Baum: An Early Family Tree

The search for the earliest use of "Baum" in German to describe a stemma continues. Currently the honour seems to reside with Heinrich Steinhöwel of Ulm who is thought to have used the term in his dedication of a book printed 1475 when introducing the following woodcut:

The male ancestor at the root, right, is designated Albrecht Hapsburg, landgrave of Alsace, Lord of Sassenburg. The main body of the book is a German translation of the Speculum Vitae Humanae of Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (1404-1470). Steinhöwel's German title is Der Spiegel des Menschlichen Lebens.

It is online as BSB incunable 2 Inc.s.a. 1264 digitized here (seek image 18), also at the LOC and in Heidelberg. ISTC: ir00231000.

The text preceding the woodcut says: "darumb will ich ... alleyn desletszen hauses österreich auff wachssen eynen bom beczeichnen ale er hie ynne mit bilden ist geformieret. Und vince ds anfang von eynem lantgraffen aus dem Elses dessun in die graffschafft ze habspurg komen ist als dr in nachgenter geschrifft v[o]n in dem bom mit geleich-en büchstabben wirt ausgezeichnet. (That's why I wish to draw all of the latter house of Austria on a full-grown tree. Each is shown by pictures. And those counts of Hapsburg arising from this landgrave of Alsace are each marked in the tree with the same letter (of the alphabet) as is used in the subsequent list.)

This praise of the Hapsburgs is not part of the original Speculum Vitae Humanae itself (see the Latin version at Gallica), but an appeal for patronage from the Hapsburgs. Given that aristocrats were the principal customers for books in Steinhöwel's time, the genealogy was a crude but entirely normal attempt to secure sales.

No date or place of printing for the incunable is given, but it seems from the type-face to be settled that the printer was Günther Zainer of Augsburg, and that the year was most likely 1475. The translator's manuscript (which still exists) was completed March 19, 1474 and an entry in the genealogy on folio 10v mentions the baptism of Prince Maximilian in Augsburg "this Easter" on Maundy Thursday of 1475. It is to be assumed the printing was completed later that year. The book is overlooked by Klapisch-Zuber, who opens L'Ombre with a family tree of 1491 (see below), the earliest she could discover.

The book is prefaced by (1) a foreword and overview, (2) a dedication to Duke Siegmund of Tyrol, (3) a one-paragraph explanation of the family tree, (4) the full-page engraving, and (5) a tabular listing of the genealogy keyed to the sketch. (4) and (5) appear to be the work of Ladislaus Sunthaym (ca. 1440 – 1512).

Walther Borvitz is dismissive of (2) as fawning hack-work, which perhaps leads him to his peculiar view that (3) is a boiler-plate insertion originating with Sunthaym. Perplexingly, he refused to transcribe (3) in his edition (Archive.org) although it continues in the same first person (ich) as the paragraphs above and is almost certainly of a unity with them. It is hard to follow Borvitz's justification for this omission, since his contention that the text of (3) appears at col 1004 of Scriptores Rerum Austriacarum Veteres ac Genuini, vol 1, by Hieronymus Pez does not seem to be correct. The Latin text there is by Pez and makes no claim at all about the Steinhöwel book of 1475:

Harum Tabularum Clauftro Neoburgensium praecipuus Auctor est Ladislaus Sunthaim seu Sundheimius, Ravensburgio Sueviæ oppido oriundus, Dioecesis Constantiensis Presbyter. Quod mirum est in laudatarum Tabularum editione fuisse dissimulatum: cum in MS Claustro-Neoburgensi quod nos coram inspeximus, diserte Sunthaimii nomen, patria conditioque habeantur. Porro eas Sunthaimius condidit sub annum 1491, quo ipso Basileæ typis excusæ fuerunt in majori forma, quam vocant. Ad cuius editionis fidem & hanc nostram adornavimus, cum sæpe memoratæ Tabulæ manuscriptae vix commodum Mellicium perferri potuerint, & nos, dum in lustranda Claustro-Neoburgensi Bibliotheca versaremur, ab ipsis integris describendis angustia temporis exclusi fuerimus. In vulgatis Tabulis ad calcem, Reverendissimus Dominus Jacobus Praepositus Clastro-Neoburgensis ad eas concinnandas symbolam contulisse memoratur, qui ab anno 1485 usque ad annum 1509 Claustro-Neoburgensem praefecturam gessisse dicitur apud Adamum Scharrerum in Vita S. Leopoldi Auftriæ Marchionis. Cæterum Ladislaus Sunthaimius is præterea fuit, qui Historiam de Guelfis sub annum 1511 composuit, quam ex Caesarea Bibliotheca fecum communicatam Cl. Leibnitius Tom. I Script. Brunswic. a pag 800 ad pag 806 publico exposuit. Ex qua etiam intelligimus, Sunthaimium postea Viennensis Canonici dignitate fuissse auctum. Sed de his fatis. En ipsas Tabulas Claustro Neoburgenses.

