Nasty Medicine

The latest big batch of online manuscripts from the Vatican Library includes medical works that list some very nasty medicines. Leafing through Pal. lat. 1084, thought to date to the 13th or 14th century, my eye was caught by a table of electuaries. In early medicine, an electuary was a mixture of powdered herbs with honey to disguise the vile taste.

Here is a purgative with 11 ingredients including lapis lazuli:

(Choke.) It would have been healthier to refuse the medicine and send the doctor away.

For the book historian, the layout demonstrates that a type of scientific stemmatic table which is found in early printed books has deep roots in medieval manuscript practice:

Another of the manuscripts, Pal.lat.1078, a 16th-century Italian herbal, contains fine drawings of herbs, apparently used in medicine, but also in alchemy. Here at fol. 13r is Herba Triacho (which would appear to be Tussilago farfara, a plant with small white flowers and undulate leaf margins):

The main DigiVatLib site onlined three manuscripts on October 26:

1. Chig.G.VIII.226
2. Urb.lat.185, Dialogues of Plato, translated to Latin, by Marsilio Ficino of Florence (thanks @LatinAristotle for correcting this)
3. Vat.ebr.668

The Biblioteca Palatina, based in Germany, has gradually brought the 76 Vatican items below online over the past seven weeks, many medical including works by Galen. Here I summarize them from their RSS feed:

