Beauty Imagined

The noble ladies of the south of France were praised in song by male troubadours employed by the courts and themselves composed verse which was a full part of this woman-led courtly ritual.

No portraits of these women of celebrated intelligence and beauty survive, but a 13th-century Venetian miniaturist at least attempted to visualize one of the latter ladies, Maria de Ventadorn, long after her lifetime:

Her image appears in Vat.lat.3207, a manuscript of Provencal troubadour poetry just digitized by the Vatican Library, which depicts the trobairitz, the female poet. The arrival of this extraordinary codex online has already been noted by @DigitaVaticana (below).

The two images below represent Tibors de Sarenom (described on Wikipedia as the earliest attested trobairitz), and ...

... Iseut de Capio (according to @DigitaVaticana, relying on the scholarship, I can't find the names in the text at first glance):

The existence of the codex points to the high value set on women's poetry in medieval Italy. Read Francesca Gambino's review of Elizabeth Poe's study of the text of this codex for a feel of its uniqueness and importance. The fact that half a page of this codex was ripped out long ago suggests someone might have removed one image as a kind of pin-up, but perhaps it was simply careless treatment of what is now a priceless book.

Last week, 56 manuscripts arrived online in full color. My list:

1. Barb.lat.4287,
2. Ross.19,
3. Ross.20,
4. Ross.30,
5. Ross.76, church music. Jeffrey Wasson drew on this manuscript to point out variations in a medieval chant used as a gradual
6. Ross.114,
7. Vat.lat.2342,
8. Vat.lat.2348,
9. Vat.lat.2349,
10. Vat.lat.2378 (Upgraded to HQ), Galen in Latin translation, eTK-listed incipit: "Que namque optima compositio nostri ...", also one Hippocratic and one anonymous text
11. Vat.lat.2444.pt.2,
12. Vat.lat.2574,
13. Vat.lat.2651, Johannes Calderinus, Consilia, listed by Brendan McManus, also a text by Antonio da Butrio
14. Vat.lat.2698,
15. Vat.lat.2722,
16. Vat.lat.2734,
17. Vat.lat.2759 (Upgraded to HQ),
18. Vat.lat.2853 (Upgraded to HQ),
19. Vat.lat.2953 (Upgraded to HQ),
20. Vat.lat.3039 (Upgraded to HQ),
21. Vat.lat.3207 (Upgraded to HQ), 13th-century manuscript of Provencal troubadour poetry (above)

    Maria de Ventadorn, Tibors de Sarenom, Lombarda, Iseut de Capio. 💁🏻💁🏼🙋🏻🙋🏼#Miniature di trobairitz (#donne poetesse e compositrici vissute tra XI e XIII secolo).
    
    Vat. Lat. 3207: Canzoniere Provenzale (manoscritto trobadorico H), sec. XIII, Veneto. #LatestDigitizedManuscripts pic.twitter.com/G2PLdMQ1Wu

    — Digita Vaticana (@DigitaVaticana) October 26, 2018

22. Vat.lat.3513,
23. Vat.lat.3604,
24. Vat.lat.3904,
25. Vat.lat.3953 (Upgraded to HQ),
26. Vat.lat.3956,
27. Vat.lat.3961,
28. Vat.lat.3987,
29. Vat.lat.3990,
30. Vat.lat.3994 (Upgraded to HQ),
31. Vat.lat.3996,
32. Vat.lat.3997,
33. Vat.lat.4012 (Upgraded to HQ),
34. Vat.lat.4013,
35. Vat.lat.4015 (Upgraded to HQ),
36. Vat.lat.4017,
37. Vat.lat.4023,
38. Vat.lat.4024,
39. Vat.lat.4062,
40. Vat.lat.4065 (Upgraded to HQ),
41. Vat.lat.4070,
42. Vat.lat.4089, an elaborate tabulation of Easter dates by Ricciardo Cervini 1454-1534: Tabulae annorum solarium pro inveniendo die Paschatis ad Clementem VII, see Jordanus 
    