There is thus no reason to attribute (3) to Sunthaym, and every good reason to regard Steinhöwel as the writer who chose the word "bom". Barbara Weinmayer offers a very different perspective on the section (3), seeing the dedication as a valuable source of Steinhöwel's genuine views about the science of translation, although she makes no comment on the content of our disputed final paragraph (3) and its bom.

For the time being it seems best to leave the authorship of (3) with Steinhöwel. Perhaps an expert on Renaissance German style could ponder the issue.

The woodcut employed at Basel in or after 1491 for the printing of Der löblichen Fürsten und des Landes Österreich Altherkommen und Regierung (full text on Wikisource) of Sunthaym is not the same as this one, though it is similar. Sunthaym is often treated in the literature as father of the royal "tree", but it would seem that the "tree" was already part of the vocabulary of man one generation older.

Borvitz, Walther. Die Übersetzungstechnik Heinrich Steinhöwels: dargestellt auf Grund seiner Verdeutschung des ‘Speculum vitae humanae’. Hermaea 13. Halle: Niemeyer, 1914.

Dicke, Gerd. ‘Steinhöwel, Heinrich’. Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, 1995. vol 9, cols 269ff. http://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/cgi-bin/mgh/allegro.pl?db=opac.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’ombre des ancêtres. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

Weinmayer, Barbara. Studien zur Gebrauchssituation früher deutscher Druckprosa. Literarische Öffentlichkeit in Vorreden zu Augsburger Frühdrucken. Munich: Artemis, 1982.

Peter and Parker

Half a year ago, a kind reader revealed to me that the Compendium of Petrus Pictaviensis, a remarkable medieval chart of time that dates from around 1180 just kept going and going and turns up in English translation in one of the early English vernacular bibles, that edited by Matthew Parker and printed in London from 1568 onwards.

There are several copies of this famous work of 16th-century printing on Early English Books Online (which is behind a paywall). Otherwise check out Princeton's copy incomplete at archive.org.

The English text of the diagram has been usefully abstracted by the Text Creation Partnership (here is the transcript). What one notices is that this text is longer than that of Petrus, heavily interpolated and rather liberally translated from the Latin.

I was interested to see how the diagram shaped up graphically, and as I usually do, I looked at the end rather than the beginning of the chart, where there are several characteristic ways of laying out the Holy Family and Apostles, one of Petrus's hobby-horses. Here's how it is shown in the Parker Bible:

Below is my own abstract of the three most characteristic layouts to be found in the older manuscripts:

You'll see at a glance that the Parker Bible use the layout at top right. This is useful to anyone who wants to research the origins of the Parker diagram and the work involved in converting it to print. I haven't continued my research past that simple check, but knowing about this connection may be useful to others studying this diagram, so I will leave this note online.

Stemmata in Incunables

What I have been looking at in recent weeks is how early printers coped with the idea of a stemma without drawing a tree. The period I am looking at is that of the so-called incunables, books printed before 1500, and I should stress that I am not concerned here with fanciful treelike art like that of Hartmann Schedel (as in the previous post) but with the pure stemmata.

The simplest approach in this period was to cut a pre-existing graphic as a woodblock, which is what the author and publisher did in Die Cronica van der hilliger Stat va[n] Coelle[n] (The Chronicle of the Holy City of Cologne, 1499, ISTC ic00476000 GW 6688). Here, each name is placed in a rectangular clipeus with curvilinear connectors.

A copy of this little book printed in Cologne has been digitized by the HAB. Although headed "Der Stam ind Ursprunck der Herzogen von Sassen", the graphic is in fact nothing more than a new version of the 1043 stemma by Siegfried of Gorze, which had been drawn to argue (in vain) the irregularity of Emperor Heinrich marrying Agnes of Poitou and was endlessly repurposed for the next five centuries:

The same book contains an adaptation of the Stemma of Cunigunde of similar age. These woodcuts are innovative in form, but do not advance diagrammatic technology in any essential way.

Strictly traditional stemmata could also be cut in wood, as in the 1475 Rudimentum Novitiorum where the roundel form is made chainlike:

The long-familiar pattern of roundels is set up as a block in this Seleucid genealogy in a 1498 edition from Basle of Nicholas of Lyra, once again imitating forerunners in the manuscripts, but with the change in this printing that the connecting lines are almost as wide as the roundels:

Slightly out of period is a 1511 Paris-printed Boccaccio Genealogy of the Gods (John Rylands Library copy), where the fanciful leaf-work of the Boccaccio autograph manuscript (1363-66) is dispensed with and roundels and little scrolls are used:

Much more creative and innovative is the early effort by the printers to build stemmata out of punch-cut type. These experiments had to be adapted to the type-form, the printing frame in which every element had to be rectangular so the form could be fitted and wedged before going to press.