1. Pal. lat. 762 Codicis Iustiniani imp. libri IX (13. Jh.)
2. Pal. lat. 797 Nicolai de Messiato: Sammelhandschrift (15. Jh.)
3. Pal. lat. 811 Repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars IV] (15. Jh.)
4. Pal. lat. 813 Repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars VII] (15. Jh.)
5. Pal. lat. 836 Ludolphi carthusiani liber de vita Ihesu Xpisti in ewangelio (15. Jh.)
6. Pal. lat. 839 Ludolphi Carthusiani de vita Ihesu Xpi pars secunda a cap. I ad LVII (15. Jh.)
7. Pal. lat. 840 Petri Trecensis (Comestoris) historia scholastica sive commentaria in Biblia (12.-13. Jh.)
8. Pal. lat. 841 Petri Trecensis (Comestoris) historia scolastica theologice discipline (13. Jh.)
9. Pal. lat. 843 Petri Comestoris scolastica hystoria (13. Jh.)
10. Pal. lat. 847 Novum passionale editum a predicatore quodam, i. e. (Iacobi a Voeagine) legenda aurea sanctorum, in quatuor partes divisa (13.-14. Jh.)
11. Pal. lat. 848 Jacobus : Iacobi a Voragine Legenda sanctorum (14. Jh.)
12. Pal. lat. 853 Vitae patrum (14. Jh.)
13. Pal. lat. 854 Sammelhandschrift (14. Jh.)
14. Pal. lat. 855 Sammelhandschrift (15. Jh.)
15. Pal. lat. 856 Sammelhandschrift (10. Jh.)
16. Pal. lat. 857 Sammelhandschrift (1300)
17. Pal. lat. 859 De gestis et translationibus trium Regum (15. Jh.)
18. Pal. lat. 860 De gestis et translationibus trium Regum (15.-16. Jh.)
19. Pal. lat. 861 Retraet(ati)o breuis et succincta perfectissime uite sanctissimeque venerabilis ac devotissime religiose gloriose memorie nomine Colete ordinis (15. Jh.)
20. Pal. lat. 863 Sammelband (14.-15. Jh. ; 16. Jh.)
21. Pal. lat. 865 Florenti Gregorii Turonici: Liber vitae patrum opere ; Liber in gloria confessoruni (9.-10. Jh.)
22. Pal. lat. 866 Huberti de Romanis: Sammelhandschrift (13. Jh.)
23. Pal. lat. 872 Livius, Titus: Ab Urbe condita (Decas III) (Italien, 15. Jh.)
24. Pal. lat. 917 Plutarchus; Cruser, Hermann [Übers.]: Biographie des Pyrrhus und Marius, lat. (16. Jh.)
25. Pal. lat. 967 Historia monarchiarum ;Tractatus de geographia (Deutschland, 16. Jh. (nach 1558))
26. Pal. lat. 969 Burlaeus, Gualterus: De vita et moribus philosophorum et poetarum (Italien, 15. Jh.)
27. Pal. lat. 987 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus; Aristoteles: Sammelhandschrift (Frankreich, Ende 13. Jh.)
28. Pal. lat. 999 Quaestiones et commentum in Logica (Deutschland, 14. Jh.)
29. Pal. lat. 1000 Quaestiones in Logica (Deutschland, 15. Jh.)
30. Pal. lat. 1001 Johannes (Petrus Hispanus): Summulae logicales ; Commentum in Summulas logicales Petri Hispani (Deutschland (Heidelberg?), 1491-1498)
31. Pal. lat. 1003 Melanchthon, Philipp (Theologe); Culmann, Leonhard: Reportationes dialecticorum (IV-V) ; Disputationes seu argumentationes theologicae (Deutschland (Heidelberg?) (I) , Nürnberg (II), 16. Jh./Mitte (I) ; ca. 1545 (II))
32. Pal. lat. 1010 Bruni, Leonardo; Aristoteles: Super Analytica posteriora Aristotelis (Deutschland, Mitte 15. Jh.)
33. Pal. lat. 1018 Thomas : Commentum in Ethica Nicomachea Aristotelis (Deutschland, Ende 14. Jh.)
34. Pal. lat. 1020 Aristoteles; Gerardus : Ethica Nicomachea ; Commentum in Ethica Nicomachea Aristotelis (Deutschland (Heidelberg?) (I) , Brixen (II), Mitte 15. Jh. (I) ; 1482 (II))
35. Pal. lat. 1023 Franciscus Mediolanensis ; Ambrosius Crassus ; Leodegarius Rotomagensis: Sammelhandschrift (Nordfrankreich, 1540-1542)
36. Pal. lat. 1028 Albertus : Commentum in Ethica Nicomachea Aristotelis (Deutschland, Ende 14. Jh.)
37. Pal. lat. 1030 Thomas ; Burlaeus, Gualterus; Albertus : Sammelhandschrift (Paris, 1367-1370)
38. Pal. lat. 1032 Petrus ; Aristoteles; Albertus ; Johannes : Sammelband (Deutschland, 15. Jh. (I) ; um 1387 (II))
39. Pal. lat. 1038 Melanchthon, Philipp (Theologe): Sammelband (Wittenberg (I) , Deutschland (II), 1543 (I) ; 16. Jh. (II))
40. Pal. lat. 1040 Johannes : Sammelhandschrift (Deutschland (Heidelberg?), 1479)
41. Pal. lat. 1041 Johannes Egen ; Nicolaus Francus Vimacuus : In libros naturales Aristotelis (Heidelberg, 1512-1537)
42. Pal. lat. 1043 Camerarius, Joachim (1534-1598) Centuriae viginti (Deutschland (Nürnberg?), um 1560-1584)
43. Pal. lat. 1045 Albertus ; Johannes : Sammelband (Prag (I) , Paris? (II), 1366 (I) ; 14. Jh.)
44. Pal. lat. 1049 Johannes ; Albertus : Sammelhandschrift (Lippspringe, 1376)
45. Pal. lat. 1050 Petrus Nickel ; Johannes Versor: Sammelhandschrift (Leipzig (I) , Heidelberger Region (II), um 1465 (I) ; um 1530 (II))
46. Pal. lat. 1051 Nicolaus : Compendium physicae sive de philosophia naturali (Deutschland, 15. Jh.)
47. Pal. lat. 1052 Nicolaus : Compendium Metaphysicae (Deutschland, 15. Jh.)
48. Pal. lat. 1053 Nicolaus ; Simon Dacus ; Johannes ; Martinus Rentz ; Johannes ; Hugo ; Luder, Petrus: Sammelband (Heidelberg, um 1469 (I) ; um 1456 (II))
49. Pal. lat. 1055 Ovidius Naso, Publius; Aristoteles; Valerius Flaccus Setinus Balbus, Gaius; Propertius, Sextus; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Vergilius Maro, Publius: Sammelhandschrift (Deutschland , Leipzig, um 1488)
50. Pal. lat. 1057 Rocca, Angelo: Commentum in topica Aristotelis (Italien?, 14. Jh.)
51. Pal. lat. 1058 Knab, Erhardus; Aegidius ; Thomas ; Ps.-Augustinus: Sammelhandschrift (Frankreich und Deutschland, 15. Jh. (1400-1427))
52. Pal. lat. 1069 Crescentiis, Petrus /de: Ruralia commoda, Libri XII (Italien, 14. Jh.)
53. Pal. lat. 1072 Grynäus, Simon: De ignitorum meteororum natura commentarii duo ; De cometa anni 1577 ; De planeta Veneris conspecta anno 1578 (Heidelberg, 1579-1582)
54. Pal. lat. 1078 Herbarium (Italien, 16. Jh.)
55. Pal. lat. 1082 Galenus; Hippocrates; Ibn-Riḍwān, ʿAlī: Medizinische Sammelhandschrift: Articella (Italien, 13./14. Jh.)
56. Pal. lat. 1084 Galenus; Archimatthaeus; Baron, Roger; Johannes ; Trotula; Gilbertus : Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (13./14. Jh.)
57. Pal. lat. 1085 Baron, Roger; Aegidius ; Johannes (Petrus Hispanus): Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (13./14. Jh.)
58. Pal. lat. 1086 Johannes Calderia; Aegidius : Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (2. Hälfte 15. Jh.)
59. Pal. lat. 1087 Johannes ; Johannes : Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (13./14.. Jh.)
60. Pal. lat. 1089 Johanntitius; Hippocrates; Theophilus; Philaretus; Galenus: Medizinische Sammelhandschrift: Articella (1. Drittel 14. Jh.)
61. Pal. lat. 1091 Galenus: Liber collecorii (Heidelberg, letztes Viertel 15. Jh.)
62. Pal. lat. 1103 Galenus; Ibn-Riḍwān, ʿAlī: Medizinische Sammelhandschrift: Articella (1. Hälfte 14. Jh.)
63. Pal. lat. 1104 Galenus; Ibn-Māsawaih, Abū-Zakarīyā Yūḥannā; Guilelmus : Medizinische Sammelhandschrift: Articella (Italien, 1. Hälfte 14. Jh.)
64. Pal. lat. 1106 Serapio : Liber aggregationum in medicinis simplicibus (Deutschland, 15. Jh. (1439))
65. Pal. lat. 1107 Serapio ; Petrus : Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (Bologna, 15. Jh. (1426))
66. Pal. lat. 1132 Johannes Matthaeus de Gradibus; Bacon, Rogerus: Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (Heidelberg, 1473)
67. Pal. lat. 1140 Isrāʾīlī, Isḥāq Ibn-Sulaimān /al-; Knab, Erhardus; Johannes Matthaeus Ferrarius de Gradi: Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (Heidelberg, 1472)
68. Pal. lat. 1349 Euclides; Johannes Andreae; Petrus Bertrandus; Bartholomaeus ; Galenus; Rāzī, Muḥammad Ibn-Zakarīyā /ar-; Albertus ; Bonaventura: Miscellanea (Paris, Speyer, 1360-1370)
69. Pal. lat. 1485 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Orationes (Italien, 15. Jh.)
70. Pal. lat. 1509 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Epistulae (Italien (Venedig), 15. Jh.)
71. Pal. lat. 1516 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Opera (Italien (Toskana), 15. Jh.)
72. Pal. lat. 1517 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Sammelhandschrift (Frankreich , Italien, 15. Jh.)
73. Pal. lat. 1541 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus : Sammelhandschrift (Deutschland, 15. Jh.)
74. Pal. lat. 1583 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus; Pius / Enea Silvio Piccolomini; Plutarchus; Bruni, Leonardo; Bonjohannes : Sammelhandschrift (Heidelberg, 15. Jh.)
75. Pal. lat. 1585 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus; Pius / Enea Silvio Piccolomini; Petrarca, Francesco; Seneca, Lucius Annaeus : Sammelhandschrift (Deutschland, 15. Jh.)
76. Pal. lat. 1824 Luther, Martin: Auslegung der ersten 25 Psalmen (Weimar, 1556)
77. Pal. lat. 1957 Französische Bibel (Nordostfrankreich, Anfang 14. Jh.)

