My last post on the “Praedestinatus” brought back a memory or two. If my memory serves me correctly, this was the very text that caused me to seek out the Patrologia Latina for the first time, almost quarter of a century ago. A reference in Quasten for the “Tertullianistae” was the prompt. So I drove up to a research library, where I purchased a visitors’ ticket, and nervously explored the huge building. At length I came to the reading room, then as now organised in a baffling manner. Shyly asking the individual at the desk for help, I was curtly pointed to one end of the immense room. And there were the volumes of the Patrologia Latina, bound, and faded, volume after volume – a whole wall of it. I’d never seen anything like it. I found the passage; and then wondered if I could get a photocopy. Back to the desk, where I was told to take it to another room. There, in turn, I was told that it was too fragile, and I would have to purchase a service photocopy and come back for it in a couple of days. So of course I had to do so, and drive all that way again. The copy was absurdly overpriced and not very good quality, and came on A3 sheets – hardly easy to use. But at last it was mine! I took it home, and pored over it with my nascent Latin – just a faint memory from schooldays – and tried to puzzle it out into English.
How things have changed. The free availability of the PL online in PDF was unthought-of then. Now we take it for granted.
I have continued collating a dozen manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas. I’ve collated all the way through, but I am redoing chapters 2-5, because I didn’t do those as thoroughly, and I have since learned better. I’m still correcting the text.
Originally I started with two early editions, and a couple of articles with extracts. Now I am deep in the manuscripts.
The longer that I spend collating, the more that I start to get a “feel” for each manuscript. In turn this means that certain relationships are starting to emerge, quite without effort.
I know that P and Q will be near-identical; but Q breaks off in chapter 6, so Q is a copy of P, not the other way around.
I know that O will give much the same variants as P and Q; except that it has some oddities of its own. It is probably a descendant of P also. I know that C is generally a mainstream manuscript, except that, once in a while, it has a reading which only O shares. There’s some kind of influence from O.
I know that G and D are very similar. So similar, in fact, that the layout of the words on the page is sometimes identical. But G goes a bit weird sometimes. So G is probably a copy of D, by a careless or imaginative scribe.
M is my oldest manuscript, just. I know that it won’t tend to agree with the P, Q, O group. It’s not that similar to G and D. It usually agrees with W, but not always. It’s a bit of a rogue.
The 12th century manuscript V is generally in agreement with W, and C. Except that… sometimes it is the only manuscript to give the reading in the editio princeps, the Mombritius 1483 edition.
There’s no shortcut to this. It just starts to imprint itself on your mind. As I go along I am noting what I think may be significant points of variance. But of course I won’t know until later. I have to find out by doing.
The critical edition of the Praedestinatus also had a nice couple of pages in which the editor established the relationship of the 5 manuscripts and drew a stemma. It’s a nice, concise, worked example of what I need to do. I shall refer to it again.
All this is really quite good fun. I really do recommend it. Text criticism is not real until you actually have to do it, in the wild, with a text that has never been critically edited, and ask: “just what did the author write?” Once you do, you really feel that you are achieving something.
Textual criticism can be interesting, but textual critics can be infuriating! I don’t mind having my opinions being rejected by the other fellow, or him trying to ram his opinions down my throat; but I do object to his haughty disdain of another’s opinions. Recently, I was saying that the ending of Luke’s Gospel, the words “praising and blessing”, could be the true reading, omission by passing over one “-ing” ending to the other [Greek endings, of course!] being just as plausible as that one participle was interpolated. In fact, unless one believes in fraudulent utterance of the text, innocent omission seems to me to be more likely than guilty interpolation. Be that as it may, I was hectored as if I were a mere amateur who needed to be corrected by the true professional. And to all such, I say, in Latin, so as not to profane in English : “abī in malam crucem!”.