmeijer's Divina Quaternitas: a preliminary study in the method and application of visual exegesis tackles some of the same issues, but is of course mainly concerned with rather simple figures, not the complex abstraction of the Great Stemma.

Now obviously I have missed from this list a great many other learned books and articles. Many are listed on the further reading page of my website. But nowhere have I found a book or an article that goes to the heart of the issue. How the Latin writer could present mere words and numbers so pregnantly on the page so that the mere arrangement gave food for thought.

Karlsruhe MS

2011-10-31T22:16:00.000+01:00

Another Cassiodorus manuscript briefly went online in May at http://www.stgallplan.org/ and now seems to have vanished again. The Karlsruhe codex is one of a group that has not represented all the stemmata correctly as Cassiodorus drew them, but has converted the simpler ones to lists. However the parts of rhetoric, for example, are correctly depicted in much the same fashion as in the Bamberg manuscript.

New Issue by e-Codices

2011-10-07T14:07:00.008+02:00

E-Codices in Switzerland this week put Cod. Sang. 133 online, and I have accordingly added hyperlinks to my edition of the Liber Genealogus of 427 on www.piggin.net so that readers can read both side by side on a computer screen. This is the codex I blogged about earlier this year. Lowe's description of the script is also provided on the e-Codices website.
As always, it is interesting to "thumb" through the other material in a volume like this. This little codex is a jewel, and I quote the manuscript summary:

This manuscript, still in its original Carolingian binding, consists of three parts and was written in Merovingian script by numerous hands, apparently in the late 8th and/or early 9th century, probably at the Abbey of St. Gall. It contains reliable versions of many onomastic texts, including copies of the work Liber de situ et nominibus locorum Hebraicorum by Jerome, the Cosmographia of Aethicus Ister, the chronicles of Isidore of Seville, Chronica maiora and Historia regum Gothorum, Vandalorum Sueborum, as well as an excellent version of the Itinerarium Antonini Placentini, an account of the pilgrimage of a citizen of Piacenza in about 560/570 to the Holy Land.

The latest rush of e-codices material, placed online Tuesday, appears to comprise 65 more volumes, and includes wonderfully illuminated bibles and some magnificent compilations. A compendium of histories, Cod. Sang. 547, penned in about 1200, caught my eye. Its summary says:

This rather hefty tome (weighing nearly 17 kilograms) compiled around 1200 contains copies in Latin of major works of world-, church- and ethnic history; examples include the History of the World by Orosius, the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius of Caesarea, the Summa of Biblical history (Historica Scholastica) of the early Parisian scholastic Peter Comestor († ca. 1179), the history of the first crusade by Robert of Reims, the history of the Langobards by Paulus Diaconus, the History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede, and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne.

One cannot praise the work of e-codices (and the generosity of its benefactors) too highly. Christoph Flüeler, who leads the project, deserves high honour for this. I was shocked to hear that Switzerland not only has no system of honours to reward civic excellence, but also makes it an offence for its citizens to accept honours from other nations. I hope that Professor Flüeler can be assured in some other way of the high esteem in which we hold his work.

For Medievalists

2011-09-26T09:40:00.003+02:00

Dr Nathaniel Taylor has published a very acute news summary on the RootsWeb Gen-Medieval news list of what is new in Great Stemma research as a result of the Oxford Patristics presentation. He offers this succinct summary:

Jean-Baptiste Piggin has now convincingly shown the whole to derive from a single long scroll of Late-Antique origin, likely 4th century, which he has named the 'great stemma'. All existing copies come through a (lost) early Visigothic intermediary in which the scroll was copied into a series of folio pages in codex form, but the process of reducing the scroll format to sequential pages introduced various errors and subsequent recensions degraded the logic of the original in ways Piggin has been able to trace.

Nat also wrote up my website's findings last year on the same list:

These biblical genealogical stemmata are now the subject of a fantastic set of analytical webpages by Jean-Baptiste Piggin. His page cited below is a table with links to many online images of the tables of biblical kinship found in the Beatus manuscripts and 10th-century Spanish bibles, as well as the Codice de Roda ...

Detective Story

2011-09-25T08:06:00.059+02:00

Does the Liber Genealogus contain work by Lactantius? A detective story is developing around this unexpected proposition. I have only just discovered that the Liber Genealogus etymologies were comprehensively studied by the German philologist and Old Testament scholar Franz Wutz in his 1914-1915 book Onomastica Sacra. Unfortunately he did not notice during his years of study that the source he was using was in fact identical with the Liber Genealogus as published by Theodor Mommsen. This is a grand example of two great ships passing one another unseen in the night which has not, as far as I know, been brought to wide attention. Without Mommsen, Wutz's broad conclusions are weakened, although his fine detail bears continued reading.

Wutz (1882-1938) (short biography) was extending the work done two generations earlier by Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891) who had published a compilation of materials on biblical onomastics with a limited critical apparatus but without commentary, also entitled Onomastica Sacra, the first edition in 1870 and the second in 1887. Lagarde had presented a paper in 1890 with complete transcriptions of the Turin (T) and Lucca (L) recensions of the Liber Genealogus, and would doubtless have used these to proceed to a third edition of his Onomastica handbook, had it not been for his early death.

It was thus left to Carl Frick to begin a more thorough investigation of these documents. He published an edition of T in 1892 as part of his Chronica minora, with each biblical name carefully linked to certain Greek etymologies which Lagarde had published in his Onomastica compilation. Wutz thus had coherent texts available to him in printed form and could proceed to their analysis.

Wutz arrived at a most curious conclusion. He refers throughout his book to the set of etymologies in T and L as the "Laktanzgruppe", literally, the "Lactantius Group". He also included in the Laktanzgruppe those parts of Lagarde's Greek which Frick had painstakingly linked, word by word, to T. Wutz concluded that some lost Greek work had somehow been included in a manuscript of mixed notes and was able to distinguish two coherent fragments of it (reproduced below, denominated V3 and V4). His designation of T, L, V3 and V4 as the Laktanzgruppe implies he had solved a great mystery, but as it turns out, this nomenclature may have been simply a little joke by Wutz.

Wutz appears to have realized only at the last moment that Mommsen had published a wider-ranging collation of the Latin witnesses, binding T and L to the other recensions of the Liber Genealogus, in his MGH series (note 1, page xviii: Mommsen's Ausgabe des Lib. genealogus ... ist mir leider entgangen.) Had Wutz known of the St Gall (G) and Florence (F) recensions while he was conducting his research, he would probably not have attached the name "Lactantius" to the work and might well have reached different conclusions.

He was approaching the topic from a very different perspective to our own, and it is interesting to consider the basis on which he was thinking. As far as I have been able to understand his argumentation, Wutz suspected T was a Latin translation by Lactantius from a Greek work by a now unknown author and that Lactantius had attached it as an appendix to his Epitome. T appears just after the Epitome in the sole manuscript to have transmitted that ancient work more or less entire. This 6th- or 7th-century codex is at Turin: Archivio di Stato IB. 11.27 (formerly IB. VI.28), CLA IV. 438. Charles McNelis, who examined it in 1999, provides the following useful listing of its contents:

f. 2-42v, Lactantius, De opificio dei (CPL 87);
f. 42v-61, Lactantius, Epitome divinarum institutionum (CPL 86);
f. 61-62, extracts from the Latin translation of Hegemonius, Acta Archelai (CPG 3570);
f. 62-71, Liber genealogus (Incipit origo generis humani and Explicit de generationibus);
f. 71v-81, Quintus Julius Hilarianus, De ratione paschae et mentis (CPL 2279);
f. 81 v-122v, Origenes, Omelie iv de Exodo. i. De cantico; ii. De amaritudine aquae Merhae; iii. De Decalogo; iv. De tabernaculo (CPG 1413);
f. 122v, Augustinus, Sermo ad Caesareensis ecclesiae plebem Emerito presente habitus (CPL 284, ser. 339).

It will be clear from this juxtaposition why Wutz was able to believe the Liber Genealogus to be a work by Lactantius, whereas Bruno Krusch had earlier believed it to be the work of Q. Julius Hilarianus. Monceaux (vol. 6, p. 253) appears not to have known of Wutz's assessment and in any case favoured Krusch, writing, "Le Taurinensis contient à la fois le De ratione Paschae d'Hilarianus et le Liber genealogus." At the same time he was not 100 per cent convinced (Rouse and McNelis over-estimate Monceaux's certainty: sans doute (Monceaux) is the lowest degree of certitude in French, not the highest, rather like the exhortative English "surely"). In my own view, both Krusch and Wutz were barking up the wrong trees.

Since the T text of the Liber Genealogus ends with the life of Christ, there is no easy way to date it. I have only recently shown that it is in fact a descendant from the Liber Genealogus of 427.

Wutz devoted considerable effort to backing up his Lactantius hypothesis, and here I summarize from his German, with page numbers in parentheses:
The Lactanzgruppe (hereafter LGr) of Greek and Latin texts is "completely new" and "completely independent of the Origen Group" (56). The names are presented in genealogical order, not the order of the biblical texts (57). The author's purpose was to present a 'stemma' of Christ and he thus limited his supplementary material to the tribes of Israel only (57). This shows the list is of purely Christian origin, and not Jewish (58). The Origen Group and LGr were created completely independently of one another. If the LGr were really the work of Lactantius, we would be well on the way to understanding how this onomastic work came to be written: Lactantius died in about 330, whereas Jerome did not translate the Philo/Origen list until 390, meaning the LGr would have existed in Latin translation 70 to 90 years earlier, only decades after Origen had completed his work (62). Supposing the Greek text is the prior one, it must therefore date from well before [the year 330] (63). Even though the Latin text is more comprehensive than the Greek fragments at many points, for example in the Exodus material, it too must derive from a Greek vorlage. The order of the Latin text we know must be that which originally prevailed in the lost Greek text, and this proves that the existing Greek fragments are not the vorlage (76). The actions of Jerome, who undoubtedly is the translator of the Origen Group, and had plainly intended to translate everything of this nature that he could lay hands on, indicate that either the LGr did not exist in Jerome's day or that it was unknown to him. The former is unlikely, since the Greek forms of certain names indicate a very early date. So the tradition that Lactantius translated this Greek Onomastica has historical plausibility behind it and should not be rejected without significant reason. Therefore Jerome did not know of the LGr. This is particularly remarkable insofar as other Origen Group lists do consult the LGr (77). Wutz's conclusion bears translating in full:

This thorough examination of the LGr has yielded some remarkable conclusions: A completely independent study of biblical names was composed in Greek by a Christian. If as tradition holds, a translation [into Latin] was performed on African soil at a very early point, six to eight decades before Jerome, then the Greek work must be dated much earlier to a point before the Origen Group. This does not necessarily mean its author worked in Africa. All that we can say is that he had a very good knowledge of Syrian, most probably the Christian Palestinian [dialect]. We have found no evidence to cast doubt on tradition. Up to the time of Jerome, this Onomastica remained almost hermetically sealed off from the numerous Origen Group explanations in circulation, but thereafter it influenced one fork of the Origen Group (96).

Once this false idea of Lactantius's role in the work had been placed in the world, it naturally put down roots. Ilona Opelt in her 1965 encyclopaedia article Etymologie appears to misunderstand Wutz's citation of T and L and compounds the error, describing these Latin codices as "zwei Hss. des Laktanz aus dem 6. und 7. Jh." I cannot see any material from Lactantius listed in the descriptions of codex L by Mommsen and Lagarde.

Let us now turn to the Greek texts of the Laktanzgruppe. Wutz performed a major service by re-edited these. They had earlier been printed by Lagarde and had originally been published by Jean Martianay (1647-1717) and later Dominic Vallarsi (1702-1771). Lagarde had applied the somewhat misleading heading "Onomastica Vaticana" to the pages where the two fragments are printed, although neither of them is in the Apostolic library at the Vatican. Roger Gryson in 1966 proposed fixed sigla, and possibly relying on Opelt 828 and Wutz 238, suggested that a fourth onomastic group be distinguished:

L (Laktanzgruppe)
O (Philo-Origen)
V (Onomastica Vaticana)
C (Glossae Colbertinae)

Wutz states (page xviii) that the Greek redaction of the Laktanzgruppe is to be found in seven manuscripts, while pointing out (page 3) that one 10th-century Rome manuscript, Biblioteca Vallicellana 66,4 (link), contains the source text (249v-254r) of the six others. He differentiates the following two fragments (page 4), but take the view that they once formed separate parts of a single text, now lost:

Lag. 177,63 -- 179,23 (Martianay: fragmentum tertium) == V3
Lag. 179,24 -- 181,83 (Martianay: fragmentum quartum) == V4

We start with V3, whereby line numbers are printed on one margin at every fifth line and the opposite margin contains biblical references keyed to those line numbers. The other numbers are possibly pages of Martinay's and Vallarsi's editions. Obviously, lines 56 to 61 are references, but are not visible on this blog entry because they are not part of V3. I have omitted the footnotes.