The Chronica Bossiana printed by Zarotto at Milan (or Parma) in 1492 (ISTC ib01040000 GW 4952) has an extraordinarily modern-looking stemma which employs rectangles and straight connecting lines:

For a while I found it hard to believe this Genealogy of the Visconti was truly made this way, back in 1492. It would look absolutely at home in a modern PowerPoint presentation, and apart from the Latin and the typeface, it could grace any modern digitally composed book without anyone suspecting its age.

The Italian printer produced it in red ink in a book that otherwise is in black (in my plot, the print should therefore properly be red too) and pasted it in the front. Scrutiny suggests this may not be xylographic like the Cologne stemma above, but a composed typographic page using rules, though I am not expert enough to judge how these boxes and connecting lines could have been set up.

The author of this world chronicle, Donato Bossi (biography in Italian), paid for the printing, so he may well have had a hand in the design. You can inspect the page as printed and zoom in by consulting the Chronica Bossiana copy at the HAB. The University of Cambridge has another copy which is not digitized, but is carefully described, and I will quote that description:

[Genealogical tree of the Visconti family], caption "Geneologia uicecomitum Principum Mediolani descendentium de Inuorio Ducatus Mediolani", 1v; Donatus Bossius. Chronica, dedicated to Johannes Galeatius Sforza, duke of Milan.

Later, printers were to develop other options, such as using blank space to build a stemma. The table of figures of speech by Georg Major printed as a preface to Philipp Melanchthon's De arte dicendi at Leipzig in 1528 (and also at Paris in 1529, digitized at HAB), contains a stemma with no connecting lines at all:

But as far as I can tell at first sight, these minimalist stemmatic arrays are not yet found in pre-1500 printing.

Curly Braces

One of the great macro-typography inventions of the first 100 years of western printing was the curly brace (or bracket) as a device to organize hierarchical information. Initially the letterpress type-piece for a brace seems to have been cut ad-hoc by hand, as in this single example in the Margarita Philosophica of Gregor Reisch (1503):

In some work, such as grammar texts, the brace could soon be taken as read and simply omitted, as in a 1533 printing in Basle, Switzerland of the grammar of Donatus edited by Heinrich Loriti or "Glarean". But the normal procedure was for the typesetter to make a brace for such layouts.

Where the material in the stemma was more copious, printers laid it out with its root at the top. In a 1540 Basle printing of Livy's Decades in the edition of Glarean, the brace is still hand-cut:

Printers soon recognized it was quicker to resort to their typecases, combining the small pieces of straight rule and rounded corners supplied by their typecutters to form braces.

The first explicit explanation of this practice which I can find appears 200 years later in The Printer's Grammar by John Smith (link goes to a full edition of 1787, but the original seems to have come out 1755). It explains how a printer mainly resorts to his middle-length rules to do this:

Middle and Corners are very convenient in Genealogical Work, where they are used the flat way; and where the directing point is not always in the middle, but has its place under the name of the Parent, whose offspring stands between Corner and Corner of the bracing side, in order of primogeniture.

The "directing point" was a specially cut form to be found in the standard typesets in Basle. We see this in a 1557 example of a book by Wolfgang Lazius (1514-1565) (biography) in De gentium aliquot ... (online), page 589:

Elsewhere the point might be made from two corners, as in this 1556 book of genealogies (online) by Ernst Brotuff (1497-1565) (nasty biography) printed at Leipzig, Germany, where if one looks carefully, the joins between the rules are visible:

Sometimes the brace was reduced to a minimum as in a 1559 example. As another option, Johannes Herold (1514-1567), who was a publisher in Basle (biography), often preferred stemmata with the root at the left, as we see in his 1561 Churfürstliches Haus der Pfaltz an Rhein (online). Here too one can see that these braces were not hand cut, but assembled from smaller parts:

The curly brace was thus the printers' most important instrument in adapting the ancient graphic idea of the stemma to the technology of the printing press, where the need to square the forms that will be put into the type-bed presupposes that all elements fit together at 90-degree angles. When Leonhard Ostein of Basle came to print Hulderic Zwingli junior's edition of the Compendium of Petrus Pictaviensis in 1592 (previous blog post), he could hardly do otherwise:

Later tabular printing including some braces has been listed by an interesting Munich project, Historische Tabellenwerke (ended 2007), but I am not aware of any research on braced stemmata in incunables. What I am currently trying to do is take this history back beyond 1500. It is plain that the solutions then in use were not experimental, but settled practices. Can anyone help me find older examples?

