Mappaemundi

The Digital Mappaemundi Project contains a very useful English translation of the geographical text from the Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII (Seven Books of History against the Pagans) of Paulus Orosius. He was an Iberian priest (ca. 385-420) who was commissioned by St. Augustine of Hippo to write up the story of the bad old world. Digital Mappaemundi looks as if it will become a wonderful and important resource: the maps are high-quality digital images from medieval manuscripts and the plan is to completely index and cross-reference them.

Diplomatic Editions of Diagrams

I've so far looked in vain for scholars' ideas on how to create what one might describe as a "diplomatic" edition of a diagram. As a 21st-century scribe, what one is looking to do is to recopy an antique or medieval diagram while:

• preserving its original language and wording;
• adapting its script and linework to contemporary lettering and drawing conventions;
• unwinding physical deterioration that mars the old medium.

The last objective could perhaps be adequately met by taking a photographic image of an old document, and photoshopping away the blotches, mould, tears and distortions. There is an interesting 2008 account (pdf) in e-Perimetron of how this can be done with old maps. But this does not allow much editorial amendment, nor does it make the document readable. Since the age of print began, we expect documents to be recast with modern typographic lettering.
In the digital age, we also expect a document to be searchable, and it would be perverse nowadays to publish on paper only: one must produce a full digital edition.
The solution I have been experimenting my way towards is to use XML documents which contain the text and all the necessary instructions to draw a vector image of the original diagram and lay it out faithfully, either on the screen or on paper via a digital printer. XML files can be directly edited: every word and letter can can be checked and altered if need be without using proprietary or sophisticated software.
The images on my website have all been created using OpenOffice Draw and the master files are saved in odg format. To publish them online, they are converted to Flash files.
I have been learning ways to manipulate odg files so that they could become the definitive transcripts of original manuscript pages, or provide the basis for merged, critical, digital editions. In fact it ought to be possible to do this so one could have several languages all stored in the one file: Layer 1 would be Latin, but you could easily swap to a Layer 2 in English, Layer 3 in German and so on.
I prefer to write transcripts into Microsoft Excel, which allows you to standardize the data, mark it up, sort it, add fields and so on. An early problem was how to convert Excel data into a format that can be used by OpenOffice Draw. These are the steps I take:

• I create an Excel spreadsheet which attaches the necessary XML tags to the left and right of the list data;
• An odg file is in fact a zipped-together folder of files, one of which is named content.xml and contains the text within the drawing;
  
• Use IZ Arc to open the odg file, and extract content.xml to another folder.
• Open content.xml and prepare to overwrite all of its text sections as follows;
• Copy the XML tags and data which you have generated using Excel;
  
• In Windows, right click the file icon of content.xml and choose edit from the context menu. Paste the data into content.xml;
  
• Save the new version of content.xml;
  
• Drag the altered file back into the IZ Arc window and save the odg file;
• OpenOffice Draw will hiccup a bit as it processes this odg, but it will open;
• The texts may not be properly formatted. Highlight everything and choose Default style to reformat them, then save;
• More fixing in OpenOffice Draw then includes converting background to invisible. To make the borders invisible, change "line" to invisible as well.

The Excel file that begins this process includes sequential position information so that each draw.frame element has its own position on the page and is not overwritten. It is easy to construct 10 or more columns of data this way. The first element, at the upper left, is enclosed in the following tags:

• At the beginning of each element, these three opening tags:
  • draw:frame draw:style-name="gr1" draw:layer="Text" svg:x="-56cm" svg:y="-19cm"
    
  • draw:text-box
    
  • text:p


• At the end of each element, these closing tags:
  • /text:p
  • /draw:text-box
  • /draw:frame

The minus 56 and minus 19 in this case mean the text begins 56 centimetres to the left and 19 centimetres above the top left corner of the virtual canvas in OpenOffice Draw.
I am still thinking about ways to make the resulting document more easily editable.

Old Vellum and Bookselling

A learned article by Richard Rouse and Charles McNelis appeared a decade ago. North African literary activity is subtitled "A Cyprian fragment, the stichometric lists and a Donatist compendium" and incredibly it rounds up four utterly diverse topics in one discussion: the unlikely discovery of a very worn piece of old vellum in a codex binding, Late Antique bookselling, a North African Christian sect and how 19th-century philologists could not see the wood for the trees. The article comes to the conclusion that a lot of the Late Antique bible-handbook and chronographic material we now have was saved for posterity in a single compendium.
Rouse, who is now emeritus professor at UCLA, and McNelis, now associate professor at Georgetown University, suggest a way by which the Great Stemma (that is not of course their name for it) might derive from the Liber Genealogus. It would be nice if this fitted the facts, but we have three signal differences between these works:

• they use different versions of the Table of Nations from Genesis 10
• they use different chronologies of the kings of Rome
• the Great Stemma has none of the Liber's etymological content

Of course the overall structure of the documents is similar, and both evince a fascination with the Twelve Minor Prophets of the Old Testament. It looks as if the latter topic is going to need some further research...

Setback or Progress

After weeks of combing through the Liber Genealogus, including creating my own fully keyed versions of both Frick's and Mommsen's versions, I think I am barking up the wrong tree. My original idea was to hunt for any clues that the Liber Genealogus author might have had the Great Stemma open on the desk in front of him as he wrote. There are no such clues. The two works appear to be siblings, drawing on a common tradition but created in utter ignorance of one another.

The crux is the Table of Nations, the strange anthropological list in Genesis 10 which is the inspiration for two ancient works, the Antiquities of Josephus and the Chronicon of Hippolytus.

The Liber bases all its statements about the different ethnicities in the Mediterranean and Middle East on the Chronicon. In fact, when Bauer and Helm were compiling the critical edition of the Chronicon and came to its ethnicities chapter, the so-called Diamerismos, they often used the Liber Genealogus as a check (see Bauer/Helm, page 1).