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 75. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

First Handbook

If you are keen on historic warfare or the fantastical war machines created for battles in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, you'll be hooked by a 1455 book by Roberto Valturio on the military arts which is full of wonderfully creative images of military machines, real and imagined.

The Vatican Library's manuscript of De re militari (On matters military) arrived online October 24 and Urb.lat.281 is a real page-turner. Leonardo da Vinci is reputed to have read this and to have been inspired by it to some of his own inventions. On folio 147v we find an astonishing dragon machine with a cannon in its snout, capable of firing incendiary missiles:

That is just part of the image.This particular dragon just happens to have a basket on its head with nine commandos wearing blue helmets, ready to jump down and hack you to bits.

Who doesn't remember the James Bond Aston-Martin with knives that emerge from the hubcaps? In this book, it's a heavy battle-wagon drawn by oxen that does the same.

On  fol. 168v there's a tortoise, a machine for getting up close to walls and battering them down, and of course it even looks like a tortoise:

Ponder the weird raking fire weapon on fol. 166r:

Or how about some 15th-century Meccano on fol. 144r:

Valturio (1405–1475) (see French Wikipedia) was a man of letters rather than a proper engineer and this handbook is derivative rather than original. It even starts off with a copious list of sources:

De re militari is also remarkable in book history. A couple of dozen manuscripts were made at great cost to be presents to princes (this is Federico da Montefeltro's copy), but 17 years later a print version appeared in 1472 for the new mass market. It is regarded as the first modern handbook on any subject, dealing with the entirety of its topic in a systematic way, and integrating images and text.

A total of 72 manuscripts came online in this batch. Here is the full list:

1. Pal.gr.14
2. Pal.gr.265
3. Urb.lat.81
4. Urb.lat.96
5. Urb.lat.248 , ‏@LatinAristotle on Twitter (Pieter Beullens) points out this is Galen, De simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus in the Latin of Niccolò da Reggio
6. Urb.lat.281, De re militari (above). Anthony Grafton's Rome Reborn catalog calls the book the most important Renaissance forbear of Machiavelli's Art of War. The St. Louis catalog notes that this copy is dated May 11, 1462 and signed by the scribe Sigismondi Nicolai Alamani.
7. Urb.lat.410
8. Urb.lat.423
9. Urb.lat.674
10. Urb.lat.732
11. Urb.lat.740
12. Urb.lat.763
13. Urb.lat.772
14. Urb.lat.774
15. Urb.lat.789
16. Urb.lat.793
17. Urb.lat.797
18. Urb.lat.812
19. Urb.lat.814.pt.
20. Urb.lat.820.pt.1
21. Urb.lat.823.pt.3
22. Urb.lat.825.pt.2
23. Urb.lat.827.pt.1
24. Urb.lat.827.pt.2
25. Urb.lat.828.pt.3
26. Urb.lat.829.pt.1
27. Urb.lat.829.pt.2
28. Urb.lat.829.pt.3
29. Urb.lat.832.pt.2
30. Urb.lat.836
31. Urb.lat.837
32. Urb.lat.847
33. Urb.lat.848
34. Urb.lat.850
35. Urb.lat.854.pt.2
36. Urb.lat.855
37. Urb.lat.868
38. Urb.lat.870
39. Urb.lat.873
40. Urb.lat.881
41. Urb.lat.883
42. Urb.lat.887
43. Urb.lat.889
44. Urb.lat.890
45. Urb.lat.892
46. Urb.lat.897
47. Urb.lat.910
48. Urb.lat.916
49. Urb.lat.923
50. Urb.lat.926
51. Urb.lat.927
52. Urb.lat.931
53. Urb.lat.960
54. Vat.gr.303.pt.1
55. Vat.gr.303.pt.2
56. Vat.lat.855
57. Vat.lat.897
58. Vat.lat.920
59. Vat.lat.922
60. Vat.lat.923
61. Vat.lat.947
62. Vat.lat.951
63. Vat.lat.960
64. Vat.lat.963
65. Vat.lat.996
66. Vat.lat.1002
67. Vat.lat.1028
68. Vat.lat.1031
69. Vat.lat.1032
70. Vat.lat.1043.pt.2
71. Vat.lat.1089
72. Vat.lat.3281, a magnificent old palimpsest containing fragments from a 5th- or 6th-century Vulgate Bible, scribed in southern Italy perhaps as soon as 50 years after the death of Jerome. It was torn apart and re-used in the 12th century for the Achilleid of Statius in Beneventan script (Lowe 1 14, Trismegistos 66110).

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 74. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

Chart Before Jerome

Before Jerome of Stridon produced his revised Latin version of the Christian Bible in about 400 CE, the version that remains in use today, a Latin edition by translators unknown had existed and had been in wide use. The Great Stemma, the world's oldest network diagram, is product of that culture.

My new reconstruction of the Great Stemma appeared several weeks ago, initially in an English translation. Hot off the press today is an update containing the Vetus Latina or Old Biblical Latin text.

Seeing the chart reconstructed to the original shape is amazing enough. Seeing it in its original language from the time before Jerome adds to the verisimilitude. We don't know exactly when the Great Stemma was made. It was certainly before 427 CE. If it was not made before 400, its ignorance of Jerome's work is in no way surprising. It took centuries for the Jerome Bible to establish itself.

Flipping text upside-down and making it land dead centre in every circle or roundel were among the challenges in the initial reconstruction. One of my difficulties this time round was squeezing these Vetus Latina labels, which mostly take the stereotypical form of "Salomon filius David" (Solomon son of David), into the roundels.

It helped to adopt a condensed/narrow font (CSS: font-family: "Arial Narrow", "Helvetica Condensed", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;), but many of the labels still burst the confines of the circles. In a handwritten chart, you used to be able to vary the text size or squeeze it close together, or split words in unconventional ways. With modern, regularized, typographical text, that is hardly possible, and I did not want to make the text any smaller or it would not have given the impression the chart used to make, so I have allowed labels to spill when they are too long. Tell me what you think.

Notable Names

Great manuscripts have their own names, usually arbitrarily chosen by scholars and journalists. More than 20 years ago, the US classicist Wilma Fitzgerald came up with the entertaining idea of compiling a directory of all these bizarre names worldwide. She published it in three issues of the Canadian journal Mediaeval Studies.

One might dismiss this as being the codicological equivalent of sports trivia, but classicists and medievalists secretly loved it. I keep the index from one of those articles to help me spot interesting new Vatican digitizations. She later republished the articles as a book, Ocelli Nominum: Names and Shelf Marks of Famous/familiar Manuscripts, which I have not been able to lay hands on, but which fans of the digitization program will often spot in the Vatican Library bibliographies.

Sister Wilma (who died in 2013, here is her obituary) would herself have been entertained to know that of the 115 nameable manuscripts she identified at the Vatican Library for her article, 61 are so far online at the DigiVatLib website and seven more are now accessible at the Bibliotheca Palatina in Germany. When the BAV tops 100 of them, I may offer you a list for your browsing pleasure.

