Cassiodorus Digital

Since I first published several years ago a hyperlinked listing of the 37 diagrams "made up" by Cassiodorus for his Institutiones, two key sources have become available digitally: the great 8th-century codex from Monte Cassino now at Bamberg, Msc. Patr. 61, which contains the complete set, probably in the final form approved by Cassiodorus for publication, and Mazarine 660, which contains some peculiar variations in the motifs used in the diagrams. The tabulated listing now includes links to all these images, making it an excellent tool for comparing their evolution in the first millennium. The drawings from Mazarine 660 are to be found on the Liber Floridus illuminations site.

It is remarkable how much has changed in the 13 years since the definitive article on the Cassiodorus diagrams by Michael Gorman was published and included this comment:

Today it is relatively cheap and easy to buy a microfilm of a manuscript and print it out on paper, but in the 1930s this was a luxury that could probably not even be imagined ... I hope this note is sufficient to stimulate interest in preparing a facsimile of the Bamberg manuscript ... (pages 39, 41)

Since that was written, another unimaginable barrier has been breached and it has become possible for anyone to see these manuscripts at no charge via the internet, making facsimiles less necessary.

This update is one of three data upgrades to the Macro-Typography website that have been accomplished in the past month. The collation of the Great Stemma now contains a properly checked fifth and last set of text variations, from the Gamma manuscripts. This was previously bodged together from Fischer's Genesis edition and my transcription of the Urgell Beatus. The Gamma text is now based on a sounder manuscript, that in the San Juan Bible, with the Urgell Beatus only required to fill gaps. This data entry was a lot of work at an unwelcome time, but means that I can now close off the transcription phase with a good conscience.

The third of the upgrades has been some supplementing of the Petrus Pictaviensis table on my website. The major new find there has been a digitization (by Heidelberg) of one of the manuscripts in the Vatican Library. I have also restored the Walters digitization which for some inexplicable reason I had deleted from the list. This means there is an even wider range of quality digitizations -- 22 -- of the Compendium available for comparison.

In addition to these, I continue to keep an eye out for any more additions to the Stemma of Boethius tabulation I completed in the late spring.

Gorman, Michael. “The Diagrams in the Oldest Manuscript of Cassiodor’s Institutiones.” Revue Bénédictine no. 110 (2000): 27–41.

Great Minds

Do great minds think alike? Here a couple of striking quotes separated by a millennium and a half. First of all comes Cassiodorus, who seems to have had quite definite ideas about how to employ diagrams:

Duplex quodammodo discendi genus est, quando et linealis descriptio imbuit diligenter aspectum, et post aurium praeparatus intrat auditus. (Institutions 2, praef. 5. Possible translation: Learning is a dual process: the visual mind first acquires the exact context through a drawn figure, so that an attuned aural perception can grasp the subsequent discourse.)

Here are Christopher Chabris and Stephen Kosslyn in 2005:

To be maximally effective, the diagram should be examined before the reader encounters the relevant text, in part because the diagram helps to organize the text, and in part because the reader may try to visualize what the text is describing and the results may not match the diagram.

There is a more thorough discussion of Cassiodorus on my website, including references to Esmeijer's book which first drew attention to this aspect of Cassiodorus's thinking. I have slightly altered the punctuation of Chabris/Kosslyn.

Both passages are onto an important point about thinking through vision: it may not be especially helpful to have access to diagrams after we have discussed topics, but diagrams can be very effective aids, priming the mind to understand things before a more linear form of reasoning commences.

• Cassiodorus, and R.A.B. Mynors. Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
• Chabris, Christopher, and Stephen M. Kosslyn. “Representational Correspondence as a Basic Principle of Diagram Design.” Knowledge and Information Visualization (2005): 185–186 (Springer).
• Esmeijer, Anna Catharina. Divina Quaternitas: a Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Exegesis. Translated by D.A.S. Reid. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1978.

Books of the Bible

I have chanced on a curious medieval infographic showing all the books of the Old Testament in stemmatic fashion, an idea that goes back to Cassiodorus (see my Cassiodorus abstract). The drawing, discovered with the help of Digital Scriptorium, is in the Lawrence Library at the University of Kansas and available in a high-resolution image.

It shows God as the origin node at the top, forking to the various books, for example the Pentateuch as a group of five at the top left, and employing trunk connectors below to connect the books of the prophets. The colours and style recall the Great Stemma.

The bibliographic information places the document (f. 2v of MS 9/2:29) in the 13th or 14th centuries and it is on the back of the final page of a Peter of Poitiers Compendium (see my list). It appears to be a continuation of the Compendium by the same scribe/artist. In the bibliographic description, the library considers it to be French.

Karlsruhe MS

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.

Bamberg Cassiodorus

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.

Cassiodorus

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.