The Great Stemma, on the other hand, offers an almost unalloyed reproduction of the ethnicities list in Josephus' Antiquities, a fact that Yolanda Zaluska published 25 years ago. It ought not to have surprised me, but I never appreciated what a black-and-white distinction this is and how starkly this difference in sourcing separates the Great Stemma from the Liber.

I always feel disappointed when a setback like this sinks in. But of course the finding is progress. And in fact it has exciting implications, because it implies yet another way in which the Great Stemma must predate the thinking and intellectual resources of the early 5th century. Its author can have known nothing of Jerome or Augustus. But the thought that he worked in a library where there was not one scrap of Hippolytus to read? Who is this guy? How far back should we be looking? This is tantalizing.

[Later note: the final two paragraphs above are mistaken. It is far more likely that the Table of Nations was worked into the Great Stemma by a Spanish recensor, using a copy of Isidore's Etymologiae. There is no evidence the Great Stemma author was even interested in the Table of Nations material, and why should he have been? The ethnicities material does not add any useful information on the genealogy of Christ or on the chronography which are his central concerns (October 1, 2010).]

[Much later note: I did finally discover sequential evidence. The Liber follows the order of the Great Stemma. This is the subject of my Oxford Patristics Conference paper (September 25, 2011).]

Lay Historians

A couple of inspiring accounts of lay historians have just appeared. The story of Tony Clunn, who discovered the site of the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest, is written up by Peter McDermott in the Free Library. Clunn has earned his living as a British Army officer. Adrian Murdoch's blog drew my attention to this. An account of Hershel Shanks, a US lawyer who has become a leader in the field of biblical archaeology, appears in the New York Times. With a degree of false modesty, Shanks describes himself as an outsider to the field, a person who wouldn’t have gotten into it had he known how much it was divided into specialties and subspecialties. Of course he would have! The vital quality in a lay historian today is enterprise: the ability to weld together the work of many specialists into a coherent whole and to perceive opportunities which the specialists do not notice because they are too close to the topic.

Liber Genealogus

Göttingen University Library in Germany has a digital version of Paul de Lagarde's 1892 edition of the Lucca Cathedral manuscript of the Liber Genealogus. This is in a very rare printed periodical, not available on Archive.org or Google Books. I can only see two libraries in Germany which catalogue this article, entitled SeptuagintStudien, II (perhaps a rare 19th century use of so-called CamelCase). Neither Göttingen nor Mainz are willing to interloan it.
The Liber is a vital text in understanding the Great Stemma. Both works belong to the same tradition (we are not yet sure how their interdependency should be described). This edition is very useful as de Lagarde went to the trouble to link each name to its biblical place with a reference, an extra duty which the Mommsen edition does not bother with. I went to the same trouble myself, and will have to see how our results compare. There is also a Greek text for comparison.
Ayuso Marazuela quotes the de Lagarde version (omitting the "de" from the name and adding a hyphen to the CamelCase), but de Lagarde is not mentioned in the Klapisch-Zuber bibliography.
Carl Frick brought out an all-Latin critical edition of yet another version, the Turin manuscript, in 1892, and published that in his handbook Chronica Minora under the title Origo Humani Generis. The Hathi Trust has placed Frick online, but unfortunately it is only accessible from inside the United States.
Here are the links:
1. de Lagarde
2. Mommsen
3. Frick

A History of the Timeline

An impressive new illustrated history of timelines has just appeared in the United States. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline is the work of Daniel Rosenberg, an associate professor in Oregon, with help from Anthony Grafton. I have not bought a copy yet, but can see the first 34 pages as a sample on Google Books here. Thanks to Nat Taylor for pointing out this publication. The formal launch date seems to have been May 1, but there are bibliographic references suggesting it was in circulation earlier.

Rosenberg's book deals with a topic closely related to the stemma: the long history of vertical, horizontal (and curled-up) timelines to represent history.

One gem of a story I noticed at first glance on the Google preview was the account on page 27 of the Milanese publisher Boninus Mombritius boasting that no scribe could have copied such an intricate and extensive work as accurately as he did with his printed version of Eusebius. Mombritius declared he had kept all the tables in order and put all the kings in their places.

This alludes to the muddle which hampered the diffusion of both the stemma and timeline in the medieval period, and erased almost all documentary evidence of their Late Antique models. It is challenging for any reader to grasp and to remember complex technical drawings which require careful measurement and layout. It is difficult for even a scribe with artistic skills to copy one correctly. And with fewer skills, time pressure and inadequate remuneration, it is practically impossible. Thus, the serious corruption done to the Great Stemma early in its diffusion led to it ultimately being discarded and begun all over again by medieval writers such as Peter of Poitiers.

I cannot see the index and I have not read the book yet, but on the pages I did read, Rosenberg seems to jump his history from Eusebius (who arranged his chronography in vertical columns, with the synchronous entries all carefully aligned with one another) straight to Peter of Poitiers with no mention of the Great Stemma.

The Great Stemma's arcade, which marks out the patriarchs from Adam to Abraham in a series of arches, each containing a span of years between each begetting, is incontestably the oldest left-to-right timeline extant in the West. The manuscripts date from 945 and later. If Rosenberg's valuable book were not to mention them, it would be incomplete.

It can also be argued that the Great Stemma contains a more sophisticated timeline than this simple arcade of patriarchs. I am exploring this on the latest page of the Piggin.Net website. The Great Stemma was undoubtedly created before the 8th century, perhaps in Visigothic Spain, perhaps in North Africa. It could even be that the Great Stemma pre-dates Eusebius, but those are matters that are still the subject of ongoing research.