None of the Ocelli manuscripts showed up in the line-up of 50 items digitized this week, but I watch weekly with hope. The posted total is now 5,811 manuscripts online. Here are the latest:

1. Barb.lat.4022 ,
2. Chig.L.VIII.304, Letters by Bembo
3. Ott.lat.2057, Belbello da Pavia's production of Cicero, De Oratore, with Cicero taking notes:
   
4. Vat.ebr.54
5. Vat.ebr.331.pt.1
6. Vat.ebr.414
7. Vat.ebr.476
8. Vat.ebr.688
9. Vat.ebr.690
10. Vat.ebr.696
11. Vat.ebr.697
12. Vat.ebr.698
13. Vat.ebr.700
14. Vat.ebr.708
15. Vat.ebr.712
16. Vat.ebr.714
17. Vat.ebr.715
18. Vat.lat.246 ,
19. Vat.lat.324 ,
20. Vat.lat.867 ,
21. Vat.lat.896 ,
22. Vat.lat.903 ,
23. Vat.lat.912 ,
24. Vat.lat.916 ,
25. Vat.lat.921 ,
26. Vat.lat.926 ,
27. Vat.lat.929 ,
28. Vat.lat.932 ,
29. Vat.lat.952 ,
30. Vat.lat.958 ,
31. Vat.lat.982 ,
32. Vat.lat.983 ,
33. Vat.lat.988 ,
34. Vat.lat.994 ,
35. Vat.lat.1024 ,
36. Vat.lat.1043.pt.1 ,
37. Vat.lat.1045 ,
38. Vat.lat.1063 ,
39. Vat.lat.1072 ,
40. Vat.lat.1077 ,
41. Vat.lat.1084 ,
42. Vat.lat.1091 ,
43. Vat.lat.1094 ,
44. Vat.lat.2669, juridical
45. Vat.lat.2780, a 1481 manuscript of the Metamorphoses of Ovid with this fine speech bubble:
    
46. Vat.lat.3313, a battered old 11th-century Priscian, Institutiones Grammaticae, notable for its Beneventan script (listed by Lowe).
47. Vat.lat.8204, Il Libro del Cortegiano, by Baldassar Castiglione, one of three (author's?) manuscripts at the Vatican (the others are 8205 and 8206), extensively discussed by Valeria Finucci (1992).
48. Vat.lat.13748, a scrapbook of many drawings and engravings such as this care for a dead man:
    
49. Vat.pers.177
50. Vat.pers.178

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 73. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

Fitzgerald, Wilma. Ocelli Nominum: Names and Shelf Marks of Famous/Familiar Manuscripts. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992.

Greek Gospels

Scholars of the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, organize the many known early manuscripts by names that refer to the script. That is why Vat.gr.364, an illuminated Gospels from the 12th century which has just been placed online by the Vatican Library, is known as Minuscule 134.

In the nature of such things, it has its own Wikipedia entry. It has elaborate canon tables decorated in gold. The evangelists are shown writing at desks on arms that appear to swivel:

Here is the full list of 19 new digitizations on October 12, which bring the total to 5,762.

1. Vat.ebr.50
2. Vat.ebr.51
3. Vat.ebr.52
4. Vat.ebr.53
5. Vat.ebr.618
6. Vat.ebr.620
7. Vat.ebr.626
8. Vat.ebr.635
9. Vat.ebr.637
10. Vat.ebr.643
11. Vat.ebr.644
12. Vat.ebr.645
13. Vat.ebr.669
14. Vat.ebr.672
15. Vat.ebr.677
16. Vat.ebr.681
17. Vat.ebr.683
18. Vat.ebr.684
19. Vat.gr.364

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 72. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

From Larestan

Among the treasures put online this week is the celebrated Vatican Judaeo-Persian Pentateuch. This is a 14th-century translation of part of the bible into Persian from the Aramaic Targum Onkelos.

Vat.pers.61 is written out in Hebrew script, though other contemporary translations from the Mongol era exist in Persian script. I quote from the Encyclopaedia Iranica:

Persian manuscripts were purchased for the ‘Stamperia Orientale Medicea’ by the brothers Giovan Battista Vecchietti (1552-1619), and Gerolamo Vecchietti (1557-ca. 1640) during their several missions to the East commissioned by the papacy... Among the manuscripts brought to Italy by Giovan Battista Vecchietti, mention should be made of a copy of the Judaeo-Persian Pentateuch, preserved at the Vatican Library as MS Vat. Pers. 61 (Rossi, 1948, p. 87). Ignazio Guidi (q.v.) made a preliminary study of it, and Herbert Paper published the text in Latin transliteration (1965-68). 

Vecchietti apparently obtained this fragile old book, which is almost square in format, in the town of Lar, capital of Larestan in Iran, according to Kenneth Thomas.

Here is the full list of digitizations placed online on October 10:

1. Barb.or.14, Hebrew grammar
2. Barb.or.82
3. Barb.or.85
4. Barb.or.88
5. Barb.or.98
6. Barb.or.101
7. Barb.or.110
8. Barb.or.119
9. Barb.or.161
10. Barb.or.162
11. Barb.or.163
12. Borg.turc.79
13. Reg.gr.31
14. Reg.gr.36 
15. Reg.lat.1512, a 14th-century copy of the De Re Militari of Vegetius. According to Charles Shrader, Queen Christina owned numerous of these.
16. Urb.lat.187, Metaphysica, an Avicenna Latinus of the Renaissance (hat tip for this to Pieter Beullens, @LatinAristotle on Twitter)
17. Vat.ebr.3
18. Vat.ebr.6
19. Vat.ebr.8
20. Vat.ebr.
21. Vat.ebr.55
22. Vat.ebr.56.pt.1
23. Vat.ebr.56.pt.2
24. Vat.ebr.58
25. Vat.ebr.59
26. Vat.ebr.60
27. Vat.ebr.61
28. Vat.ebr.62
29. Vat.ebr.63
30. Vat.ebr.64
31. Vat.ebr.65
32. Vat.ebr.67
33. Vat.ebr.68
34. Vat.ebr.69
35. Vat.ebr.70
36. Vat.ebr.73
37. Vat.ebr.74
38. Vat.ebr.76
39. Vat.ebr.77
40. Vat.ebr.78
41. Vat.ebr.80
42. Vat.ebr.81
43. Vat.ebr.82
44. Vat.ebr.83
45. Vat.ebr.84
46. Vat.ebr.85
47. Vat.ebr.86
48. Vat.ebr.88
49. Vat.ebr.89
50. Vat.ebr.90
51. Vat.ebr.91
52. Vat.ebr.92
53. Vat.ebr.93
54. Vat.ebr.94
55. Vat.ebr.95
56. Vat.ebr.96
57. Vat.ebr.97
58. Vat.ebr.98
59. Vat.ebr.99
60. Vat.ebr.254
61. Vat.ebr.454.pt.3
62. Vat.ebr.473
63. Vat.ebr.477
64. Vat.ebr.480
65. Vat.ebr.481
66. Vat.ebr.483
67. Vat.ebr.488
68. Vat.ebr.489
69. Vat.ebr.491
70. Vat.ebr.495
71. Vat.ebr.496
72. Vat.ebr.498
73. Vat.ebr.507
74. Vat.ebr.509
75. Vat.ebr.510
76. Vat.ebr.511
77. Vat.ebr.515
78. Vat.ebr.517
79. Vat.ebr.518
80. Vat.ebr.520
81. Vat.ebr.521
82. Vat.ebr.522
83. Vat.ebr.524
84. Vat.ebr.525
85. Vat.ebr.526
86. Vat.ebr.527
87. Vat.ebr.528
88. Vat.ebr.529
89. Vat.ebr.539
90. Vat.ebr.540
91. Vat.ebr.541
92. Vat.ebr.542
93. Vat.ebr.543
94. Vat.ebr.545
95. Vat.ebr.547
96. Vat.ebr.548
97. Vat.ebr.549
98. Vat.ebr.550
99. Vat.ebr.551
100. Vat.ebr.552
101. Vat.ebr.553
102. Vat.ebr.554
103. Vat.ebr.555
104. Vat.ebr.556
105. Vat.ebr.558
106. Vat.ebr.559
107. Vat.ebr.560
108. Vat.ebr.561
109. Vat.ebr.563
110. Vat.ebr.567
111. Vat.ebr.569
112. Vat.ebr.570
113. Vat.ebr.574
114. Vat.ebr.575
115. Vat.ebr.576
116. Vat.ebr.577
117. Vat.ebr.578
118. Vat.ebr.579.pt.2
119. Vat.ebr.580
120. Vat.ebr.585
121. Vat.ebr.588
122. Vat.ebr.590
123. Vat.ebr.592
124. Vat.ebr.593
125. Vat.ebr.594
126. Vat.ebr.596.pt.1
127. Vat.ebr.596.pt.2
128. Vat.ebr.597
129. Vat.ebr.600
130. Vat.ebr.601
131. Vat.ebr.603
132. Vat.ebr.604
133. Vat.ebr.605
134. Vat.ebr.606
135. Vat.ebr.608
136. Vat.ebr.613
137. Vat.ebr.615
138. Vat.ebr.617
139. Vat.lat.344
140. Vat.lat.889
141. Vat.lat.906
142. Vat.lat.913
143. Vat.lat.917
144. Vat.lat.954
145. Vat.lat.955
146. Vat.lat.984
147. Vat.lat.985, Mich. Angiran's Commentary on the Sentences. Schadt, p. 197 notes 12-13, quotes a curious argument at fol. 161 based on medieval genetics to explain why incest leads to sick babies. The front illumination contains a fine image of a baptism where the tiny altar boy is struggling to hold up the heavy lectionary:
     
148. Vat.lat.1000
149. Vat.lat.1017
150. Vat.lat.1029
151. Vat.lat.1058, miscellany including Bonaventura, Lignum Vitae. Those who follow this blog will know that I am interested in tree diagrams, and this contains a diagram presenting people in a tree at fol 28v. This is an exceptionally early adoption of the idea, dating from the 13th century:
     
     The figure at right is not waving fists in a victory pose. Those are only tendrils. As Hermann Schadt notes, Bonaventura (1221-1274) discussed Christ's cross as a "tree of life" with 12 branches and invited his readers to dwell on and explore this symbolism. The graphic is not a data visualization, but the artistic motif helps to prepare the ground for genealogical trees in later centuries.
152. Vat.lat.1068
153. Vat.lat.1087
154. Vat.lat.1819, Latin translation of Dionysius Halicarnassensis, Antiquitates romanae, lib. I-XI - 15th century manuscript
155. Vat.lat.1848, Livy, Ad Urbe Condita, 15th or 16th century
156. Vat.lat.3317, 10th-century copy of Servius, In Vergilium, apparently on Georgics I. Lowe notes its Beneventan script.
157. Vat.lat.7319, Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium, with a fine opening illumination from Brussels
158. Vat.pers.61, see above

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 71. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Schadt, Hermann. Die Darstellungen der Arbores Consanguinitatis und der Arbores Affinitatis: Bildschemata in juristischen Handschriften. Tübingen [Germany]: Wasmuth, 1982.