43. Vat.lat.4093,
44. Vat.lat.4099,
45. Vat.lat.4112.pt.1,
46. Vat.lat.4113.pt.2,
47. Vat.lat.4126,
48. Vat.lat.4134,
49. Vat.lat.4135,
50. Vat.lat.4142,
51. Vat.lat.4152,
52. Vat.lat.4162, 12th-century codex compiling ecclesiology and penitentials, also includes Bede's Arithmetic, in Jordanus
53. Vat.lat.4165,
54. Vat.lat.4177,
55. Vat.lat.4227 (Upgraded to HQ),
56. Vat.lat.13721, a 1727 catalog of the manuscripts then present in the library/archive of Sassovivo Abbey in Umbria, a foundation from about 1070 which was more or less defunct by 1800
    

In addition, DigiVatLib has imported 19 manuscripts which have already been online for over a year at Heidelberg:

1. Pal.lat.417,
2. Pal.lat.580,
3. Pal.lat.582 (Upgraded to HQ),
4. Pal.lat.584 (Upgraded to HQ),
5. Pal.lat.585,
6. Pal.lat.586,
7. Pal.lat.587 (Upgraded to HQ),
8. Pal.lat.588,
9. Pal.lat.589,
10. Pal.lat.590,
11. Pal.lat.591,
12. Pal.lat.593,
13. Pal.lat.594,
14. Pal.lat.595,
15. Pal.lat.596,
16. Pal.lat.601,
17. Pal.lat.602,
18. Pal.lat.604 (Upgraded to HQ),
19. Pal.lat.605,

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 183. Thanks to @gundormr for harvesting. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

Florence Online Again Soon?

Last year I described the wreck of the Laurenziana Digital Library in Italy. This was to libraries what the Costa Concordia sinking was to shipping, except that there was no craven captain involved.

There seem to be some faint stirrings of life in the wreck of one of the world's great medieval manuscript collections. There is no announcement on the portal of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana about any fix, but on Wednesday at breakfast time, I briefly managed to access a manuscript in the Biblioteca Digitale. They are no longer using the ill-conceived Java set-up, but serving pages with their own URLs, just as Archive.org does.

This must have been a test only by the engineers, because for the rest of the day and today I have obtained a 503 error only.

There is a touching honesty about the site: the site map asks us to report 404 errors if we see them:

Questo sito è continuamente aggiornato e verificato in modo da evitare link scorretti e fastidiosi Error 404.Vi saremo molto grati se vorrete segnalarci errori.

But a 503 is not a 404. Can we hope that the digital library will be online again soon? Is anyone able to obtain access? Or has anyone seen a blog post about this?

Java Disaster in Florence

The digital library of 3,000-plus manuscripts at the Medicea Laurenziana Library in Florence was introduced on this blog as outstanding news three years ago. This year, disaster struck as hackers round the world exploited security vulnerabilities in Java software. Java's security had to be tightened to such a degree that the current plug-ins for browsers can no longer access the digital library in Florence.

This mess has been evident for several weeks. The library has just issued a notice about the problem which offers little solace other than a promise to act in "a short space of time" to achieve a permanent solution. The notice (digitally dated December 6) blames "security controls in the latest version of the Java interpreter that no longer allow the execution of our viewer."

The interim solution proposed is not satisfactory: uninstalling your current Java version and downgrading to the old low-security version, SE 6, which is "still compatible with our application".

Oracle warns that this version is "not recommended for use" and is reserved for developers and administrators doing debugging. Running an unsafe Java version would, in my view, only be feasible if you were to reserve a dedicated computer to visit the Laurentian site alone. Otherwise the risk would be too great of catching a virus while the PC was used to visit other parts of the internet. And who has computers to spare?

Liber Genealogus

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.

Translation Finished

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:

1. The Genealogy of Christ
2. Other Genealogies
3. The Timeline
4. The Interpolations

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.

Plutei Online

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.