False Alert

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).

Intriguing Lead

This post has been superseded.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

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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?

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* 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.