Fragmentum tertium (V3)

Fragmentum quartum (V4)

Wutz edited V3 and V4 with a more advanced apparatus than Lagarde had provided and published this at 685-703 of his book. Here is a summary of the names in English, with Lagarde's line numbers in bold, and Wutz's line numbers in italics. Some of the names I could not understand, but I have nevertheless transcribed them:

63 1 65 [Filum of Christ according to Matthew:] Adam 67 Abel 68 Cain Seth Enosh 69 9 Kenan Mahalalel 70 Jared Enoch Methuselah 71 Lamech Noe Shem 72 Ham Japheth [from Shem:] Arpachshad 73 Shelah Eber 74 Nahor 75 Esrom Thara Abram 76 Abraham 77 Isaac 78 Jacob [filum stops here] Esau 79 21 Reuben Simeon 80 Levi Judah 81 Issachar Zebulon Dan 82 Nephtali Gad Aser 83 Joseph Benjamin 84 Melchisedech 86 [Jacob's family from Gen 46:8-25:] Reuben Pallu 87 Carmi 88 31 Simeon Jemuel Jamin Ohad 89 Iachin Zohar 90 Levi Gershon Kohath 91 Merari 92 Judah Er Onan 93 Shelah Perez Zerah 94 Issachar Tola Puvah Iob? 95 Solomon? 96 Zebulun Sered 97 Elom Jahleel 98 Dan [see Wutz 66; sons of Gad:] Ziphion Haggi Shuni 99 48 Ezbon Eri 100 Areli 1 [sons of Dan:] Naphtali Jahzeel 2 Guni Jezer 3 Shillem 4 Gad 5 Asher Imnah Ishvah 6 Ishvi Beria 8 Joseph Ephraim Manasseh 9 Asenath Potiphera 10 Benjamin 11 62 Becher Ashbel Gera 12 Naaman Ehi Rosh 13 Muppim Huppim 14 [From Exodus:] Pithom Rameses Shiphrah 15 Moses 16 Reuel 17 Jethro 18 Perez Hezron Hamul 19 [Additional LXX Josephites:] Ephraim Southalaam Taam 21 Manasseh Galaad 22 Beriah Eber Melchiel 24 Ermeneia (2) 25 78 [Biblical women:] Eve Sarah 26 Agar Rebecca 27 Deborah 28 Zipporah Rachel 29 Aeia? 30 Bersabee Saraa? Tamar 31 Maria 32 Miriam 33 Ruth 34 Serah 36 [Filum of Christ according to Matthew resumed] Perez Hezron Ram 37 Amminadab Nahshon 38 Salmon* Boaz* 39 93 Jesse* David 40 Solomon 41 Rehoboam* Abijam* 42 Asa* 44 Jehoshaphat Jehoram Uzziah* 45 Jotham* Ahaz 46 100 [omissions!] Zedekiah [1st insert:] Madiam 47 Iesba (Jezebel?) Samareia Raasson 48 Romelion Pharaoh 49 Bathouel Chettoura 50 Chet Gerson [Num. 13:6:] Caleb Jephunneh 51 Elias Elissaie 52 Chebron Asaph 53 Gelbone Nelcha 54 110 Edem Gaidad Maiel 55 Adda Sella 56 Thobel Neomin 57 Iarer Chanaan 58 [Races of Japheth:] Gomer Magog 59 Medes Meshech Tiras 60 [of Gomer:] Ashkenaz [of Javan:] Elishah Tarshish 61 Kittim [Races of Ham:] Cush 62 Misraim 63 Put Seba Dedan 64 Nimrod 65 [Place-names:] Babel Erech Shinar 66 Ashur Nineveh Canaan Sidon Chethatha 68 127 [Races of Shem:] Elam Arpachshad 69 Aram Job Gamer 70 Mosoch Eber Joktan Almodad 72 Uzal Obal Abima-el 73 Ored Havilah 74 Aram? Jobab [mixed list:] Nachor 75 Aot Chaldaeans Suchem 76 Bethel Haggai (prophet?) Amarphal (Gen 14:1?) 77 Ariol Heschod 78 Onam 79 [Sinai (corr. Wutz 80-81)] batos* [peoples of Canaan:] Canaan Amorites 80 Girgashites Jebusites [2nd insert:] Daron (=Aaron) 82 143 Sinai? Israel.

The asterisks mark material that Wutz also found in the hypothetical "Lexikon" used by Ambrose of Milan. It is noticeable that the overall order of the names has some similarities to that in the Liber Genealogus, although considerable amounts of material (particularly Fila B and Fila D) are omitted.

Now the plot thickens. The Liber Genealogus has been written about by a series of scholars in the past hundred years, most notably by Paul Monceaux, Hervé Inglebert and Charles McNelis. Frick's exploration of the etymologies was known to them, but as far as I know, none mentions the very important analytical contribution a generation later by Wutz, an oversight which is understandable, since Wutz did not use the current title for the work. As a result, a century of research has proceeded along two tracks. This blog post is, as far as I know, the first time the two tracks have again met.

So the question is, did Lactantius write a glossary of biblical names that was expanded, 100 years after his death, into the Liber Genealogus of 427? Attractive as the idea is, it relies on only the weakest of supports: Wutz's modern "tradition" that associates Lactantius with the text because it is in the Turin manuscript. There does not seem to be any other evidence for such a link. But we do not have any idea who the true author of the etymologies is. One suspects that Wutz, having spent years looking at fanciful names and etymologies, smiled to himself one morning and made up a fanciful name of his own to leave to posterity. I believe that we should continue to use the term Laktanzgruppe, since it has the weight of a century of (somewhat obscure) tradition, while recognizing that it is a misnomer and misleading.

Wutz argues that the Greek text on which V3 and V4 are based is older than the Latin text of 427, and moreover that there is an Armenian branch of the Laktanzgruppe (document cited in a note by Erwin Preuschen (Wutz, 84), further study apparently conducted in 1981 by Michael E. Stone). If this is so, we are obliged to consider how the Laktanzgruppe of etymologies might have diffused. We can conceive of two paths by which it could have reached Donatist North Africa:

A Latin translation, now lost, could have been prepared in the 4th century, and could have lain side by side on the table with the Great Stemma while the Liber Genealogus was being written.
The manuscript may have remained in Greek, untranslated, until a Donatist scholar conceived the bold idea of translating it while using a familiar document, the Great Stemma, as a giver of structure.

The second of these choices is marginally more plausible, given that the underlying motive for writing the Liber Genealogus remains unclear. I have suggested that in the broadest terms it was an ekphrasis of the diagram, but we remain uncertain as to what the incentive to publish it was. A new translation, especially of a work that remained "untainted" by the touch of Catholic writers including Jerome, might perhaps have seemed a rewarding project for a Donatist to undertake.

References

Gryson, Roger. "L'interprétation du nom de Lévi (Lévite) chez saint Ambroise." Sacris Erudiri 17, 2 (1966), 217-229.
Krusch, Bruno. Studien zur christlichen-mittelalterlichen Chronik, Leipzig, 1880.
Lagarde, Paul de. Onomastica Sacra: Pauli De Lagarde Studio Et Sumptibus Alterum Edita. Göttingen, 1887.
Monceaux, Paul. Littérature donatiste au temps de Saint Augustin. Vol. 6. 7 vols. Histoire littéraire de l'Afrique chrétienne depuis les origines jusqu'à l'invasion arabe. Paris, 1922.
Opelt, Ilona. "Etymologie". Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (RAC), 6, col. 829. 1965.
Rouse, Richard, and Charles McNelis. “North African literary activity: A Cyprian fragment, the stichometric lists and a Donatist compendium.” Revue d'histoire des textes 30 (2000): 189-238.
Wutz, Franz. Onomastica sacra: Untersuchungen zum Liber interpretationis nominum hebraicorum des hl. Hieronymus (2 vols). Leipzig, 1914-15.

Miraculous Birds

2011-09-18T21:03:00.015+02:00

Rudolf Wittkower offers the following English translation of the Bird and Serpent text which accompanies many copies of the Great Stemma. It seems worth bringing it online in a searchable, copiable format:

It is maintained that there is a bird in a country of the Orient which, armed with a large and very sharp beak, provokes the snake which he wants to fight with audacious hissing. He covers himself purposely with dirt and also covers the pearls of different colours with which nature has lavishly adorned him. Having thus given himself an insignificant appearance he surprises the enemy by this unfamiliar impression and deceives him, so to speak, by the security which the latter feels in front of his shabby appearance. Holding his tail as a shield in the manner of a warrior before his face, he boldly attacks the head of his furious adversary, pierces the brain of the surprised beast with the unexpected weapon of his beak and thus kills his monstrous enemy by his marvellous intelligence.
Christ girded himself with human weakness and enveloped himself with the dirt of our flesh to fight in the shape of man for the benefit of salvation and to deceive the godless deceiver with pious fraud, and he concealed his former shape with the latter, throwing, as it were, the tail of his humanity before the face of divinity, and extinguished as if with a strong beak the poisonous malice of the old murderer of men through the word of his mouth. Therefore the Apostle says: Through the word of his mouth he will kill the wicked.

From: Rudolph Wittkower. 'Miraculous Birds.' Journal of the Warburg Institute (1938), Volume 1, Issue 3, pages 253-257. DOI: 10.2307/750013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/750013. Wittkower probably intended the last phrase to be "the sword of his mouth," but this has been spoiled by an officious proof-reader. The biblical text referred to is Revelation 2:16.

The text has a French translation in: Bord, Lucien-Jean, and Piotr Skubiszewski. L’image de Babylone aux serpents dans les Beatus: Contribution à l’étude des influences du Proche-Orient antique dans l’art du haut Moyen Age. Paris: Cariscript, 2000.

Wittkower and Neuss located the image in five Beatus manuscripts: three of them alongside Alpha recensions of the Great Stemma (Gerona, Turin, Manchester). The others were Urgell (Gamma) and Saint-Sever (Sigma). The image, without the text, is also found near a Great Stemma, in a biblical Delta manuscript, the San Millàn Bible, spread across two pages.

The Rylands version of the image in Manchester is online. Moleiro has a watermarked version of the Gerona image online. The French website Encylopedie Universelle reproduces a detail of the same (about 975, folio 18v). It also has a relatively large image from the Saint-Sever Beatus (about 1060, folio 13). Turin and Urgell are not imaged online as far as I know.

The Latin, as transcribed by Wilhelm Neuss, is as follows:

Quedam esse avis in regione orietentalis asseritur, quae grandi et perduro armatoque rostro contra draconem quem audacibus lacessit sibilis pugnaturam coenum de industria expetit, e cuius volutabro teiro habitu infecta sordescit et diversorum gernmas colorum quibus eam indulgentiam natura depinxit. Et humili despecta vestitu ita hostem novitate deterreat et quasi vilitatis suae securitate decipiat. Caudam velut scutum ante faciem suam quadam arte bellatoris opponit audaci impetu in capud adversarii furentis adsurgit, improviso oris sui telo stupentis bestiae cerebrum fodit, et sic mirae calliditatis ingenio immanem prosternit inimicum.
Informa hominis pugnaturus ad militiam salutis publicae humana se infirmitate praecinxit ac luto se nostrae carnis involvit ut impium deceptorem pia fraude deciperet, et postremis priora celavit ac velut caudam humanitatis ante faciem divinitatis objecit, et tamquam rostro fortissimo venenatam veteris homicidae malitiam verbo sui oris extinxit. Unde et apostolus dicit: verbo oris sui interficiet impium.

Office Buildings

2011-08-23T00:15:00.005+02:00

I have already described my presentation in Berlin on August 18 to the German chapter of the Society for News Design (report).

It was curious that my host there brought along some images of extremely disciplined trees: persons represented by rectangles, each generation rigidly parked in its own storey, rather like an office building. This fierce axial character contrasts with the much looser attitude to space of the Great Stemma author. Late Antique stemmata are really about paths through space, and are not at all like grids.

Stemma, Maps and Matrices

2011-08-22T21:03:00.008+02:00

Now that we have the Great Stemma published online, it's a good time to consider what sort of commonalities it has with the "arbor juris" diagrams in Isidore's Etymologies and with the Peutinger Map. The most important observation is that all three are in a sense calques of the board game, where the meaning arises from traversing through the diagram, much as you jump a counter over the squares or circles of a board towards a goal.

As an itinerarium, Peutinger is all about paths and distances, and not at allhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif about spatial arrangements. One might argue that this is an adaptation to fit its roll form, but I wonder if this isn't a kind of deliberate elaboration from what would be needed for a mere map into something more sophisticated. As it happens, today's IHT edition of the New York Times reports on an ingenious new way of representing cities that overlaps a perspective view into a bird's eye view. It was designed by London's Berg studio and is an exhibit at the NY Museum of Modern Art. The Peutinger Map may not be a broken or primitive map, but instead a highly sophisticated meta-map like the Berg one (I won't comment here on the Richard Talbert proposal that the map is more show-off than practical).

One could argue that the common feature of Peutinger, the arbor iuris, the Great Stemma and also items such as the arbor porphyriana is the invitation to the reader to discover and explore paths, usually crooked paths. That is what the fila and the hypothetical timeline of the Great Stemma are about. The open question is about how accurately the fila and timeline were aligned with one another.

One important ancillary point, to my mind, is that our knowledge of all these graphic schemes is diminished by the difficulty that every scribe, whether Antique or medieval, must have had in accurately copying technical drawings by hand. Last year, I copied the triangular version of the "arbor iuris" and found it a very tricky task, even with good graphics software to help me.

Practice at copying these ingenious graphics has been helpful in understanding their transmission. When I am looking at a poor copy of a drawing, I now assume that its predecessor was more observant of the regularities generally. The more accurate predecessors of these drawings might have had a lot more fine-scale axial information, which is the easiest feature to get out of alignment, as we also seen in the Eusebian Chronological Canons.

But we cannot even begin to reverse this degradation unless we know what equipment such a copyist used when reproducing such drawings, and there I am afraid I have not read enough research. My understanding is that desks were uncommon: according to Kurt Weitzmann, texts were commonly copied onto papyrus rolls by a scribe sitting tailor-style, wearing a tight skirt as the support for his papyrus, which was laid obliquely over the left knee. In the early codex period, the folios were also inscribed on two knees (at least that is true of the Spanish monastery depicted in one of the Beatus codices). It seems to me that big graphics like the Great Stemma could not be competently copied that way, especially if straight axes had to be preserved. I have not studied how paintings were reproduced, but would guess that this done on tables or easels, since the artist had to be at some distance from his canvas to wield his brush.

When we consider how a pen-drawing was copied, I can only speculate. My guess would be that this was a job for a specialist. A tracing through translucent "paper" of some nature? Hardly likely, as the customer would surely expect a product on a robust support. In the 19th century, technical draftsmen used technology such as pantagraphs, but I doubt if these were known in Late Antiquity.

