Statistics

I've recently completed collating the fifth and last recension of the Great Stemma, found in the Urgell and San Juan manuscripts and it has gone online, along with an expanded bibliography of about 100 works. The collation of the manuscripts has been fairly tedious work and I think I'll stop here. I don't think it would achieve much if I transcribed the Saint-Sever (Sigma) manuscript, and the only other document I am at all curious about at this stage is the one in the Codex Amiatinus III. Perhaps I'll do it later.

It's time for a few statistics now that we have collated all five early recensions of the Great Stemma. Here are the tallies of genealogical roundels for the ancestry of Christ (A), other biblical figures such as Moses and Saul (B) and lone kings (C) with a subtotal of A+B+C.

All versions include about 114 sections of timeline material, of which 44 to 48 sections take the form of roundels. Adding these into the tally brings us to a grand total of roundels for each recension noted in the final row below:

	Epsilon	Delta	Gamma	Alpha	Beta
A	390	380	379	396	406
B	83	78	77	81	83
C	19	19	18	19	19
subtotal	492	477	474	496	508
all roundels	540	521	516	542	555

In general, the colums to the left tell us the most about the Great Stemma as it existed in Late Antiquity and those at the right measure what changes later editors made to the document, both losing data and adding material. These numbers are surprising in various ways.

For one thing, it turns out the Zaluska's estimated total of about 600 roundels, presumably based on her transcription of the Saint-Sever stemma, is somewhat deceptive. The Late Antique version probably only contained the 540 roundels in Epsilon. The higher tallies come from interpolated versions, of which Saint-Sever (not tallied here) is certainly the biggest.

We also see that despite the rearrangements in structure, the compressions, the many Vulgate-based alterations in the text and the extensive interpolation of material from Isidore, Jerome and others, the Great Stemma remained remarkably constant in its underlying scale during hundreds of years of copying.

Another implication is that the Urgell manuscript, which looks unfinished because of all its empty roundels, is in fact more complete than it seems: the scribe was careless and left out a dozen individuals, but he clearly also drew far more roundels than he ultimately needed. And after supplementing the Gamma collation with material from the San Juan bible, we can see that the Gamma total is only a score or so short of the full muster.

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).

Mount Seir

I have completed one of the more obscure analyses of the Great Stemma: a tabulation of the passage dealing with the chieftains of Mount Seir. These are outland people mentioned in Genesis 36 and are not part of the stated ancestry of Christ. We cannot even begin to guess why they were included in the Great Stemma. Interesting sounding names? To fill a blank area of the page? To prove that the author had read Genesis exhaustively? We just don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. Zaluska thought it was of great importance, but never published her own tabulation. I have filled the gap.
In all honesty, this tabulation is not going to make history, but as a piece of utilitarian work, it positions us for further analysis. The passage is the key proposed by Zaluska to identifying the different recensions of the Great Stemma. It is also important in demonstrating that the Epsilon version (not studied by Zaluska) is the oldest and purest that we have got.

Intriguing Lead

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

---

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?

---

* 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.

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.

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.

Decoding the San Millán Manuscript

A tricky decoding job with the San Millán stemma seems almost complete, thanks to Brepols and their Library of Latin Texts (LLTA), an online database of Latin. Here is an image of the text:
My first transcription of this gloss about the secular city built by Cain turned out to be nonsense, but I was fortunate to find that the bulk of the text was simply borrowed from a theological exposition by Isidore of Seville, the Mysticorum expositiones sacramentorum seu Quaestiones in Uetus Testamentum. This is easily found in the LLTA: Quid ergo sibi per figuram vult, quod impiorum progenies civitatem in ipsa mundi origine construxit? nisi quod noveris impios in hac vita esse fundatos, sanctos vero hospites esse et peregrinos. Unde et Abel tanquam peregrinus in terris, id est, populus Christianus non condidit civitatem. Superna enim est sanctorum civitas (In Genesim, 6).
That allows us to transcribe the script as follows: Primus ante diluvium Cain civitatem Enoch nomine filii sui in India condidit quam urbem ex sola sua posteritate in plevit, quod sibi vult, quod impiorum progenies civitatem in ipsa mundi origine construxit? nisi quod noveris impios in hac vita esse fundatos, sanctos vero hospites esse et peregrinos. Unde et Abel tamquam peregrinus in terra populus Christianus non condidit civitatem; superna enim est sanctorum civitas.
As a result we can draft the following abbreviations key, which is useful for decoding the entire manuscript, including the Ordo Annorum:
2id = quid
s with a spike over it = sibi?
qd+ = quod
p with a downwards hook at the left = pro
9 = con
n with a rightwards hook above it = nisi
nov+is = noveris
ee with a downwards hook above = esse
sc+os = sanctos
u with a circle over it = vero
p with a straight stroke through the descender = per, with e = pere
g with a top right cantilever and a rightwards hook above = gri (cf. nisi)
vn with a line over the n = unde
qm with a kind of W over and between them = quam
9 on the shoulder at the right = -us
t+ra = terra
ppls = populus
xianus = Christianus
e with a line over it = est
LLTA also indicates that Isidore lifted the latter part of the text from Augustine, De Civitate Dei 15.1: scriptum est itaque de Cain, quod condiderit ciuitatem; Abel autem tamquam peregrinus non condidit; superna est enim sanctorum ciuitas.
In other parts of the same codex we have seen:
c with a spike over it = cri
p with a spike over it = pri
scdam where d ascender has a stroke throught it = secundam