The Goths Got a Long Run

The Goths, an eastern Germanic people, have had a fabulously long run. Of their own culture we know comparatively little, but we know much of the glories of Latin Spain under their rule.

Later, a revival of what was fancied to have been Gothic took medieval art by storm. Of the Gothic Revival in the 19th century (properly a revival of a revival) we find traces in the whole globe. And the Goths who now meet every year in Leipzig to hear Gothic rock music pay their own tribute.

So what are we to make of the Missale Gothicum, a fabulously old book of Christian liturgy made in France about 700 which the Vatican Library placed online this week in one of the major gifts of the year to historical scholarship?

Reg.lat.317 is not Gothic at all and its traditional title is entirely false, as Henry Bannister noted a century ago in his introduction:

... for it is not a missal, but a pure sacramentary, and the word Gothic in its time has borne many different meanings; at any rate, it was so called about five centuries ago, when someone inserted this title at what was then, and is still, the first page of the ms. One cannot say what he intended by it; it may ... have simply meant that to him Gothicum was synonymous with "ignotum" ...

This codex, collected by Vossius and formerly at Stockholm, is of such huge importance that four editions of it have appeared: by Giuseppe Maria Tomasi in 1680, by Bannister in 1917, by Leo Mohlberg in 1961 and most recently and authoritatively by Els Rose in 2004.

Described by Bannister as "the oldest and nearly perfect sacramentary of the Church in the West", the manuscript was presumably written in a Burgundian scriptorium, and was most probably in use in the church of Autun. As an important source of the Gallican liturgy, and of early medieval Latin, a language in a transitional stage, it naturally has its own entry in Wikipedia. Enjoy it now online.

It is among 106 new manuscripts placed online on October 3, bringing the total to 5,585. Here is the full list:

1. Chig.C.VI.163, autograph by Bernardino of Siena (died 1444)
2. Patetta.1621
3. Reg.lat.317, above, TM 66201 in the Trismegistos database.
4. Urb.lat.151
5. Vat.ebr.45
6. Vat.ebr.46
7. Vat.ebr.47
8. Vat.ebr.57
9. Vat.ebr.407
10. Vat.ebr.438
11. Vat.ebr.444
12. Vat.ebr.445
13. Vat.ebr.450
14. Vat.ebr.452
15. Vat.ebr.454.pt.1
16. Vat.ebr.454.pt.2
17. Vat.ebr.455.pt.1
18. Vat.ebr.455.pt.2
19. Vat.ebr.455.pt.3
20. Vat.ebr.456
21. Vat.ebr.457
22. Vat.ebr.458
23. Vat.ebr.461
24. Vat.ebr.462
25. Vat.ebr.463
26. Vat.ebr.464
27. Vat.ebr.465
28. Vat.ebr.466
29. Vat.ebr.468
30. Vat.ebr.469
31. Vat.ebr.475
32. Vat.ebr.478
33. Vat.ebr.482
34. Vat.ebr.484
35. Vat.ebr.494
36. Vat.ebr.497
37. Vat.ebr.500
38. Vat.ebr.501
39. Vat.ebr.502
40. Vat.ebr.503
41. Vat.ebr.504
42. Vat.ebr.505
43. Vat.ebr.506
44. Vat.ebr.508
45. Vat.ebr.516
46. Vat.ebr.523
47. Vat.ebr.546
48. Vat.ebr.564
49. Vat.ebr.565
50. Vat.ebr.566
51. Vat.ebr.571
52. Vat.ebr.572
53. Vat.ebr.581
54. Vat.lat.175
55. Vat.lat.217
56. Vat.lat.265
57. Vat.lat.439
58. Vat.lat.539
59. Vat.lat.544
60. Vat.lat.692
61. Vat.lat.822
62. Vat.lat.857
63. Vat.lat.859
64. Vat.lat.868
65. Vat.lat.871
66. Vat.lat.876
67. Vat.lat.883
68. Vat.lat.885
69. Vat.lat.891
70. Vat.lat.893
71. Vat.lat.900
72. Vat.lat.902
73. Vat.lat.907
74. Vat.lat.910
75. Vat.lat.915
76. Vat.lat.918
77. Vat.lat.919
78. Vat.lat.924
79. Vat.lat.928
80. Vat.lat.938
81. Vat.lat.940
82. Vat.lat.941
83. Vat.lat.944
84. Vat.lat.946
85. Vat.lat.948
86. Vat.lat.956
87. Vat.lat.967
88. Vat.lat.968, Johannes de Capistrano (patron saint of jurists), Speculum Conscientiae, in 15th-century writing. Lowe: The final fly-leaves, fols. 151-2 (part of a missal), are in a 12th-century Beneventan hand:
    