Again, I am only guessing, but I would suppose that the most efficient method would be to stretch a net over the source, another net over the destination, and plot each square or hexagon from one to the other. If a non-specialist scribe were given the task, he might not have the equipment, or the training, or the wit, or the time to do this. If he were particularly incompetent, he would not even complete each panel left to right but might simply hurl squiggles on the page to represent his "overall impression" of the model, then fill the gaps. The Urgell Beatus version of the Great Stemma exemplifies that sort of chaotic, ill-planned copy. It is hardly surprising that we have rather little of the pen-drawings of Antiquity.

Now, I think this encourages us to contemplate the question of Antique "technical" drawing with more attention to the intelligence behind each drawing than to the deficiencies in execution of any of its copies (this was my criticism of Klapisch-Zuber). To some extent, we may be able to at least discover the right questions to ask by looking at collective memory, the practices in other periods, and even our own perceptions. The answers to those questions naturally depend on evidence, but we should try to connect to the intelligence or the intention of the Antique authors.

Infographics Meeting

2011-08-21T12:57:00.005+02:00

I did a presentation on Thursday to a monthly meeting of the Society for News Design in Berlin, and there is a short note on it here by Dagmar Gehl, a PhD candidate at the University of Trier who has been completing a thesis on how adequately people understand "multimodal print clusters" (that is, graphics and text).
The questions fom the listeners as I went along were helpful in showing what audiences find surprising about this material.
One immediate question was: why there were so few daughters in the "family tree of Christ"? The answer: the Great Stemma author, working circa 420 A.D., is faithfully reproducing material that was nearly 1,000 years old in his own time. So the heavily male bias merely reflects the bias of the material he was given. The 540 names in the Great Stemma are certainly a selection from two or three times as many biblical names, but gender is not a factor in the selection.
Other questions focussed on why people wanted to construct genealogies in the first place, or how "true" they are. That is such a wide question that I usually steer away from discussing it, since I would like my audiences to focus more on the "how" of producing a flow chart, or organization chart, or dendrogram, or family tree, and why the visualization can be more useful as a communication medium than a text. But of course it can be legitimately discussed, and I do intend to broach the wider issue in the book I am writing about the research.

Oxford Patristics Conference

2011-08-11T21:18:00.004+02:00

I've done the presentation at last of the Great Stemma, to a qualified audience at the Oxford Patristics Conference today, followed by fruitful chats with three leading professors with close knowledge of the issues it raises. There were about 50 people at the session. After all these years of speaking, it still feels a bit strange to have an audience staring at you, seemingly unresponsive, though they are actually busy mentally processing what you say. They were great, and it was a kind of out-of-nowhere topic. Conference participants who had been told about it in advance were prepared, and said encouraging things afterwards. There was even a little murmer of laughter when I suggested the Great Stemma was like a PowerPoint slide. Thanks for being a great audience!

Liber Genealogus Text

2011-07-22T08:53:00.002+02:00

Just in time for the Oxford Patristics Conference, I have completed a new, structured edition of the Liber Genealogus and published it online here: www.piggin.net/stemmahist/libertext.htm.
Last summer I wasted a couple of weeks marking up a different recension of the Liber, that of Turin, in the mistaken belief that it was the earliest. This time I seem to have tracked down the recension that is truly the first, that of St Gall. It contains a subscription indicating it was written in 427 CE. I have keyed the transcript to the pages of the St Gall manuscript (I will make these hotlinks when it comes online). The manuscript page numbers begin with 299 (this particular codex is numbered by pages, not by folios). I have placed the etymological glosses in a column of their own at the right, which helps to make clearer how the author worked as he read his data from the Great Stemma diagram. The numbering is Mommsen's. It breaks the text into sections of wildly varying size, and I find it illogical, but it has been established as authoritative. Perhaps we can devise a better numbering system in the future.

Oxford Patristics Conference

2011-07-08T22:06:00.003+02:00

Here is the Oxford Patristics Conference web announcement of my paper to be delivered August 11: The Great Stemma: A Late Antique diagram of Christ's descent from Adam. They have put me in Room 10 at the Examination Rooms among the communications taking place on the Thursday on Art. I'm looking forward to it a lot.

Reconstruction

2011-06-06T19:22:00.002+02:00

A first reconstruction of the Great Stemma is complete. This has been accomplished using OpenOffice Draw, separating the various elements into approximately 10 layers. The reconstruction will be issued at the Oxford Patristics Conference in August.

E-Codices

2011-05-28T18:21:00.024+02:00

Some very good news from Professor Christoph Flüeler of the E-Codices manuscript digitization project in Switzerland. I asked him if Cod. Sang. 133, a little codex that is hugely important to the history of books, was likely to be released on the E-Codices website, and he replied that his team would speed this one up and make sure it is issued on the web in the next few months. This is magnificent. I am a big fan of E-Codices, which is a key source in Antiquity studies.

Cod. Sang. 133 in the Abbey Library at St. Gall in Switzerland is an important source in understanding the antique book trade, since it contains a set of more or less intact stichometric lists. These were computations of the length of books, calibrated in στιχοι or stichoi, that were used to set both the cost of transcription (the scribe's wages) and the book price (what the bookseller charged).

Cod. Sang. 133 contain fourth-century measurements of the books of the Bible and the 28 works of Cyprian. We know from the writer Galen (quoted here by Diels) that a Greek stichos or unit was 16 syllables, and this source confirms a Roman stichos, or verse, was similarly 16 Latin syllables.

Once described by Bernhard Bischoff as the "oldest document of the Christian book trade" and used by scholars such as Bruce Metzger to estimate the bulk of early bibles, this record gives us an insight into the economics of book publishing. The content is of course dry, for example:

This translates as:
The Four Gospels:
Matthew, 2700 lines
John, 1800 lines
Mark, 1700 lines
Luke, 3300 lines
All the lines make 10,000 lines.

But there are some interesting observations. The author lets fly for example at exploitative Roman booksellers for their slack and cheating ways with his beloved Cyprian:
Because the index of verses in Rome is not clearly given, and because in other places too, as a result of greed, they do not preserve it in full, I have gone through the books one by one, counting sixteen syllables per line, and have appended to each book the number of Virgilian hexameters it contains (Rouse translation).

The St. Gall manuscript, written during the late 8th or early 9th century, probably at St. Gall itself, and another manuscript, Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Vitt. Em. 1325 (handwritten catalog entry in Italian here, formerly Cheltenham or Phillipps 12266), written at Nonantola in the 10th or early 11th century, are the key practical records we have about the stichometric method.

These North African lists, the so-called indicula, were discovered (it seems) by the great Theodor Mommsen, who wrote them up in 1886. Mommsen expanded his fame with this codex in the late 19th century, publishing the Liber Genealogus in his MGH series. It also contains a curious work, the Inventiones Nominum, which mentions a good many unusual biblical names that never made it into canonical scripture.

The St. Gall codex was revisited in 2000 by eminent US professor Richard Rouse, who argued that the 11 items discovered by Mommsen in the collection (see below) were not a random group of texts, but formed an intact North African reference book or compendium. It had travelled through the centuries together and had been put together by Donatist scholars, according to Rouse and his co-writer Charles McNelis.

The St Gall codex is of quite a small format, which explains why the Liber Genealogus, not a very long work, fills 49 of its folios: there is not that much writing on each side. The script is very clear and the parchment clean, which suggests it was probably not very heavily used in its day. This text of the Liber is the earliest recension (the direct description of the Great Stemma) and therefore the most important.

Here is Mommsen's Latin description of the compendium, interspersed with text from Scherrer's 1875 St. Gall printed catalog, with one or two additions by me (the English bits, obviously):

Cod. Sang. 133

Pgm. 8° s. VIII u. IX; 657 (656) pages.

Scherrer: Drei oder vier Handschriften in einem Band. [Preceded by Eusebius/Jerome on Holy Land place-names. Followed by Isidore Chronicon pp 523-590 and 'Incipit cuius supra Goti de Magog Jafet filio orti' pp 590-597. Pages 598-601 blank.]

Mommsen: saec . IX formae octonariae praeter alia quae recenset catalogus editus p. 48 [Scherrer] a glutinatore demum cum his compacta medio loco p. 299-597 continet commentaries qui sequuntur:

1. p. 299 – 396 librum genealogum infra editum. [Scherrer: S. 299-396: 'Inc. liber genera(tio)num vel nominum patrum vel filiorum vet. test. vel novi a s. Hieronimo prbo conpraehensum etc. Incipit genilocus sci Hieronimi prb.' Am Ende: 'Explicit liber genealogus.' (Unbekannt und nicht von Hieronymus; reicht, laut p. 396, bis zum Jahr der Welt 5879 oder bis zum Consulat 'hieri et ardabii.')]

2. p. 397 – 420 incipiunt prophetiae ex omnibus libris collecte. quae prophetiae membra habent .... cecidisse in hanc voluntate perseverantes caeci a dei fide lapsi sunt ignorantes. expl . coll . prophet . veteris novique testamenti. [Scherrer: S. 397-426: 'Incip. prophetiae ex omnibus libris collecte.' (Katechese).]

3. p. 420′– 421 incipiunt virtutes Haeliae quae eius merito a domino factae sunt. prima virtus. clausit caelum . . . sublatus est in caelo.

4. p. 421 – 426 incipiunt etiam Helisei virtutes. prima virtus. de melote divisa est .... post mortem suam revixit. expl.

5. p. 427 – 454′ inc̅p̅t̅ inventi̅o̅n̅ nomi̅n̅ , duo sunt Adam , unus est protoplaustus .... et alius est Domires vir sponsor Teclae: inter ambas autem sunt an̅n̅ ferme DCCLXX. [Scherrer: S. 427-492: 'Incipt. invention. nominum.' (Aufzählung von Personen- und Völkernamen des A. T.).]

6. 454′– 484′ sequitur liber generationis cum praescriptione hac: haec sunt diutissime . . . . . . anni sunt v̅dccccxviii (vide infra p . 89), sed c . 240 – 331 ad brevem epitomam redactis et ad eius finem inserta computatione quae statim referetur adsunt rursus nostrae editionis c. 333 – 361, abest pars extrema c . 361 – 398: subscriptum expl .

7. p. 484 – 485 item interpretationes filiorum Iacob de Hebreo in Latino. amen vere. Ruben dei spiritus cet.

8. p. 485 – 488 item interpretationes Hebreas in Latin translatas . Hebrea lingua triplex .

9. p. 488 – 492 incipit indiculum veteris testamenti , item novi et Caecili Cipriani, quos indices versum numerum per singulos libros enuntiantes ex gemello libro Cheltenhamensi edidi in Hermae volumine 21 p . 142 seq. librarius iam is qui archetypum scripsit indices eos ad librum generationis non pertinentes neque ei continuatos ad titulorum eius laterculum adiunxit (v. p. 89 not.).

10. p. 492 item interpretationes Hebreas in Latinum . Maria domina cet. [Scherrer: S. 492-522: 'Interpretationes hebreas in latinum etc. Nomina locorum et interpr. nominum de hebreo in latinum. (Excerpte aus Hieron. Liber de interpr. nom. hebr. Opp. ed. Mart. II, von p. 3 bis circa p. 83.)

11. p. 493 – 522 nomina locorum et interpretatio nominum de Hebreo in Latinum. Hermon regio Hebreorum cet. similesque interpretationes aliae.

There is a very old Wikipedia article on stichometry, which I have just fixed a bit. Not just old in the sense of posted in 2005, but old because it was copied from a 100-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica: it stated that one of the codices is at Cheltenham in Sir Thomas Phillipps's collection. In fact that collection was broken up and sold a century ago. This codex was purchased by the Italian state, and I have altered the Wikipedia article accordingly.

At the Oxford Patristics Conference

2011-05-27T21:05:00.004+02:00

I have been accepted to present a paper on the Great Stemma at the Oxford Patristics Conference which takes place in England August 8-12. The paper will be a short communication delivered during one of the parallel sessions when participants can divide up according to the area that interests them.

Here is my abstract (I think I am allowed to publish this, though the paper itself is under wraps until delivery):

The annotated diagram which spans eight folios of Florence Laurenziana Plutei 20.54, ff 38r-45v is demonstrably Late Antique in origin. This little-studied Latin work, partly published by Wilhelm Neuss and Bonifatius Fischer, presents a genealogy from Adam to Christ. It is also found in a cluster of Spanish bibles and the Apocalypse commentary of Beatus of Liébana. The anonymous author worked entirely from the Vetus Latina rather than from Jerome's Vulgate. We can study how a Late Antique author used complex graphics in place of prose to include a non-canonical figure, Joachim, as father of the Virgin within the genealogy of Christ. He structured the diagram around a timeline based on Eusebius's Chronological Canons. The paper will present a reconstruction of the diagram's archetype, arguing that it was originally a chart displaying synchronisms between scripture and history. It suggests that information graphics were a tool in early Christian literature.

Ekphrasis

2011-05-26T07:33:00.007+02:00

In the classic sense, ekphrasis means a poem that vividly describes a work of art or other physical artefact. During the Greek period, such texts might describe weapons, exceptional clothing, household items of superior craftsmanship (urns, cups, baskets) and splendid buildings.

This form of expression connects with the Roman pride in showing off one's education (paideia) at dinner parties which Michael Squire describes (p. 219) in his book Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Learned discussions of myths and philology were the bread and butter of the cena and convivium, and it seems to have been de rigueur to intersperse dinner with all manner of literary entertainments, he notes. Even Petronius's Trimalchio appreciates that 'one must know one's philology at dinner' (oportet etiam inter cenandum philologiam nosse: Petron. Sat. 39.3), though getting his own woefully wrong, Squire notes.

Squire traces this back to Hellenistic examples, quoting (p. 239) a passage in Greek (Dom. 2) from Lucian's On the Hall: When it comes to what we see, the same law does not apply for ordinary as for learned men. For the former, it is enough to do the usual thing: simply to gaze, look around ... But when a man of learning looks upon what is beautiful, he would not, I think, be content with harvesting his delight in looking alone, nor would he allow himself to witness their beauty in silence; instead, he will do all he can to take his time and to reciprocate the image with speech.