Oldest Family Tree

As part of my book research, I am searching for the oldest family tree. Some time in the 16th century, the idea of dressing up the genealogies of royal and noble families to look like oak trees took hold in Europe. These were printed from copper engravings and could be distributed to regional leaderships as a kind of corporate branding and loyalty-building exercise.

As an entrepreneurial venture, this could be profitable. Scipione Ammirato, the Italian writer and historian, set up a workshop in Florence and turned out a whole series of them in cooperation with artist-engravers (Congedo, 216). On spec, he sent a family tree of Henry III to the French royal court. He received a reward of 500 gold ducats from Paris for it (Congedo, 274).

The oldest of Ammirato's trees is probably that of the Hapsburgs of Austria, engraved in 1576. It shows the tree on a high hill over a bay (probably representing Trieste) where a great naval fleet rides at anchor. The original copper plate still exists in Florence, according to the Italian register of cultural heritage, though it is not stated who owns it. An original print from it was sold by the antiquarian bookseller Gonnelli a few years ago as part of a set for 300 euros:

The type continues with Ammirato's 1580 book Delle Famiglie Nobili Napoletane. which contains eight double-page and five single-page engraved illustrations of genealogical trees. Each contains some kind of landscape in the background that can be connected with the dynasty. Here is my plot of part of the tree of Marzani, who were big shots in the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples, from that book:

Now I must hasten to say that what I am looking for here is the earliest example of a thing named "family tree" or "albero genealogico" or "Stammbaum" or "arbre de famille".

We know from the great study by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber that these things had unwitting precursors in previous centuries. There were even 12th-century artists who took pre-existing stemmata and flipped them upside down to depict them as trees. A celebrated example, now at Erlangen (Universitätsbibliothek ms 406, fol. 204v), is found in one of the manuscripts of the Chronicle of Ekkehard of Aura:

But these were experiments or flukes, not genealogical trees as a general cultural phenomenon.

The conscious idea of presenting a complete family line connected by a woody trunk first shows up in southern German woodcuts in the late 15th century. [Later note: Dr Volker Bauer (see below) has kindly pointed out a magnificent early example in BSB incunable 2 Inc.s.a. 1264 from 1475-78 digitized here (seek image 18) and also at the LOC. There is also a most remarkable tree of heraldic arms in the 1492 Cronecken der Sassen, GW 4963.] This phenomenon reaches its finest flower in the Ehrenpforte engraved in 1515 by Albrecht Dürer (there's a fine reconstruction of this on Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett). But Dürer's has no branches.

The tree as a recognizable category of art, a product where artist and customer know what to expect, only shows up later in the sixteenth century. It looks semi-natural, has a bottom root and clearly tiered generations. The oldest example I can find is Robert Peril's 1535 tree of the Hapsburgs made at Antwerp (lower half online: Boijmans Collection).

Examples later than Ammirato's include a fine 1586 tree of the Kings of Saxony by Lorenz Faust which is labelled "Stammbaum," perhaps the first documented use of that word in the German language (the link is to the MDZ in Munich). [Later: Note however a 1515 illustration title "Bawm vnnd Außlegung der Sypschafft ..." here.] The type's later development in Germany and embrace of tree shapes other than oaks has been researched by Volker Bauer of the Herzog August Bibliothek.

But I cannot find any trees of living families from the first third of the 16th century. Has anyone got suggestions?

Ammirato, Scipione. Delle Famiglie Nobili Napoletane. Firenze: Appresso Giorgio Marescotti, 1580. https://archive.org/details/gri_33125013895186.

Bauer, Volker. “Attesting to Dynasty: The Use of Images in Early Modern German Genealogy.” Rome, 2013. http://crhipa.upmf-grenoble.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Bauer.pdf.

———. “Dynastic Botany: Banyans, Cedars, and Palms as Visual Models in Seventeenth-Century Genealogy.” In Visual-Acuity-and-the-Arts-of-Communication-in-Early-Modern-Germany, edited by Jeffrey Chipps Smith. Ashgate, 2014. https://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Visual-Acuity-and-the-Arts-of-Communication-in-Early-Modern-Germany-Intro.pdf.

Congedo, Umberto. La vita e le opere di Scipione Ammirato (notizie e ricerche). V. Vecchi, 1904. http://archive.org/details/lavitaeleopered00conggoog.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’Ombre des Ancetres. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

———. “The Genesis of the Family Tree.” In I Tatti Studies. Essays in the Renaissance, 4:105–29. Florence: Leo Olschki, 1991.