89. Vat.lat.974
90. Vat.lat.975
91. Vat.lat.978
92. Vat.lat.980
93. Vat.lat.1001
94. Vat.lat.1015
95. Vat.lat.1016
96. Vat.lat.1018
97. Vat.lat.1019
98. Vat.lat.1036
99. Vat.lat.1041.pt.1
100. Vat.lat.1041.pt.2
101. Vat.lat.1647
102. Vat.lat.1742, a 15th-century manuscript of the Orationes of Cicero. Anthony Grafton's Rome Reborn catalog notes of fol. 2v below: Gaspare di Sant'Angelo's manuscript of Cicero portrays the Roman orator and his audience in contemporary dress before a gilt background:
     
     The image is framed in interlacing white vines or branches, one of the most common ornamental devices of the Italian illuminated manuscript of the Renaissance.
103. Vat.lat.1766, Quintilian, Epistola
104. Vat.lat.1860, Livy
105. Vat.lat.7320, Valerius Maximus, De Dictis et Factis, with this wheel of fortune at fol. 145v:
     
106. Vat.lat.10305, Giovanni Battista Natali, with many sample drawings like this baby
     

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 70. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

Secret of Oldest Infographic Revealed: A Grid

Things have been quiet on this blog and my Twitter stream because I have been working on a major project: a complete reconstruction of the oldest known conceptual infographic in the world: the fifth-century Latin Great Stemma.

When I first announced its rediscovery in 2011, I presented a rather freely drawn plot of it (see this in my article in Studia Patristica or archived on my website as an swf (Flash) file):

This time round, I am trying to do something much harder: to replicate the chart without any accommodations to modern assumptions, showing it precisely as it was intended by its designer.

The result (link) is the layout that the designer would have saved if the SVG mark-up language had existed in the fifth century. Not only are the lines, circles and text in the precise locations where the design called for them to be positioned. These positions also allow us to observe the design's hidden concepts and rules. This new drawing is not an impression of the late antique original: it is an encoding of the design itself.

The starting point for my revision was wise counsel from a great infographics teacher and practitioner, Raimar Heber of Germany. Raimar has just published a textbook (in German, Rheinwerk Verlag) of best practices in infographics and it looks very good indeed from the page samples.

In 2011, Raimar offered to do a retro-engineering experiment: he world accept an imaginary design brief and visualize the data of the Great Stemma as one of the world's leading professional art editors would design it today. He drew up a graphic sampler. One frame of it pitched a grid as the basis of the visualization. Chains should be laid out in the horizontal and vertical, he argued, with shoots allowed at 45-degree angles if the going got tough.

For a long time, I was sceptical about this. It sounded too 21st century to me. There is only one manuscript of the Great Stemma where straight lines and right angles stand out (Plut 20.54 in Florence), but one tends to assume that was just the obsession of an over-neat scribe.

But in spring this year I began re-analysing every substructure of the Great Stemma using a selection of the best manuscripts. This involved no less than 30 separate investigations, listed here as a "detail views".

For the first time I noticed something.

The manuscripts contain many vertical columns of roundels (the circles containing names). If one counts how many members there are in such rows, one comes up unusually often with the number 10. There might for example be a column of eight connected roundels, in a place where two others above them block the area overhead. Or there are long chains which bend to the left or the right at the 10th member in many manuscripts.

So as an experiment I worked to trim all 100 of so columns of the Great Stemma so that each was 10 elements high. If you array that many columns side by side it naturally appears gridlike.

This alignment became a new paradigm. Not only is this pattern harmonious, but it also provides a simple and logical explanation for so many bulges, interlocks and elbows in the manuscripts. I am convinced it is the lost original pattern that the designer used. So Raimar's insight turned out to be spot on.

On reflection there would have been good reasons to use a grid. Firstly, it makes designs easier to read. That is an imperative of then and now.

Secondly, it makes a design much easier to hand-copy, which is no longer an imperative now, but was an important concern before the rise of printing. If you draw a grid where the written data expand neatly in two dimensions, and prescribe moreover that certain squares be left blank, you have a robust model for copyists to work from. We should study whether a similar method may have been used to copy the Peutinger Table, mappaemundi and other late antique charts by hand.

Take a look at my new reconstruction, which translates all of the 5th-century design into a (gridlike) pixel coordinate system. This design is not drawn by hand, but as output from a new database I have built, where all the crossing points in the grid have been recorded, along with the roundels, texts and connectors that pertain to those crossings. Other scholars may offer their own editions in future, but I would argue that the Piggin Stemma is the most accurate reconstruction on the available evidence.

A contemporary buzzword is digital humanities, which often is simply watered down to mean storing and searching old documents as scans in databases. True digital humanities work is something more: it means recasting historic creative work from its original analog expression to a digital expression which remains absolutely congruent with the artist's or writer's intentions, but yields more insight.

I have tried to make this chart even more accessible by translating its text into English and by supplementing it with explanatory plaques and interactive visual effects (look for radio buttons like those above). Tell me if it works like this and how you think it might be further improved.