Lucian's speaker later says: 'Visual judgement lies not in the act of looking, but a rational eloquence also concurs with what is seen' (Dom. 6, quoted Squire p. 240). Addressing this Hellenistic 'etiquette of viewing', Squire adds (p. 243): 'The art of being an educated viewer once again becomes the art of being equipped with paideia - of having the terms, language and knowledge to articulate what is remarkable in an image.

The remainder of Squire's argument, that 'verbally mediated responses might actually force viewers to look harder at what they saw' (p. 247), need not concern us here. Instead, I am concerned with the relationship between the Great Stemma and the Liber Genealogus. The one is a very large and impressive diagram, the other an extended text which muses, in list order, on the etymology of biblical names and drops in various tendentious remarks of a Donatist nature about the Church of Rome. In the order of the material, the earliest, G recension of the Liber Genealogus closely follows the diagram. It is all but inconceivable that this order would have been independently adopted without reference to the diagram.

We are thus left with the issue of how and why the Liber Genealogus was written.

It seems to me that the practice of ekphrasis offers a plausible hypothesis to explain its creation. Much of what we read in the Liber seems to be a response to the visualization, perhaps by a Christian displaying both classical learning and biblical knowledge. It might be too fanciful to imagine three or four Christian literati going out to dine with a secretary at hand to jot down what they say and the Great Stemma pinned up on the wall of the dining room. But certainly the Liber does seem to be written with the purpose of dazzling somebody with the eloquence and resourcefulness of its etymological speculation about Hebrew names of the Bible.

Liber Genealogus

2011-04-10T22:43:00.005+02:00

A 9,000-word study of the links between the Liber Genealogus and the Great Stemma more or less completes my detailed research into the oldest stemma diagram known. I have just placed this new article online. I do not pretend it offers any great amusement: it is rather dry stuff. But we need the detail to assemble the case that the Liber is the textual account of someone who had read the Stemma, or something like it. I don't think many people read the Liber Genealogus: it is difficult to see what use it ever was to any reader. Mommsen's edition of the Liber does not help the contemporary reader much either. It is not particularly easy to use, given that the composite Mommsen text overlays the original G recension with material from the Origo Humani Generis and a lot of Donatist disputation. It might have almost been easier for me to just read a manuscript. Unfortunately, the best and oldest one is not online. The excellent Swiss e-codices project has not yet digitized Cod. Sang. 133, which contains the G recension dating from the late 8th or early 9th century. That is quite impressive: this codex was penned less than 400 years after the Liber Genealogus was written in 427. In the absence of this much-needed digital work, one can only consult Plutei 20.54 in Florence, which contains the inferior F recension. This is in fact the same codex that contains the most primitive form of the Great Stemma.

Greek Place-Names

2011-03-09T09:11:00.003+01:00

An interesting blog post from last year by Nick Nicholas on old Greek names for a stretch of coast that is much in the news at the moment. Hippolytus's Chronicon comprehensively lists places that a mariner might need to know about on the desert coast of North Africa.

New Revisions

2011-03-08T09:14:00.002+01:00

So we now have two new pages on the site: one deals in more detail with Eusebius and the likely debt of the Great Stemma to his Chronological Canons. The other explores in more detail the oddities of the Ordo Romanorum Regum. I have also fully revised the bibliography to make it more comprehensive.

Ordo Annorum Mundi

2011-02-17T08:23:00.003+01:00

A new page, dealing with the Ordo Annorum Mundi, has now been placed on the Macro-Typography website. It seems to me that the OAM may be a piece of writing by the Great Stemma's author, but I am still looking for the killer evidence. The OAM seems to appear only in Iberian-origin manuscripts, but has achieved wider diffusion through its incorporation in the Commentary on the Apocalypse of Beatus of Liebana.

The Vetus Latina Hispana of Ayuso

2011-02-16T23:33:00.011+01:00

In 1953, Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela published the first volume of his Vetus Latina Hispana. It was an ambitious project, presumably with government funding, to recover the bible texts that circulated in Iberia before the introduction of Jerome's Vulgate. It was in direct rivalry with the Vetus Latina that was being reconstructed at the Abbey of Beuron in Germany, and it was awarded a prize (marked on the title page) in the name of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Ayuso devised his own numbering system for the codices and other manuscripts he used. The numbers seem to have fallen completely out of use, but are still essential in reading scholarly Spanish articles of the period, in particular Ayuso's own writing, about biblical manuscripts. Since the numbers seem to be nowhere on the internet, I am tabulating them online in the hope they can be of service to modern scholars.

The left column comprises the VLH or Ayuso numbers themselves, followed by the abbreviations commonly used and the sequence numbers for each manuscript of the same provenance. For example, Leg² or Legionense² is the Codex gothicus. Burgense¹ is the Burgos Bible, also called Biblia de San Pedro de Cardena. The last column lists the (1953) locations of the manuscripts.

1	Guelf		Vaticano -Guelferbitano	Vaticano
2	Tur		Turonense	Paris
3	Fragm. To		Fragmentos toledanos	Toledo
4	Freís		Fragmentos de Freising	München
5	Palimps		Palimpsesto de León	León
6	Ottob		Ottoboniano	Vaticano
7	Lugd	1	Lugdunense	Lyon
8	Lugd	2	Lugdunense	Paris
9	Escu	1	Eseurialense	El Escorial
10	Ov	1	Ovetense (Desaparecido)	Oviedo
11	Luxeuil		Leccionario de Luxeuil	Paris
12	Ov	2	Ovetense (Desaparecido)	Oviedo. Escorial
13	Cav		Cavense	Cava
14	Cav dpdo		Cavense duplicado	Vaticano
15	To	1	Toledano	Madrid
16	To dpdo		Toledano duplicado	Vaticano
17	Co	1	Complutense	Madrid
18	Co	2	Complutense	Madrid
19	Leg	1	Legionense	León
20	On		Oniense	Salamanca
21	Leg	2	Legionense	León
22	Leg dpdo		Legionense duplicado	Vaticano
23	Leg	3	Legionense supuesto (Desaparecido)	León
24	Emil	1	Emilianense	Madrid
25	Burg	1	Burgense	Burgos
26	Valv		Valvanerense (Desaparecido)	Escorial
27	To	2	Toledano	Toledo
28	Pin		Pinatense	Madrid
29	Moz		Breviario Mozárabe	Madrid
30	Psalt	1	Salterio	Madrid
31	Psalt	2	Salterio	Madrid
32	Psalt	3	Salterio	Madrid
33	Psalt	4	Salterio	London
34	Psalt	5	Salterio	Nogent-sur-Marne
35	Psalt	6	Salterio	Escorial
36	Psalt	7	Salterio	Madrid
37	Psalt	8	Salterio	Santiago
38	Cant		Liber Canticorum	Madrid
39	Com	1	Liber Commicus	Toledo
40	Com	2	Liber Commicus	París
41	Com	3	Liber Commicus	León
42	Com	4	Liber Commicus	Madrid
43	Seg	1	Seguntino	Sigüenza
44	Esc	2	Escurialense	El Escorial
45	Tolos	1	Tolosano	Toulouse
46	Tolos	2	Tolosano	Toulouse
46*	Esc		Escurialense Misceláneo (not a bible)	El Escorial
47	Lugd	3	Lugdunense	Lyon
48	Teod		Teodulfiano	Paris
49	Anic		Aniciense	Le Puy
50	Bern		Bernense	Bern
51	Hub		Hubertiano	London
52	Sang		Sangermanense	Paris
53	Sang		Sangermanense	Paris
54	Sang		Sangermanense	Paris
55	Riq		Saint Riquier	Paris
56	Laud		Laudiano	Oxford
57	Mon		Monacense	München
58	Aur		Aureo	Escorial
59	Cas	1	Casinense	Monte Cassino
60	Cas	2	Casinense	Monte Cassino
61	Cas	3	Casinense	Monte Cassino
62	Cas	4	Casinense	Monte Cassino
63	To	3	Toledano	Toledo
64	Matr	2	Matritense	Madrid
65	Matr	3	Matritense	Madrid
66	Matr	4	Matritense	Madrid
67	Matr	5	Matritense	Madrid
68	Matr	6	Matritense	Madrid
69	Matr	7	Matritense	Madrid
70	Matr	8	Matritense	Madrid
71	Purp		Purpúreo (Desaparacido)	Urgel
72	Urg		Urgelense	Urgel
73	Rip		Ripollense	Vaticano
74	Roa		Rodense	Paris
75	Vic	1	Vicense	Vich
76	Vic	2	Vicense	Vich
77	Vic	3	Vicense	Vich
78	Vic	4	Vicense	Vich
79	Par	1	Parisiense	Paris
80	Par	2	Parisiense	Paris
81	Par	3	Parisiense	Paris
82	Esc	3	Escurialense	El Escorial
83	Mall		Malloricense	Palma
84	Leg	3	Legionense	León
85	Leg	4	Legionense	León
86	Leg	5	Legionense	León
87	Leg	6	Legionense	León
88	Leg	7	Legionense	León
89	Osc		Oscense	Madrid
90	Matr	9	Matritense	Madrid
91	Burg	2	Burgense	Burgos
92	Burg	3	Burgense	Burgos
93	Cal		Calagurritano	Calahorra
94	Emil	2	Emilianense	Madrid
95	Ler		llerdense	Lérida
96	Co	2	Complutenses	Madrid
97	Av		Avilense	Madrid
98	Esc	4	Escurialense	El Escorial
99	Alf		Alfonsino (Desaparacido)	Barcelona?
100	Avig		Avignoniense (Desaparcido)	Avignon?
101	Barc	1	Barcinonense	Barcelona
102	Barc	2	Barcinonense	Barcelona
103	Barc	3	Barcinonense	Barcelona
104	Barc	4	Barcinonense	Barcelona
105	Barc	5	Barcinonense	Barcelona
106	Bil	1	Bilbilitano	Calatayud
107	Bil	2	Bilbilitano	Calatayud
108	Burg	4	Burgense	Burgos
109	Burg	5	Burgense	Burgos
110	Cal		Calagurritano	Calahorra
111	Conc		Concentainense	Concentaina
112	Dar		Darocense	Daroca
113	Esc	5	Escurialense	El Escorial
114	Esc	6	Escurialense	El Escorial
115	Esc	7	Escurialense	El Escorial
116	Esc	8	Escurialense	El Escorial
117	Esc	9	Escurialense	El Escorial
118	Esc	10	Escurialense	El Escorial
119	Esc	11	Escurialense	El Escorial
120	Esc	12	Escurialense	El Escorial
121	Esc	13	Escurialense	El Escorial
122	Esc	14	Escurialense	El Escorial
123	Esc	15	Escurialense	El Escorial
124	Esc	16	Escurialense	El Escorial
125	Esc	17	Escurialense	El Escorial
126	Esc	18	Escurialense	El Escorial
127	Esc	19	Escurialense	El Escorial
128	Esc	20	Escurialense	El Escorial
129	Esc	21	Escurialense	El Escorial
130	Esc	22	Escurialense	El Escorial
131	Esc	23	Escurialense	El Escorial
132	Esc	24	Escurialense	El Escorial
133	Esc	25	Escurialense	El Escorial
134	Esc	26	Escurialense	El Escorial
135	Hisp		Hispalense	Sevilla
136	Mall	2	Malloricense	Palma
137	Mall	3	Malloricense	Palma
138	Matr	10	Matritense	Madrid
139	Matr	11	Matritense	Madrid
140	Matr	12	Matritense	Madrid
141	Matr	13	Matritense	Madrid
142	Matr	14	Matritense	Madrid
143	Matr	15	Matritense	Madrid
144	Matr	16	Matritense	Madrid
145	Matr	17	Matritense	Madrid
146	Matr	18	Matritense	Madrid
147	Matr	19	Matritense	Madrid
148	Matr	20	Matritense	Madrid
149	Matr	21	Matritense	Madrid
150	Matr	22	Matritense	Madrid
151	Matr	23	Matritense	Madrid
152	Matr	24	Matritense	Madrid
153	Matr	25	Matritense	Madrid
154	Matr	26	Matritense	Madrid
155	Matr	27	Matritense	Madrid
156	Matr	28	Matritense	Madrid
157	Matr	29	Matritense	Madrid
158	Matr	30	Matritense	Madrid
159	Matr	31	Matritense	Madrid
160	Matr	32	Matritense	Madrid
161	Matr	33	Matritense	Madrid
162	Matr	34	Matritense	Madrid
163	Matr	35	Matritense	Madrid
164	Matr	36	Matritense	Madrid
165	Matr	37	Matritense	Madrid
166	Matr	38	Matritense	Madrid
167	Oxorm		Oxomense	Burgo de Osma
168	Par	4	Parisiense	Paris
169	Plas	1	Plasentino	Plasencia
170	Plas	2	Plasentino	Plasencia
171	Salm		Salmanticense	Salamanca
172	Segov		Segoviense	Segovia
173	Segunt		Seguntino	Sigüenza
174	Ser		Serenense	Villanueva de la Serena
175	Sor		Soriano	Soria
176	Tar		Tarraconense	Tarragona
177	Tir		Tirasonense	Tarazona
178	To	4	Toledano	Toledo
179	To	5	Toledano	Toledo
180	To	6	Toledano	Toledo
181	To	7	Toledano	Toledo
182	To	8	Toledano	Toledo
183	To	9	Toledano	Toledo
184	To	10	Toledano	Toledo
185	To	11	Toledano	Toledo
186	To	12	Toledano	Toledo
187	To	13	Toledano	Toledo
188	To	14	Toledano	Toledo
189	To	15	Toledano	Toledo
190	To	16	Toledano	Toledo
191	To	17	Toledano	Toledo
192	To	18	Toledano	Toledo
193	To	19	Toledano	Toledo
194	To	20	Toledano	Toledo
195	Urg	2	Urgelitano	Urgel
196	Urg	3	Urgelitano	Urgel
197	Valent	1	Valentino	Valencia
198	Valent	2	Valentino	Valencia
199	Valent	3	Valentino	Valencia
200	Valent	4	Valentino	Valencia
201	Valv	2	Valvanerense	Valvanera
202	Vat		Vaticano	Vaticano
203	Zar	1	Zaragozano	Zaragoza
204	Zar	2	Zaragozano	Zaragoza

You are welcome to copy my list and reproduce it as you wish, though a credit would be appreciated. As far as I can assess, the list in the book can no longer be subject to copyright, and in any case I have modified it to present it here on the web.
There is one peculiarity, perhaps a lapse in attention by Ayuso. Pages 25-6 (IV. Lista de codices espanoles o de origen hispanico estudiados, numeros y siglas correspondientes) list 203 sources only, while pages 347-83 (Los manuscritos bíblicos espanoles) contain a list that is one element longer. The extra item in the latter list comes at position number 113, Escurialense⁵, which is inexplicably missed from the summary table, so that every item below it is displaced by one position when the two lists are compared. In the above tabulation, I have followed the numbering on pages 347-83, since this seems to be correct. Perhaps there is an errata page, or a handwritten correction, in a copy in a Spanish library, and I would be grateful to anyone willing to check this. But there is no such correction in the Hamburg State Library copy, which is now in a suburban stack and does not seem to have been much used down the years.

