2012-06-15

A List of Peter Manuscripts

I have previously briefly mentioned the Compendium genealogiae of Peter of Poitiers. This roll, probably designed to hang on walls, shows the genealogy of Christ, with Adam at the very top and Holy Family at the bottom, linked by stemmatic lines.

As far as I know, the biggest recent listing of available manuscripts was compiled by Laura Alidori in 2002, before many of them had been digitized. I decided to update the list, and at the same time found that the digitized catalogs of German archives identified a good many more manuscripts which appeared to belong on the list. So far the total number is running at 185, and I suspect this is not exhaustive.

The list is on a new page of the piggin.net website, and as always, I welcome corrections or additions. The most impressive digitized version is that at the Houghton Collection in Harvard, Massachusetts.

I have not yet explored the differences between Peter's original and the roll-form Chronique universelle d'Orléans or the Histoire sainte abrégée. There are some interesting online images of the latter at Lyons (enter 863 as the search term).

A comparison with Dan Embree's list at Repertorium Chronicarum may help to weed out what does not belong. On the positive side, Embree allocates the various chronicles to authors. On the negative side, his list does not appear to be so all-embracing.