A Latin Counterpart to Eusebius?

2011-01-19T10:12:00.004+01:00

Six years ago, Roger Pearse led a magnificent distributed effort to create an English translation of the Chronological Canons of Eusebius. This was a work in Greek, now mostly lost, that we know through a Latin translation by Jerome and through Armenian translations from the Greek. The translation of the Canons is freely available as two (very large) HTML tables, beginning here on Tertullian.org or mirrored at CCEL here. They may take a while to download to your screen. The Latin of Jerome has also been tabulated on the same websites.
The chronological canons explore synchronisms in the histories of the cultures arrayed between Rome and Persia, keyed to biblical history starting at the birth of Abraham.

So what has this got to do with the Great Stemma? Well, it seems that both are essentially about the same thing, synchronisms. Eusebius created what was in a sense the world's first spreadsheet, with a patient scribe doing the autofill of dates in sequence down the left column. Eusebius then filled in events across the rows from the chronicles of the various civilizations he knew, Graeco-Roman and barbarian. Anthony Grafton in Christianity and the Transformation of the Book explores how revolutionary this method of visualizing information was. One point he might have made, but I don't think he did, is the importance of blank space in this content. The blanks are a key to reading the tabulation. There's a certain tension about it, because Eusebius obviously knew a lot of the content was rubbish, but he puts it in and lets the reader judge.

Now, the Great Stemma, in my view, must have done the same thing, but working left to right, and takes another step forward technically by eliminating the scale of years.
I've now posted a hypothetical reconstruction (link) of how the chronographical elements in the Great Stemma might have looked.

How was it progress to simplify Eusebius? The chart shows the reader the various synchronisms in the Bible: the descendants of Seth with the offspring of Cain, the offspring of Nathan with those of Solomon, the kings of Judah with those of Samaria, the founders of Rome with the Persians. But it finds a way to mix the resolution of the matches. In some cases it can state in a gloss to an exact year what is synchronous. In other cases it gives just a rough estimate of synchronicity, give or take a few hundred years. The author was probably teaching his students that the offspring of Cain were wiped out by the Great Flood, but thanks to his page design he does not need to say exactly when Lamech the Boaster lived or when Noema introduced her a capella music: he just draws them as a series of roundels crawling along the foot of the page till they stop. Big fat roundels don't need to be precisely placed. So in a sense, the Great Stemma is the first mind map: information in bubbles. If it had any kind of exactitude, this was probably confined to a separate tabulation. Perhaps the Ordo Annorum Mundi is that tabulation. We'll have to keep looking into this.

Eusebius obviously had the same issue to contend with. In fact he explains that some of his data is less exact, with a resolution in the order of decades only, not years, or at least that is one of the implications I draw from the following remark. Here is Grafton's translation (p. 140) of Chronici Canones, 14:

To prevent the long list of numbers from causing any confusion, I have cut the entire mass of years into decades. Gathering these from the histories of individual peoples, I have set them across from each other, so that anyone may easily determine in which Greek or barbarian's time the Hebrew prophets and kings and priests were, and similarly which men of the different kingdoms were falsely seem as gods, which were heroes, which cities were founded when, and, from the ranks of illustrious men, who were philosophers, poets, princes and writers.

Eusebius's thoughts on this are useful to an understanding of the Great Stemma. Understanding that Eusebius decided to simply ignore what he saw as prehistory, the time before Abraham, suggested to me that the Great Stemma author also probably decided to treat it differently, arranging it in unform arches and not bothering too closely about its possible synchronisms.
It still seems odd that the Great Stemma seems serenely unaware of Eusebius. Still, if the author worked entirely from Latin sources and did not have any of Jerome's translations to hand, neither the Vulgate nor the Chronici Canones, that would be understandable.
The Roger Pearse translation and Latin allows me to hunt and look for any resemblances and I find no matches in the proto-text of the Stemma. Something only shows up in a later recension, Urgell, where we have: Sexaginario Isaac nascuntur filii gemini: primus Esau, qui est Edom, a quo gens Iudamaeorum; secundus Jacob, qui posthea Israhel, a quo Israhelitae, qui nunc Iudaei. This matches Jerome's Latin translation of Eusebius: Sexagenario Isaac nascuntur filii gemini: primus Esau, qui et Edom, a quo gens Idumaeorum. Secundus Jacob, qui postea Israel, a quo Israelitae, qui nunc Judaei.

Now I don't wish to suggest that the Great Stemma is contemporary with the Canons, which were drawn up in the decade or so after 300 CE. The Stemma might have been drawn up 100 or even 150 years later. But in a wonderful way it is a kind of Latin counterpart to the Canons, finding new conventions to visualize a similar kind of content, preferring traditional roll form to new-fangled codex format, devising new ways to mix exactitude and vagueness, yet very successfully getting its message about synchronisms in biblical history across to the student who reads it. Or more correctly, who read it, past tense. By the time the document reached Spain, most of the careful parallelisms had probably been ruined by careless scribes, and the reader was left to guess at what episode above matched which episode in the rows below.

Léon Abbreviations

2011-01-02T12:03:00.012+01:00

The great Léon bible known as the Codex Legionensis or Leg² (to distinguish it from Leg³, a copy made 100 years later, and Leg¹, also known as ....) has never been published online as far as I know. I was able to see a facsimile of it in the summer at the Prussian State Library in Berlin: it is brought to you in a suitcase-sized wooden box, and the volume would probably not be transportable as hold baggage without paying a supplement: it weighed over 20 kilograms.

In the end I decided against transcribing its version of the Great Stemma and preferred that in the Facundus Beatus. However the Léon bible is sometimes considered the greater treasure by scholars. I have just been looking at Téofilo Ayuso's 1960-61 article in Estudios Bíblicos which comprehensively describes it. Ayuso offers some useful instructions on how to read it, summing up its abbreviations and punctuation. Most of these features are applicable in the other documents in Visigothic script, and are worth reproducing here:

Nexos y Abreviaturas
No vale la pena insistir. Son los propios de la escritura de la época, sin rarezas.
Son normales los nexos y abreviaturas de at, bis, en, er, es, et, ex, nt, per, re, rtem, rum, se, ti, ter, tre.
Normalmente usa ȩ (e con cedilla) en los diptongos ae, oe: uitȩ, suȩ, quȩ, prȩdicasse, etc. A veces la omite: celum, etc. A veces la pone en falso rȩcedent, ȩgo, ȩnim. En alguna ocasión tiene et diptongo.
Ya hemos insinuado algunas abreviaturas por suspensión:
que: usq^s, neg^s, dixeruntq^s;
y la de bus: trib^s,quib^s, etc.
Igualmente ius, mus, pus, etc.: hui^s, sum^s, temp^s, y la de bis, con una especie de cedilla: noḅ.
En cuanto a las abreviaturas por apócope, en las mayúsculas suele ser una raya horizontal gruesa ( ¯¯ ) con adornos o doble suspensión; y en las minúsculas dos o tres puntos: cü ...dṡ ..., bien para la supresión de una letra uitulü, bien para la contracción aüm.
Para e' relativo (q^ve, q^vem), suele usar una v pequenita, volada.
A base de eso las abreviaturas suelen ser las ordinarias:

apsl	apostolus
aum	autem
dd	dauid
dns	dominus
ds	deus
epla	epistola
gla	gloria
gra	gratia
fr	frater
ihrslm	iherusalem
ihs	ihesus
kmi	karissimi
ms	meus
nmn	nomen
ns	noster
oms,	omnis
ppls	populus
qm	quoniam
ppr	propter
pprea	propterea
scdm	secundum
sps	spiritus
scs	sanctus
srl	srahel
usa	uestra
xps	christus

Signos de puntuación
Valen todas las observaciones que hicimos sobre la Biblia de Oña.
Usa con bastante regularidad los signos correspondientes al incisum o subdistinctio, media distinctio y ultima distinctio o punto final. Estos signos son ^·(punto alto); · (punto en medio de linea); y ., o de .' (punto bajo, seguido de una comita un poco mayor, ya sea al mismo nivel, ya un poco mas elevada). Como es sabido, indican, poco más o menos, lo que nuestra coma, punto y coma, dos puntos y punto final.
[A note of explanation here: this is the medieval system of punctuation as developed by Aristophanes of Byzantium which we generally ignore in transcriptions, since it does not match current notions of grammatical punctuation:
media distincto: midlevel pause (≈ comma)
subdistincto: pause (≈ semicolon)
distincto: long pause (≈ period)]
Después de ., o de .' suele seguir mayúscula. Unas veces a renglón seguido, otras comenzando la linea siguiente.
Usa, como dijimos, una cedilla para expresar los diptongos ae, oe,
Usa un puntito sobre 'a y levantada.
Usa corrientemente un signo de interrogación, chie consiste en una pequeña espiral o rayita quebrada, sobre et espacio que signe a la última letra.
Para indicar la división de capitulos, bien en et margen, bien en medio de linea, usa un ángulo recto, alto, dentro del cual incluye los números romanos correspondientes: I, II, etc.

Statistics

2010-12-27T20:33:00.003+01:00

I've recently completed collating the fifth and last recension of the Great Stemma, found in the Urgell and San Juan manuscripts and it has gone online, along with an expanded bibliography of about 100 works. The collation of the manuscripts has been fairly tedious work and I think I'll stop here. I don't think it would achieve much if I transcribed the Saint-Sever (Sigma) manuscript, and the only other document I am at all curious about at this stage is the one in the Codex Amiatinus III. Perhaps I'll do it later.

It's time for a few statistics now that we have collated all five early recensions of the Great Stemma. Here are the tallies of genealogical roundels for the ancestry of Christ (A), other biblical figures such as Moses and Saul (B) and lone kings (C) with a subtotal of A+B+C.

All versions include about 114 sections of timeline material, of which 44 to 48 sections take the form of roundels. Adding these into the tally brings us to a grand total of roundels for each recension noted in the final row below:

	Epsilon	Delta	Gamma	Alpha	Beta
A	390	380	379	396	406
B	83	78	77	81	83
C	19	19	18	19	19
subtotal	492	477	474	496	508
all roundels	540	521	516	542	555

In general, the colums to the left tell us the most about the Great Stemma as it existed in Late Antiquity and those at the right measure what changes later editors made to the document, both losing data and adding material. These numbers are surprising in various ways.

For one thing, it turns out the Zaluska's estimated total of about 600 roundels, presumably based on her transcription of the Saint-Sever stemma, is somewhat deceptive. The Late Antique version probably only contained the 540 roundels in Epsilon. The higher tallies come from interpolated versions, of which Saint-Sever (not tallied here) is certainly the biggest.

We also see that despite the rearrangements in structure, the compressions, the many Vulgate-based alterations in the text and the extensive interpolation of material from Isidore, Jerome and others, the Great Stemma remained remarkably constant in its underlying scale during hundreds of years of copying.

Another implication is that the Urgell manuscript, which looks unfinished because of all its empty roundels, is in fact more complete than it seems: the scribe was careless and left out a dozen individuals, but he clearly also drew far more roundels than he ultimately needed. And after supplementing the Gamma collation with material from the San Juan bible, we can see that the Gamma total is only a score or so short of the full muster.

False Alert

2010-12-06T15:06:00.008+01:00

A check today in the Faider and Sint Jan catalog of pre-War Tournai manuscripts reveals that the manuscript I blogged about last week did not contain a stemma. The codex was destroyed in the Luftwaffe bombing of Tournai 1940 May 17. It was shelf-marked Ville Cod. 135 and the catalog (which does indeed survey what survived of Sander's discoveries) describes it thus:
L'ensemble du volume paraît être constitué par les cahiers de copies, de notes et d'extraits, recueillis par un seul travailleur, probablement anglais, au cours d'un séjour dans une bibliothèque déterminée (à Metz ou dans les environs de cette ville). Il se décompose en trois parties (fol. 1-28, 29-87, 88-117), accusées par des changements d'écriture, mais non nécessairement de main. -- Aucune indication explicite d'origine. -- En tête, note sur papier libre (4 ff.), de l'écriture de Franz Cumont (vers 1896), donnant une analyse du contenu du volume, avec quelques annotations supplémentaires. A fait partie de la bibliothèque du chanoine de Villers (cfr Sanderus, p. 215: uno volumine continentur sequentes tractatus 23, etc.). Le relieur du XVIIIe siècle a rogné dans les marges supérieures un certain nombre de titres qui peuvent être restitués grâce au témoignage de Sanderus. Même reliure que le cod. 134. Au dos: De situ Britan ac de re. eius.
The pages where Sander saw the name Gedeon are catalogued thus:
23 (84 v-87r). (Excerpta ex historia sacra)
Fol. 84v, col. 1: Adam prothoplastus colonus paradisi nomina creature dedit, per inobedientiam...; fol. 87r, col. 1: ...Gedeon ...mortuus est senex et sepultus in sepulchro ioas patris sui in effrata (le reste de la page en blanc). - Fol. 87v blanc (essais de plume).
Suite de paragraphes, accusés par des lettres initiales en vert (fol. 84v-85r), puis en rouge, et consacrés aux principaux personnages de l'Ancien Testament jusqu'à Gédéon. - Le fol. 87 est coupé à la moitié de sa hauteur. Les essais de plumes du verso se réfèrent au même texte (Ave Maria ad cuisis, etc.) que ceux du fol. 63 v.
So it was plainly a purely textual account. The other genealogical passage seems to be this:
18 (51r-55 r). Genealogia (seu Epitome Historiae sacrae usque ad Regnum Aristobuli).
Fol. 51r, col. 1: Considerans historiarum prolixitatem, uero unde? et difficultatem scolarium quoque circa studium sacre lectionis... temptaui seriem sanctorum patrum... sed ab adam inchoans ... ad christum finem nostrum ordinem produxi. Adam in agro damasceno formatus... ; fol. 55r, col. 2: ... decursis CCCC LXXV annis a sedechia quando regnum interruptum fuit. - Fol. 55v-56r blancs.
Here again, the 18th-century binder guillotined off the page edges and the heading seen by Sander, as the catalogers note: Résumé de l'Histoire sainte, interrompu après le règne d'Aristobule. Titre ancien coupé dans la marge supérieure du fol. 51r. On déchiffre I(nci)p(it) g(enealo)g(ia).

Mount Seir

2010-11-30T23:32:00.006+01:00

I have completed one of the more obscure analyses of the Great Stemma: a tabulation of the passage dealing with the chieftains of Mount Seir. These are outland people mentioned in Genesis 36 and are not part of the stated ancestry of Christ. We cannot even begin to guess why they were included in the Great Stemma. Interesting sounding names? To fill a blank area of the page? To prove that the author had read Genesis exhaustively? We just don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. Zaluska thought it was of great importance, but never published her own tabulation. I have filled the gap.
In all honesty, this tabulation is not going to make history, but as a piece of utilitarian work, it positions us for further analysis. The passage is the key proposed by Zaluska to identifying the different recensions of the Great Stemma. It is also important in demonstrating that the Epsilon version (not studied by Zaluska) is the oldest and purest that we have got.

Intriguing Lead

2010-11-29T22:59:00.024+01:00

This post has been superseded. Further investigation showed the intriguing lead led nowhere.

The Bibliotheca Belgica Manuscripta by Anton Sander, a listing of Belgian manuscripts sighted in or before 1640, contains an intriguing lead at page 215: in a codex which unites a variety of short genealogical works, there is one item described as a Genealogia ab Adam usque ad Christum, and another described as a Genealogia ab Adam usque ad Gedeonem. There is no note to say that these genealogies are in table form, but their owner must have had an interest in graphic stemmata, since another item in the volume is Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum, which often contained Boccaccio's 14th century stemmata. *

What is particularly interesting about the second genealogy (Adam-Gedeon) is that Gedeon is neither a figure in Christ's ancestry, nor, as far I know, does he figure in the bogus medieval ancestries of the European nobility. What is he doing in a genealogy? A glance at the 10th page of Plutei 20.54 in Florence suggests a possible answer. Gedeon is the penultimate item on the fifth out of eight sheets. The Tournai codex, which seems to be a grab-bag of thieved and salvaged fragments, might have contained an incomplete Epsilon manuscript where the last three sheets that cover the period from David to Christ had been lost.

After 370 years, this codex probably no longer exists. Sander saw it in Tournai Cathedral Library.** It had been left to the library by Denis de Villers, who seems to have been chancellor of the diocese (I'm not fully clear about the ecclesiastical offices in this period).*** Tournai and its cultural treasures were bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, and much was lost (pictures).

How do we discover the fate of the genealogy codex? The Bibliothecae Cathedralis Ecclesiae Tornacensis now has a weblink, but this codex is not listed. I searched for "Genealogia ab Adam..." and a selection of the other partworks in In Principio, the Brepols database of incipits, but found no promising leads. Where else should I look? Has anybody analysed Sander's work and established, codex by codex, what happened to the various manuscripts?

* Sander's book was published by Insulis, Ex officina Tussani le Clercq, apparently a printer at Lille in France.
** Sander describes the legacy thus: codices Mss. qui sunt in bibliotheca reverendi Domini Hieronymi de Winghe canonici Tornacensis, nunc in bibliotheca publica eccelsiae cathedralis solerte studio et cura R.D. Ioannis Baptistae Stratii decani et donationibus clarissimorum viriorum Hieronymi Winghii, Dionysii Villerii, ac Claudii Dausqueii, eiusdem ecclesiae canonicorum inchoata et luculenta editorum voluminum supellectile instructa.
*** Samaran, Ch. 'La Chronique latine inédite', says Denis de Villers (1546-1620) was a literary man of Tournai, versed in genealogy and numismatics, who held a doctorate in canon law from Louvain University. He and canon Jerome van Winghe founded the cathedral library which is now the Tournai public library (catalog) (article in Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes (1926), 87,144, note 3). There is a more substantial 2004 article by Claude Sorgeloos on de Villers' book collecting here and note 9 says most of de Villers' books were destroyed in the bombardment in 1940. However some had been moved to Mons (catalog) and Courtrai (catalog) and were saved, and one of de Villers' books from Tournai later ended up in the hands of Sir Thomas Phillipps, so perhaps we should also check records of the Phillipps auctions.

Bamberg Cassiodorus

2010-11-17T21:51:00.004+01:00

The State Library at Bamberg has recently digitized the stemma diagrams from its splendid codex Staatsbibliothek Bamberg Msc.Patr.61 and placed them online. The quality is excellent and this is very welcome. The library deserves to be congratulated.
The page of references to written documentation dealing with the codex includes the URLs of my catalog of Cassiodorus stemmata and my reconstruction of how Cassiodorus may have originally conceived the diagrams. There are several recent articles mentioned there which I did not know about: now to order and read them.

Translation Finished

2010-11-13T22:50:00.011+01:00

Another marker passed: the translation of the Great Stemma into English is complete. Bar a few unintelligible passages where I may have messed up the transcription, the publication is now fully bilingual. Seumas Macdonald of Sydney took charge of putting 30 of the most difficult passages into English. With the text getting so long, I have now split the collation into four sections:

The latter section emerged as a separate entity during the recent research into where the many glosses had come from. It turns out that most are almost verbatim quotes from works of Isidore of Seville or from Jerome's Vulgate text. The only text where a clear attribution is not possible is the apocalyptic prediction about the defeat of evil and the coming of the Seventh Age which has been inserted into the Plutei manuscript. For the time being I am leaving out the mappamundi text, since its separate history remains unclear.

Decoding the San Millán Manuscript

2010-11-06T20:06:00.008+01:00

A tricky decoding job with the San Millán stemma seems almost complete, thanks to Brepols and their Library of Latin Texts (LLTA), an online database of Latin. Here is an image of the text:
My first transcription of this gloss about the secular city built by Cain turned out to be nonsense, but I was fortunate to find that the bulk of the text was simply borrowed from a theological exposition by Isidore of Seville, the Mysticorum expositiones sacramentorum seu Quaestiones in Uetus Testamentum. This is easily found in the LLTA: Quid ergo sibi per figuram vult, quod impiorum progenies civitatem in ipsa mundi origine construxit? nisi quod noveris impios in hac vita esse fundatos, sanctos vero hospites esse et peregrinos. Unde et Abel tanquam peregrinus in terris, id est, populus Christianus non condidit civitatem. Superna enim est sanctorum civitas (In Genesim, 6).
That allows us to transcribe the script as follows: Primus ante diluvium Cain civitatem Enoch nomine filii sui in India condidit quam urbem ex sola sua posteritate in plevit, quod sibi vult, quod impiorum progenies civitatem in ipsa mundi origine construxit? nisi quod noveris impios in hac vita esse fundatos, sanctos vero hospites esse et peregrinos. Unde et Abel tamquam peregrinus in terra populus Christianus non condidit civitatem; superna enim est sanctorum civitas.
As a result we can draft the following abbreviations key, which is useful for decoding the entire manuscript, including the Ordo Annorum:
2id = quid
s with a spike over it = sibi?
qd+ = quod
p with a downwards hook at the left = pro
9 = con
n with a rightwards hook above it = nisi
nov+is = noveris
ee with a downwards hook above = esse
sc+os = sanctos
u with a circle over it = vero
p with a straight stroke through the descender = per, with e = pere
g with a top right cantilever and a rightwards hook above = gri (cf. nisi)
vn with a line over the n = unde
qm with a kind of W over and between them = quam
9 on the shoulder at the right = -us
t+ra = terra
ppls = populus
xianus = Christianus
e with a line over it = est
LLTA also indicates that Isidore lifted the latter part of the text from Augustine, De Civitate Dei 15.1: scriptum est itaque de Cain, quod condiderit ciuitatem; Abel autem tamquam peregrinus non condidit; superna est enim sanctorum ciuitas.
In other parts of the same codex we have seen:
c with a spike over it = cri
p with a spike over it = pri
scdam where d ascender has a stroke throught it = secundam

Mommsen's Fingerprints

2010-10-04T08:39:00.007+02:00

The great Mommsen seems to have left his fingerprints on a copy of the Great Stemma. His edition of the Liber Genealogus (link) cursorily describes the copy in Florence. It is odd that Mommsen (or his research agent) thought the document of no further interest, since he only notes a "foreign" interpolation on it, and the text of the Ordo Annorum Mundi that has been attached to the end. His record reads as follows:
cod. 54 f. 38 index alter eorundem regum et deinceps imperatorum ad Othonem II a. 961 adscriptus postea manu diversa, editus ibidem p. 506 seq. sub littera B.
cod. 54 f. 38–45 stemmata sacra ad Christum usque adiectis interdum adnotationibus, quarum prima haec est: Adam cum esset annorum CCXXX, genuit Seth: fiunt omnes vite sue DCCCCXXX, alia haec: Gog et Magog. Canuc Ageth Acenazel (acenezel m. 1) Defarfoti Repi Libusei Pharisei Declimei Garmathei Armatiani Caconei Zamartei Agrimarcli Assophargi Cinecefali Tasbei Alanei Priorsolonici Armei Saltarei. iste autem generationes de genere Cham aiunt exortas fuisse, qui propter omnes abominationes suas, quas egerunt, quia nullam legem habuerunt, ab Alexandro Magno Macedonum rege in partibus aquilonis inclusi sunt; qui ante consummationem seculi egrediuntur quattuor angulos terre et circuibunt universa castra sanctorum et civitatem magnam Roman circumdabunt.
cod. 54 f. 45 computatio sub titulo item (exsecta quaedam) orum mundi brevi collecto. ab Adam, finiunt: ab incarnationem (m deletum) domini nostri Iesu Christi usque in presentem primum gloriosi Wambani principis annum, qui est era DCCX ann. DCLXXII, ab exordio autem mundi usque ad adventum domini ann. V̅CXCV.

The quote comes from an interpolated account of the Gog and Magog legend. That text continues (my translation): As has been said by the prophet: Come to me, beasts of the field and birds of the sky, let us congregate for the sacrifice to the greatness of God, to devour the flesh of mighty men and drink the blood of kings, on the mountains of Israel. This is based on Ezekiel 39:18.

The very final sentence in the manuscript is one I cannot decode:I make of it: a quorum iteritu omnis mundus letabitirunt et invicem re munera mittent. Any improvements?

Peeling the Layers

2010-10-01T07:55:00.009+02:00

I am picking another layer of skin off the Great Stemma at last. Yolanta Zaluska, in her study of the document, was the first to point out that large chunks of this Late Antique work have been copied from works by Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 636). She described the longest recension, the Beta, as being fortement interpolé, en grande partie, semble-t-il, à l'aide des Etymologies d'Isidore. She was sketchy about the details, but thanks to full-text databases I have been able to track some of these borrowings down.
(1 It turns out that the Table of Nations material, which Zaluska says goes back to Josephus, is quoted practically verbatim from the 9th book of the Etymologiae. These glosses on the biblical ancestors of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ethnic groups are uniform in both the Alpha and Beta recensions. (2) The so-called Recapitulatio comes from another book by Isidore, the Chronica Majora, a fact which Zaluska also noticed: On peut se référer par exemple à la Chronique d'Isidore, en part. n° 24, 26, 28, 30, 31a, 32a, 32; la phrase Belus pater Nini qui fecit Babiloniam n'est pas d'Isidore. The latter phrase could perhaps be a paraphrase of Isidore, who does insist that Ninus was the son of Belus. (3) Zaluska does not mention it, but a substantial passage dealing with Babylon's temples of precious stones and gold and the Tower of Babel has also been lifted from the Chronica and inserted into the chronology material of the Beta manuscript: perhaps she missed this. (4) Zaluska also considered the mappamundi in the Roda manuscript (Ro) and the Beta recension came from Isidore: Ro est très intéressant sur ce point car il interrompt le déploiement des tables à cet endroit et recopie autour de la mappemonde les textes des Étymologies d'Isidore qui s'y réfèrent: Orbis de rotunditate...; Asia ex nomine...; Post Asiam Europam...; Libia dicta... (Etym, lib. XIV, cap. II, III, IV et V), nous livrant ainsi la source principale de cette composition. She is perhaps right about this, but we will have to recheck the evidence. I will be looking for more borrowings as I go.
Naturally one should not exclude the possibility that it was Isidore who copied the material from the antecedent Great Stemma. However that seems implausible, since Isidore's material is not only much more comprehensive, but also seems to be drawn from a text-format source, perhaps the works of Jerome.
This analysis is important not only in explaining how the Great Stemma grew by accretion, but also in stripping off the accretions to get a picture of how it looked in the beginning. It is like peeling off the brown layers from an onion to get at the edible white interior.

Mappaemundi

2010-09-20T09:27:00.005+02:00

The Digital Mappaemundi Project contains a very useful English translation of the geographical text from the Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII (Seven Books of History against the Pagans) of Paulus Orosius. He was an Iberian priest (ca. 385-420) who was commissioned by St. Augustine of Hippo to write up the story of the bad old world. Digital Mappaemundi looks as if it will become a wonderful and important resource: the maps are high-quality digital images from medieval manuscripts and the plan is to completely index and cross-reference them.

Diplomatic Editions of Diagrams

2010-09-12T13:07:00.003+02:00

I've so far looked in vain for scholars' ideas on how to create what one might describe as a "diplomatic" edition of a diagram. As a 21st-century scribe, what one is looking to do is to recopy an antique or medieval diagram while:

preserving its original language and wording;
adapting its script and linework to contemporary lettering and drawing conventions;
unwinding physical deterioration that mars the old medium.

The last objective could perhaps be adequately met by taking a photographic image of an old document, and photoshopping away the blotches, mould, tears and distortions. There is an interesting 2008 account (pdf) in e-Perimetron of how this can be done with old maps. But this does not allow much editorial amendment, nor does it make the document readable. Since the age of print began, we expect documents to be recast with modern typographic lettering.
In the digital age, we also expect a document to be searchable, and it would be perverse nowadays to publish on paper only: one must produce a full digital edition.
The solution I have been experimenting my way towards is to use XML documents which contain the text and all the necessary instructions to draw a vector image of the original diagram and lay it out faithfully, either on the screen or on paper via a digital printer. XML files can be directly edited: every word and letter can can be checked and altered if need be without using proprietary or sophisticated software.
The images on my website have all been created using OpenOffice Draw and the master files are saved in odg format. To publish them online, they are converted to Flash files.
I have been learning ways to manipulate odg files so that they could become the definitive transcripts of original manuscript pages, or provide the basis for merged, critical, digital editions. In fact it ought to be possible to do this so one could have several languages all stored in the one file: Layer 1 would be Latin, but you could easily swap to a Layer 2 in English, Layer 3 in German and so on.
I prefer to write transcripts into Microsoft Excel, which allows you to standardize the data, mark it up, sort it, add fields and so on. An early problem was how to convert Excel data into a format that can be used by OpenOffice Draw. These are the steps I take:

I create an Excel spreadsheet which attaches the necessary XML tags to the left and right of the list data;
An odg file is in fact a zipped-together folder of files, one of which is named content.xml and contains the text within the drawing;
Use IZ Arc to open the odg file, and extract content.xml to another folder.
Open content.xml and prepare to overwrite all of its text sections as follows;
Copy the XML tags and data which you have generated using Excel;
In Windows, right click the file icon of content.xml and choose edit from the context menu. Paste the data into content.xml;
Save the new version of content.xml;
Drag the altered file back into the IZ Arc window and save the odg file;
OpenOffice Draw will hiccup a bit as it processes this odg, but it will open;
The texts may not be properly formatted. Highlight everything and choose Default style to reformat them, then save;
More fixing in OpenOffice Draw then includes converting background to invisible. To make the borders invisible, change "line" to invisible as well.

The Excel file that begins this process includes sequential position information so that each draw.frame element has its own position on the page and is not overwritten. It is easy to construct 10 or more columns of data this way. The first element, at the upper left, is enclosed in the following tags:

At the beginning of each element, these three opening tags:
- draw:frame draw:style-name="gr1" draw:layer="Text" svg:x="-56cm" svg:y="-19cm"
- draw:text-box
- text:p

At the end of each element, these closing tags:
- /text:p
- /draw:text-box
- /draw:frame

The minus 56 and minus 19 in this case mean the text begins 56 centimetres to the left and 19 centimetres above the top left corner of the virtual canvas in OpenOffice Draw.
I am still thinking about ways to make the resulting document more easily editable.

Old Vellum and Bookselling

2010-09-11T13:16:00.007+02:00

A learned article by Richard Rouse and Charles McNelis appeared a decade ago. North African literary activity is subtitled "A Cyprian fragment, the stichometric lists and a Donatist compendium" and incredibly it rounds up four utterly diverse topics in one discussion: the unlikely discovery of a very worn piece of old vellum in a codex binding, Late Antique bookselling, a North African Christian sect and how 19th-century philologists could not see the wood for the trees. The article comes to the conclusion that a lot of the Late Antique bible-handbook and chronographic material we now have was saved for posterity in a single compendium.
Rouse, who is now emeritus professor at UCLA, and McNelis, now associate professor at Georgetown University, suggest a way by which the Great Stemma (that is not of course their name for it) might derive from the Liber Genealogus. It would be nice if this fitted the facts, but we have three signal differences between these works:

they use different versions of the Table of Nations from Genesis 10
they use different chronologies of the kings of Rome
the Great Stemma has none of the Liber's etymological content

Of course the overall structure of the documents is similar, and both evince a fascination with the Twelve Minor Prophets of the Old Testament. It looks as if the latter topic is going to need some further research...

Setback or Progress

2010-08-24T20:31:00.009+02:00

After weeks of combing through the Liber Genealogus, including creating my own fully keyed versions of both Frick's and Mommsen's versions, I think I am barking up the wrong tree. My original idea was to hunt for any clues that the Liber Genealogus author might have had the Great Stemma open on the desk in front of him as he wrote. There are no such clues. The two works appear to be siblings, drawing on a common tradition but created in utter ignorance of one another.

The crux is the Table of Nations, the strange anthropological list in Genesis 10 which is the inspiration for two ancient works, the Antiquities of Josephus and the Chronicon of Hippolytus.

The Liber bases all its statements about the different ethnicities in the Mediterranean and Middle East on the Chronicon. In fact, when Bauer and Helm were compiling the critical edition of the Chronicon and came to its ethnicities chapter, the so-called Diamerismos, they often used the Liber Genealogus as a check (see Bauer/Helm, page 1).

The Great Stemma, on the other hand, offers an almost unalloyed reproduction of the ethnicities list in Josephus' Antiquities, a fact that Yolanda Zaluska published 25 years ago. It ought not to have surprised me, but I never appreciated what a black-and-white distinction this is and how starkly this difference in sourcing separates the Great Stemma from the Liber.

I always feel disappointed when a setback like this sinks in. But of course the finding is progress. And in fact it has exciting implications, because it implies yet another way in which the Great Stemma must predate the thinking and intellectual resources of the early 5th century. Its author can have known nothing of Jerome or Augustus. But the thought that he worked in a library where there was not one scrap of Hippolytus to read? Who is this guy? How far back should we be looking? This is tantalizing.

[Later note: the final two paragraphs above are mistaken. It is far more likely that the Table of Nations was worked into the Great Stemma by a Spanish recensor, using a copy of Isidore's Etymologiae. There is no evidence the Great Stemma author was even interested in the Table of Nations material, and why should he have been? The ethnicities material does not add any useful information on the genealogy of Christ or on the chronography which are his central concerns (October 1, 2010).]

[Much later note: I did finally discover sequential evidence. The Liber follows the order of the Great Stemma. This is the subject of my Oxford Patristics Conference paper (September 25, 2011).]

Lay Historians

2010-06-17T08:24:00.004+02:00

A couple of inspiring accounts of lay historians have just appeared. The story of Tony Clunn, who discovered the site of the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest, is written up by Peter McDermott in the Free Library. Clunn has earned his living as a British Army officer. Adrian Murdoch's blog drew my attention to this. An account of Hershel Shanks, a US lawyer who has become a leader in the field of biblical archaeology, appears in the New York Times. With a degree of false modesty, Shanks describes himself as an outsider to the field, a person who wouldn’t have gotten into it had he known how much it was divided into specialties and subspecialties. Of course he would have! The vital quality in a lay historian today is enterprise: the ability to weld together the work of many specialists into a coherent whole and to perceive opportunities which the specialists do not notice because they are too close to the topic.

Liber Genealogus

2010-05-14T11:59:00.011+02:00

Göttingen University Library in Germany has a digital version of Paul de Lagarde's 1892 edition of the Lucca Cathedral manuscript of the Liber Genealogus. This is in a very rare printed periodical, not available on Archive.org or Google Books. I can only see two libraries in Germany which catalogue this article, entitled SeptuagintStudien, II (perhaps a rare 19th century use of so-called CamelCase). Neither Göttingen nor Mainz are willing to interloan it.
The Liber is a vital text in understanding the Great Stemma. Both works belong to the same tradition (we are not yet sure how their interdependency should be described). This edition is very useful as de Lagarde went to the trouble to link each name to its biblical place with a reference, an extra duty which the Mommsen edition does not bother with. I went to the same trouble myself, and will have to see how our results compare. There is also a Greek text for comparison.
Ayuso Marazuela quotes the de Lagarde version (omitting the "de" from the name and adding a hyphen to the CamelCase), but de Lagarde is not mentioned in the Klapisch-Zuber bibliography.
Carl Frick brought out an all-Latin critical edition of yet another version, the Turin manuscript, in 1892, and published that in his handbook Chronica Minora under the title Origo Humani Generis. The Hathi Trust has placed Frick online, but unfortunately it is only accessible from inside the United States.
Here are the links:
1. de Lagarde
2. Mommsen
3. Frick

A History of the Timeline

2010-05-06T15:27:00.009+02:00

An impressive new illustrated history of timelines has just appeared in the United States. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline is the work of Daniel Rosenberg, an associate professor in Oregon, with help from Anthony Grafton. I have not bought a copy yet, but can see the first 34 pages as a sample on Google Books here. Thanks to Nat Taylor for pointing out this publication. The formal launch date seems to have been May 1, but there are bibliographic references suggesting it was in circulation earlier.

Rosenberg's book deals with a topic closely related to the stemma: the long history of vertical, horizontal (and curled-up) timelines to represent history.

One gem of a story I noticed at first glance on the Google preview was the account on page 27 of the Milanese publisher Boninus Mombritius boasting that no scribe could have copied such an intricate and extensive work as accurately as he did with his printed version of Eusebius. Mombritius declared he had kept all the tables in order and put all the kings in their places.

This alludes to the muddle which hampered the diffusion of both the stemma and timeline in the medieval period, and erased almost all documentary evidence of their Late Antique models. It is challenging for any reader to grasp and to remember complex technical drawings which require careful measurement and layout. It is difficult for even a scribe with artistic skills to copy one correctly. And with fewer skills, time pressure and inadequate remuneration, it is practically impossible. Thus, the serious corruption done to the Great Stemma early in its diffusion led to it ultimately being discarded and begun all over again by medieval writers such as Peter of Poitiers.

I cannot see the index and I have not read the book yet, but on the pages I did read, Rosenberg seems to jump his history from Eusebius (who arranged his chronography in vertical columns, with the synchronous entries all carefully aligned with one another) straight to Peter of Poitiers with no mention of the Great Stemma.

The Great Stemma's arcade, which marks out the patriarchs from Adam to Abraham in a series of arches, each containing a span of years between each begetting, is incontestably the oldest left-to-right timeline extant in the West. The manuscripts date from 945 and later. If Rosenberg's valuable book were not to mention them, it would be incomplete.

It can also be argued that the Great Stemma contains a more sophisticated timeline than this simple arcade of patriarchs. I am exploring this on the latest page of the Piggin.Net website. The Great Stemma was undoubtedly created before the 8th century, perhaps in Visigothic Spain, perhaps in North Africa. It could even be that the Great Stemma pre-dates Eusebius, but those are matters that are still the subject of ongoing research.

Vatican Library

2010-03-31T20:31:00.004+02:00

It seems the Vatican Library will be digital some day. The announcement has appeared here. Interestingly, there will be a feature that will help scholars search for diagrams: Another two servers have been installed to process the data to make it possible to search for images ... by a graphic pattern, that is, by looking for similar images (graphic or figurative) in the entire digital memory. The latter instrument, truly innovative and certainly interesting for all who intend to undertake research on the Vatican's manuscripts ... was developed from the technology of the Autonomy Systems company, a leading English firm. Unfortunately the entire project is scheduled to take 10 years, and I suppose we must factor in 50-per-cent mission creep, so make that 15 years right off.

Plutei Online

2010-03-31T20:07:00.012+02:00

It's time to offer a brief review of the online access to the splendid Plutei Collection at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. I've found this a boon, since it not only offers images of the manuscripts, but also bibliographies which seem to be generated from a database. An interesting feature is that it offers a history spanning more than 100 years, showing which scholars have worked with each document.

When I look at Plut.20.54 for example, I can click on "MOVIMENTI RECENTI and see recent users. Under MOVIMENTI PASSATI, I can trace back its uses for scholarship to Bernhard Bischoff, and go all the way back to WM Lindsay when he consulted this Isidore manuscript in 1896 while preparing his critical edition. I am sure that here in Germany the publication of library lending records would probably be interpreted as a scandalous invasion of individual privacy and lead to the sacking of all the
high officials and possibly prison terms for the librarians. At the Plutei I find it rather touching. The slips amount to a kind of roll of honour of great philologists.

Not everything is perfectly designed however. I found the scans were not really of a high enough resolution for close analysis. A stemma in the Real Academia in Madrid is available in a fantastic resolution where I can see the pores in the parchment, but the Florence scans are so much inferior that in a few cases I had to guess about the shape of penstrokes in the document.

Secondly, while I do not intend to grumble at the lack of an English interface on the site, I did find it a pity there was no easy way to link to specific pages or to download them for later use. The URL in the address bar of the browser always connects to the first page of a manuscript, not the page you may want to link to. However it is possible to count up the number of page turns between the first page and the page of interest, and add the same number to the pagina part of the URL. In fact one can automate this slightly by copying the URL into Microsoft Excel and then using the fill function to manufacture a complete series of page links for the entire MS.

To make a copy to study when not connected to the internet, I found I had to discover the absolute URL for each image first. This is done by right-clicking the image within the Java interface and looking at the properties. But one cannot save this URL: you have to instead copy it out by hand, character by character, and re-enter it in a browser address bar. Press enter and you now get only the image you want, and can save that as a JPEG file.

Hippolytus Translation

2010-03-26T10:13:00.005+01:00

Tom Schmidt has just issued a free online English translation of Hippolytus, a chronographer who was contempory with, but worked independently from, Julius Africanus. This will be hugely helpful in exploring the early origins of the timeline contained in the Great Stemma. This is also very helpful to any non-classicist who cannot read Latin and Greek. Martin Wallraff's Iulius Africanus Chronographiae finally brought the Julius Africanus chronology into a modern language (English) in 2007, and now Schmidt has overcome the chief defect of Helm's 1955 edition of Hippolytus (its lack of a continuous German translation). See Chronicon.net.

Hypatia Movie

2010-03-20T19:44:00.009+01:00

A movie about the pagan philosopher Hypatia is currently on the loose in European cinemas. Agora is the work of a Spanish director, Alejandro Amenábar. Let me admit from the start that I did not know the Hypatia story before I saw the movie in a Hamburg multiplex, and was somewhat startled by its anti-Christian storyline. The film (here is its website) features the Christians (the bad guys) seizing the Caesarion and the Library of Alexandria from Hypatia and her fellow-pagans (the good guys).
Some of the story I did not get: when the Christians capture the Caesarion, why do they worship amid what seem to be a couple of dozen outsized statues of Osirus and other gods? At the movie’s climax, a naked Hypatia, not looking a day over 30, is asphyxiated in the said Caesarion. The violence in the movie is thoroughly nasty.
The racial stereotyping is particularly disturbing: Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and her fans Synesius (Rupert Evans) and Orestes (Oscar Isaac) are all north-of-the-Mediterranean types (white) and the villainous Cyril of Alexandria (Sami Samir) and his parabolani supporter Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) are not only south-of-the-Mediterranean, swarthy, hook-nosed characters, but terrorists to boot.
So it is a movie that will appeal to people looking for an anti-Christian message, yet infuriate Coptic Christians in particular, annoy Christians in general and even irritate strongly committed members of other Middle Eastern religions.
You leave the cinema wondering how authentic this all is. The answer, surprisingly, is that the storyline is pretty close to the historical record, allowing for a little cinematic licence. The murder of Hypatia really did happen and this conflict really was one of those historical events where Christians not only sinned, but the whole Christian movement feared it was going sickeningly off the rails. Philip Rousseau's Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian mentions Hypatia's murder in the first few pages and illuminates the disgust that many "normal" people felt in this period towards early monks, who were indeed ragged radicals.
As I have thought more about the film, I have begun to value it more as a visual introduction, sketchy as it is, to a troubled period. At the same time, my exasperation at its retrograde historiography has grown. Contemporary research into Late Antiquity stresses not its weakness but its extraordinary intellectual vigour in the face of economic decline, its empowerment of minorities, its epic struggles between virtue and evil. Nothing and nobody in Late Antiquity is all good or all: it is a period of ferment, a very exciting time to be alive. Agora does not seem to have heard of this way of doing history or this way of doing movies, for that matter. Hypatia is so heroic and Ammonius is so vile that there just isn't any room left for nuance or ambiguity. The film website says the main historical adviser was a Mr Justin Pollard: he is not a distinguished scholar. Director Amenábar is not a historian at all. They honestly tried, but the result of their labours disappoints with its lack of genuine engagement with the period.

Discoveries

2010-03-18T00:23:00.004+01:00

A game-changing discovery, thanks to the launch this month of Plutei Online in Italy. It is gradually publishing digital scans online of nearly 4,000 manuscripts from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, plus Bandini's catalogs which were drawn up in the 18th century to describe them. This library possesses not just one stemma as I first thought, but three quite diverse biblical stemma documents. Two are now online. At first glance, they are so important that I will have to re-evaluate what I have already written.

Timelines

2010-03-04T21:59:00.004+01:00

Readers may care to look at the mounting evidence that a timeline once ran through the Great Stemma. Gotolia offered the first clue. This widow of a Judaean king managed to achieve power later in her own right. And we find that she figures in the Great Stemma twice! The duplication can only mean that she was present in her separate capacities as both a spouse and a ruler. This has provided me with the first clue that there are two different streams of information present in the layout. That has in turn prompted a fresh look at the information arranged in the arcade on plates one and two. I have realized that the series of arches is a most natural way of portraying a timeline: it represents time as grasshopper springs. Could an antique graphics draftsman have conceived the distance of such leaps as being in scale to the passage of years?

Gelzer and Africanus

2010-02-24T20:41:00.007+01:00

The great stemma of biblical genealogy contains extensive traces of the universal chronicles devised in late antiquity, but that aspect of stemma authoring seems to have escaped serious study. The standard work describing classical-era timelines, by Heinrich Gelzer, was completed in 1898, and still remains authoritative:

Gelzer deals with the fragmentary evidence of what was in the Chronographiai, a history of the world by Sextus Julius Africanus in five books from the Creation up to the year AD 221. A quick scan suggests Gelzer did not know of the great stemma, which he would surely have appreciated as an important western witness to the influence of Africanus. Gelzer died in 1906, failing to produce a critical edition of the Chronographiai: a century later in 2007, Martin Wallraff completed that job.

Rightward Shift

2010-02-18T09:11:00.014+01:00

After discovering in mid-January a major "wiring error" on Plate 12 of the Great Stemma that affects every extant copy of the diagram, I am now closer to understanding how this mess-up happened.

The Great Stemma appears to be a "family tree" of Christ which was compiled in late antiquity. In its section on the Judaean kings period, it includes the names of the kings' mothers. But as has already been noticed, many of the names are not those which are carefully set out in the Second Book of Kings in the Bible. A little study shows that most of the mysterious names of wives, which seem to have come out of nowhere, can in fact be found in one of the chronicles of antiquity, the Liber Genealogus, which uses slightly unfamiliar forms of the biblical names. This part of the analysis shows that a large block of names was simply shifted rightwards across the Great Stemma page to a new position. At least four wives' names were then shifted upwards to fill the gaps on the page. But what is most interesting of all is that the name of Queen Athalia, a bloodthirsty lady said to have out-heroded Herod by slaughtering children, appears twice on Plate 12.

I have made a graphic showing these corruptions here (click).

Mistakes like this are a godsend in manuscript detective work. This error offers us additional proof that there must have been a timeline originally running alongside the great stemma at mid-page height. This matters, because it reveals that the Great Stemma is not just a genealogy, but a graphic version of the universal chronicles which attempted in antiquity to cross reference the histories of different civilizations to establish an overview of Middle Eastern and Graeco-Roman history.

All this, in its turn, helps us to reconstruct how the Great Stemma looked when it was originally drawn, and indirectly proves (a) that stemma design in late antiquity was much more sophisticated than medieval copies show and (b) that the lack of proper stemma alignment in all 21 known copies of the Great Stemma is almost certainly a defect in the copying, not in the original design.

Electricians

2010-01-02T12:11:00.004+01:00

I have been using an electrical continuity tester to discover what connects where inside a standard lamp that no longer lights up. And on the same day I have been transcribing a stemma page from the 12th-century illuminated Bible of San Millán de Cogolla. I found the coincidence illuminating (sorry, I could not resist that pun). The stemma, which presents a genealogy of Christ, contains a vast array of components (persona), which are "wired" together by connecting lines. Some authors have suggested that the stemma is a mnemonic device, but I have seen no evidence for that and doubt it. No one with a normal mind could remember all the connections simply by studying a graphic with several hundred nodes, any more than one could "learn" a wiring diagram for a complex electrical device. In fact, it is far easier to memorize the biblical passages on which the San Millán stemma is based and recite them than it would be to construct this stemma from memory. Both a wiring diagram and a complex stemma have a different purpose. They provide an analytical, information-storage method in which the user can mentally crawl along the lines to consider whether the electrical assembly is complete or whether the genealogical stemma offers all the necessary connections of descent or is marred by breaks. One must keep going back to the graphic to see the different local connections. Circuit diagrams are in fact a variety of process flow chart, which, as we know, have their origins in the stemma form.

Spelling

2009-12-17T20:46:00.006+01:00

Some readers do seem to care strongly about the plural spelling of stemma. Dictionaries such as the OED offer three standard meanings (the simple eye of certain insects / the record of an ancient Roman genealogy / the tree diagram showing the relationships among manuscripts of a literary work) and the standard plural spelling "stemmata." On the Macro-Typography website, stemma is being used in a fourth, novel meaning, as a term for any graphical representation of any branching inter-relationships. It is a sense that Karl-August Wirth used in an article in German reviewing four typical medieval graphic forms used in educational texts: the table, stemma, arbor and rota. This usage of stemma is preferable to "tree." The objections to tree are that the word is misleading, especially because it is loaded in favour of twig-like graphic patterns, but also because it has generated a long history of confusion about that figure's "correct" orientation. A broader term would be useful. But is "stemma" in this sense ready for prime time? With a plural that is drawn from Greek, stemma is bound to remain a term of scientific and scholarly jargon. Diagram, also of Greek origin, would not be a term in international standard English if its plural were still "diagramata". We need to anglicize stemma with a regular English plural, "stemmas", if we hope to bring the term into wider currency. The spelling "stemmata" will remain in place on the Macro-Typography website, because the audience there is mainly of historians, but expect the anglicized plural "stemmas" for wider audiences interested only in graphic design.

Burgos Exhibition

2009-12-13T12:39:00.006+01:00

With interest, I see that an exhibition of a selection of key Genealogies of Christ is currently under way at Burgos in northern Spain (link). From October 2009 till June 2010, a series of facimiles of Beatus manuscripts will be displayed. The centrepiece is of course the Burgos Bible. Also fascinating is that the San Millán de la Cogolla bible and another Madrid genealogy are now online in complete, high-quality digital editions.

Loyset Liédet

2009-11-25T22:23:00.005+01:00

The Loyset Liédet picture mentioned below is reproduced on the French national library website. I would not entirely agree with the summary attached to it: it is somewhat confused, muddling the contradictory "tree" concepts, but the images on the page are great. As my own introduction explains, the term "tree" leads to confusion since it has a variety of overlapping meanings in a medieval context.

Diagrams or Stemmata

2009-11-24T08:56:00.014+01:00

A scholarly correspondent has taken me to task over the term "stemmata", saying these figures in the medieval manuscripts are properly called "diagrams" in English. That rather misses the point. Conceptually, there are three different ways of seeing the figures. One is to consider their meaning as art, contemplating the world of significance behind them. That is the focus of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber's book, L'Ombre des Ancêtres, which uses the extraordinary Arbre of Loyset Liédet as its cover illustration. The wordless Liédet image, showing various well-dressed people impossibly perched in a strangely sick tree, seems senseless unless one understands the art-historical context in which it was painted. Another aspect of stemma figures is clearly diagrammatic. Like geometrical figures (for example cubes and pyramids) or plans (such as that of the locus sanctus), they engage with our spatial intelligence and illustrate text, following the dictum, "One picture is worth a thousand words." But the third aspect of the figures is typographical, considering how text can be rearranged on the page to make its meaning clearer. The stemmata of Cassiodorus do not have to be arranged in graphical form (Mynors converted most of them back to linear text in his critical edition of the Institutiones), but, like poetry, these texts are enormously improved by a sympathetic spatial arrangement. The connecting lines support and enhance the connecting words. The stemma has a dual character: it is both art and text. The word "stemma" is the appropriate term for this special type, even if the figure can also be discussed in the wider categories of art motifs or diagrams. The Macro-Typography website focuses on how text is arranged to make its meaning clear.

At the Doctor's Surgery

2009-10-28T00:08:00.004+01:00

After a morning of thinking about stemmata, I was at the doctor's surgery in the afternoon, seeing a case where stemmata do not work at all. A German doctor takes notes as a series of abbreviations scrawled on index cards, which are actually envelopes to contain the various pieces on paper on a case. It is plain that computers have not made a breakthrough here yet, and it is obvious why. Anything that requires a doctor to start from the general and proceed to the specific, as most computer programs do, does not seem to appeal to the German clinician. A stemmatic approach would be to take perfect health as the root of medical reality and follow the lines in search of the ailment. It would take ages. What my doctor was jotting looked more like a series of "tags" about me: sick for three weeks, runny nose, allergies ... In the eyes of an experienced doctor, the tags clump together into a diagnosis. The medical mind works more like the Amazon search engine, where you enter a couple of words and the software seems to read your mind and suggest precisely the book you were looking for. Yes, the illness will have a code under the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) at the World Health Organization, which is a stemmatic scheme, but that seems a million miles from the practical world of clinical medicine.

Cassiodorus

2009-10-21T22:55:00.007+02:00

After reading the literature and copying the stemmata from 9th-century Cassiodorus manuscripts to develop a feel for their divergent shapes, one is left to speculate on which of the various line forms is the oldest. In some of the manuscripts, the lines are minimalist in the extreme, often regularized to perfect semi-circles. Is this the feeling of Roman design? In other manuscripts, which may perhaps feature Cassiodorus's own visual creations - the images of lions, eagles, long-haired men and so on - the lines are fussy and tangled, or erupt like fountains. These lines faintly suggest the images of vines we see in some late Roman mosaics. Do they represent a Roman-period aesthetic? Perhaps we will never know.

Web Versions of the Diagrams

2009-10-07T18:25:00.006+02:00

Rather than offering photographs of the old manuscripts, with all the attendant permissions issues, I am posting sketches of their designs, such as this one on consanguinity. Anna Catharina Esmeijer in her authoritative book, Divina Quaternitas, did the same, but the focus here will be purely on the shapes, with English translations of the Latin to make the content more easily comprehensible to the general reader. The initial drawings have been done with OpenOffice Draw or with Autosketch, and have then been converted to Adobe Flash files, which open inside a web browser. Most browser users have the Flash plug-in installed, so these files are not only accessible, but very compact. Best of all, they can be zoomed into on screen without any loss of quality. The drawing tool of OpenOffice is free and exports simple files to Flash format in a jiffy.

Start of the History Section

2009-10-01T21:51:00.005+02:00

The Macro-Typography website starts a new history section today. For several months I have been conducting research on the early history of the stemma, the text diagrams commonly known as trees. The first page deals with a key source in stemma history: the definition of the Latin term stemma by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae.