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The Alcobaca manuscripts – catalogue located, and lots online at Lisbon!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post, I referred to a manuscript of the Alcobaca monastery in Portugal, number 113.  Afterwards I started to search for information.  I discovered that the modern catalogue in three volumes by Thomas L. Amos, The Fundo Alcobaça of the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon (1988), is online at Archive.org!

  • Vol. 1 – https://archive.org/details/HMMLAlcobaca1
  • Vol. 2 – https://archive.org/details/HMMLAlcobaca2
  • Vol. 3 – https://archive.org/details/HMMLAlcobaca3

This was excellent news, and I naturally looked for manuscript 113 in volume 1.  But it wasn’t there!  The manuscripts had two numbers – a Roman number, and a modern Arabic number. The monastery was suppressed long ago and its holdings ended up in the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Arabic number is what they use.

Doing Ctrl-F in the file – ah, the excellence of searchable PDFs – revealed that my manuscript was CXIII, now 414.  So off I went to volume 3, and there it was, on page 178.  It was volume 3 of a set of homilies.

But this did not refer to St Nicholas!  So I did another Ctrl-F, and found an incipit at the back, on – by coincidence – page 414:

[Text] Nicholaus itaque ex illustri prosapia ortus …. 414: 141a-.

Fortunate for me that I had forgotten to search for “Nicolaus”, and had used “Nicho”!  And this told me that the folio was 141a.  (By now all these 1’s and 4’s were starting to get confusing!)

I then wondered whether any of these Alcobaca manuscripts were online.  There is a website: https://bndigital.bnportugal.gov.pt/project/codices-alcobacenses/

But it is very hard to use.  It doesn’t allow you to enter shelfmark, only author, title, etc.  I searched for “V”, for Vita, and got nothing.  Then for H, for Homilies; and on the third click, I found MS 414 here.  Blessedly it has a 108Mb download and a monster 2.4Gb download!  So useful!!!  Thank you!  It is supposed to have an IIIF manifest too, but the link took me elsewhere.

[Homiliário / copiado por João Pecador]. – [Alcobaça, 1201-1300]. – [1] f., [2] f. papel, [254], [1] f. (2 colunas, 27 linhas) : pergaminho, il. color. ; 412×290 mm

But a link here was provided to the full catalogue.  Not that this said anything about Nicholas!

I downloaded the PDF and went to page 282 (i.e. folio 141 x 2), and then down a bit, and there it was!  BHL 6104, the start of John the Deacon.

Alcobaca 414, start of John the Deacon

Even better, it started Sic omnis materia, rather than the much more common materies, and someone had written in a correction.

The PDF also comes with some useful bookmarks.

But then disaster!  I tried to add a bookmark of my own and I could not!  The blessed PDF was “secured”, drat it.  Even though everything was marked “public domain”.  I can’t mark it up.

I shall poke around some more.  I might write them a polite note.  I shall try to find the IIIF manifest.

Update: The Biblissima page here gave the IIIF manifest, thankfully, even though the website did not.

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Delving into old references in the BHL

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the problems with skim-reading is that you miss stuff.  You can stare at the same pages repeatedly, and never see some of the things on the page.

Last night, I noticed some stuff in the St Nicholas material in the Bibliographia Hagiographica Latina.  There is no excuse for not having read it carefully enough, but I’d missed out on some material of interest.

Under BHL 6109, the spurious “chapter 15” of the Life by John the Deacon, the BHL gives the reference to the Falconius edition.  But it also makes clear that there are two variants of this text, labelled BHL 6108 and 6109.  The ending is different, labelled alpha and beta.  And the note reads:

Var. lect. Catal. Brux. I. 314, 1º (ibi clausula β).

What on earth was this?  Well, a look at the start of vol.1 showed that it was the Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum Bibliothecae Regiae Bruxellensis. Pars I, Codices Latini membranei, published in 1886 and online here, or so I thought (that proved to be “pars I, tomus II” – the real volume is pars 1 tomus 1, here).  So it ought to be a manuscript with a different ending, in the Brussels library, on page 314.  This turns out to be the “Codex signatus no. 1960-62” – the codex designated 1960-62.  The Vita of Nicholas starts on folio 2r, apparently, and continues to f.47.

Oddly this is the first time I have seen someone refer to the edition of C. Falconius as “Carminius” (!)  But he includes the whole text of “chapter 15” alright, but in a different and abbreviated form.

Now I have seen that the hagiographic copyists are pretty casual about the text.  They abbreviate or summarise at the drop of a hat.  So I suspect that is what we are dealing with here.

The rest of the manuscript – which does not appear to be online – contains more Nicholas material.  Some of this is given at full length over many pages in the catalogue.  So, if you want to work with Nicholas material, this is useful stuff. Yet all you have is these few words in the BHL, which I had  never truly looked at.

   *   *   *   *

Next, there is Exc., that is “Excerpta”.  The first item, “Bonaventura, Comment. de Alcobacensi mss. bibliotheca (Conimbricae, 1827), 233-35 (prologus)”, is the “Commentariorum de Alcobacensi mss”, on the Spanish Alcobacensis mss, and is online here.  The book is exactly as described and prints from the manuscript the text of the prologue of John the Deacon’s work.  This is useful, because it exhibits the interesting variant “materia” rather than the normal “materies“.  All the manuscripts I have seen print the latter, but the editio princeps printed the former.  This makes it a genuine minor variant, of use to classify manuscripts and to fit the editio princeps into a stemma.  Into my working file it goes.  If only one could verify this against the manuscript!  The text hides which manuscript this is, but it seems to be Ms. Alcobacensis 113 (so p.227), containing twelve Vitae Sanctorum.  Mr Bonaventura does not trouble to share with us any information about on which folio the Vita of Nicholas may be found, however.

My only fear here, however, is that the editor has printed Mombritius rather than the manuscript.

   *   *   *   *

The next item is wild:

Unger (C. R.), Heilagra manna sögur, II (1877), 51-52.

Call me an idiot, but that isn’t German.  Googling the phrase produces a Wikipedia article, Saints’ Sagas:

Saints’ sagas (Old Norse heilagra manna sögur) are a genre of Old Norse sagas comprising the prose hagiography of medieval western Scandinavia.

Urg.  But the book is online.  It was printed in “Christiania”.  Googling eventually tells me that this is Oslo in Norway.  Apparently it was only renamed Oslo in 1925, later than the publication of the book.  As specified, on page 52 (online here) there is the Latin text of the prologue of John the Deacon, along with what is presumably the Old Norse translation of it. Again this has “materia”.  Clearly there is a text tradition in that form somewhere.

Where does the Latin come from, tho?  The reader is left to ponder.  Is it from a “Codex Resenianus”?  The book is, of course, in Norwegian, which does not help one bit.  So I run the OCR in my elderly copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.  But meanwhile I discover a copy of volume 1 online here.  Maybe that will explain.  I find a discussion on p.15, here.  In Norwegian.

But suddenly I remember that Abbyy Finereader Pro 15 includes a screen reader, and handles Norwegian:

Nikolaus Saga erkibyskups I. Den latinske Legende Andes i Speculum Historiale Lib. 13 Capp. 67—81, forkortet i Legenda Aurea P. 22—29. De som Appendix 1 trykte 2 Pergamentblade 655 qv. III, ere Levninger af en Codex fra den første Del af det 13de Aarhnndrede; Appendix 2, et Pergamentblad i det Norske Rigsarkiv, har tilhørt en Codex ældre end 1350, og har, efter dette levnede Fragment at dømme, hart Jertegnene i en fra de andre meget forskjellig og vidtløftigere Form.

Nikolau« Saga erkibyskups II. Denne vidtløftigere Nikolaus Saga er efter Indledningsbrevet til Bogen oversat eller bearbeidet af Broder Berg Sokkason, der 1325 blev Abbed til Munkajiverä: da han her kalder sig slet og ret Broder, har han maaske ndført dette Arbeide for han blev Abbed, altsaa for 1325. Som Grundlag for sit Verk har Broder Berg benyttet <Vita beati Nicolai episcopi» af Johannes Barensis (fra Bari i Neapel), dog har Ovcrsætteren betydelig ndvidet og forøget sin Original, i al Fald saaledes som denne foreligger i «Mombritii Sanctuarium»; han har desuden ogsaa benyttet andre Kilder, saaledes ved Afsnittet om Drømmene, Cap. 69 S. 86, der er taget af Gregors Dialoger Bog IV Cap. -18. De første 4 Capitler mangle ganske i Originalen, det samme er Tilfieldet med Slutningen af Cap. 6, Capp. 7—10 og Fortellingen om Basilisken og Hermelinen i Cap. 13. Enkelte Partier bar Oversætteren ndeladt, men det er dog lidet i Sammenligning med, hvad han har lagt til. Hvor han beraaber sig paa «meistari Johannes>, gjengives dennes Udtryk gjerne nøiagtigere. Til Sammenligning er Johannes’ Brev til Athanasius trykt i latinsk Original under Texten.

De her benyttede Haandskrifter ere:

Cd. Holm. 16 qv. paa Pergament omtrent fra Aar 1400, særdeles godt skreven; hvert Capitel er udstyret med illumineret Begyndelsesbogstav, hvilken ofte indeholder en Tegning, der har Hensyn til Capitlets Indhold. Foran og bag i Bogen ere to Blade, som oprindelig have været blanke; det tredieBlad optages af Prologen og Johannes’ Brev til Athanasius; Broder Bergs Sende-brev tinde* derimod ikke i denne Bog. Forsiden af det følgende fjerde Blad optages af et Billede af St. Nicholaus, paa dette Blads Bagside og femte Blads Forside lindes atter denne Helgens Billede sammenstillet med andre Personer, og paa femte Blads Bagside begynder atter Sagaen, og fortsættes da uafbrudt til Bl. 60…..

Um yes, quite.  Thankfully the miracle of Google translate gives us:

Archbishop Nikolaus’ Saga II. According to the introductory letter to the book, this more extensive Nikolaus Saga was translated or edited by Brother Berg Sokkason, who in 1325 became abbot of Munkajiverä: since he here calls himself simply brother, he may have carried out this work because he became abbot, i.e. for 1325. As Brother Berg has used the «Vita beati Nicolai episcopi» by Johannes Barensis (from Bari in Naples) as the basis for his work, however, the translator has significantly expanded and enlarged his original, at least as it appears in the «Mombritii Sanctuarium»; he has also used other sources, such as the section on dreams, Cap. 69 P. 86, which is taken from Gregor’s Dialogues Book IV Cap. – 18. The first 4 Chapters are completely missing in the Original, the same is the case with the End of Cap. 6, Chap. 7-10 and the Tale of the Basilisk and the Ermine in Cap. 13. The translator omitted certain parts, but it is little in comparison with what he has added. Where he refers to «meistari Johannes>, his expression is often reproduced more precisely. For comparison, John’s letter to Athanasius is printed in Latin Original under the Text.

The manuscripts used here are:

Cd. Holm. 16 qv. on parchment approximately from the year 1400, extremely well written; each chapter is equipped with an illuminated initial letter, which often contains a drawing that refers to the content of the chapter . At the front and back of the book are two leaves which were originally blank; the third leaf is taken up by the Prologue and John’s letter to Athanasius; Brother Berg’s sending letter, on the other hand, is not in this book. The front of the following fourth leaf is occupied by a picture of St. Nicholaus, on the back of this page and on the front of the fifth page, this saint’s picture is shown again, juxtaposed with other persons, and on the back of the fifth page, the saga begins again, and is then continued uninterrupted to Bl. 60.  …

I would infer from this that the Latin is NOT from a Norwegian manuscript, but from Mombritius.  The Bollandists have been deceived.  But well-done them to locate the item!

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It’s starting to work! – Recensio part 4

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This afternoon I went to my draft text and translation, and, as per my last post, starting from the top, looked for a place in the text where the editions differed in meaning.  I did not have to go far before I found this place, on “in vocem” or “in clamationem“.

Latin and English text, working notes

To those wondering how I got this, remember that I started my task by creating an electronic text of the Falconius edition, and then translating the whole thing, one sentence at a time.  But when I had finished, I decided that the Mombritius edition text was better.  So I created an electronic text of that, and then I compared the two texts electronically (using dwdiff – but it could have been several tools).  This got me a list of differences.  Then I revised my translation to follow Mombritius.  As I went through the difference list, in order to do so, I noted down the differences that seemed significant to me.  That is, I ignored typos, spelling differences, etc., and only took those where a difference of meaning was apparent.  I noted the meaning as well!  The result was this document, which I am using to work on the text.

Verum, quia scio me penes literatissimos magistros inefficacis esse sermonis, ideo deprecor omnes, qui hujus operis studiosi lectores accesserint, ut non facillimam prorumpant inclamationem,** et me indoctum meque** judicare inertem incipiant.

Until today, I had the Mombritius text, “in vocem” here.

So, just as I did earlier, I opened up my directory of manuscripts, and I started to work my way down the files.

Screen grab of directory in Windows Explorer

Note that I’ve found it endlessly useful to include the century in the file name.

Of course each time I go looking for a passage in the PDF of the manuscripts, I add bookmarks and sticky notes to where I found it.  This does make navigation easier.  I have not attempted to mark up everything in one pass in advance.  Rather I am doing what I need to do as I need it.  After all, I can always come back!

Here is the current state of BNF lat. 2627:

Bookmarks and sticky notes in a manuscript PDF

Apologies for the size.

I found book marks by just picking up on red initials.  So in that picture, I didn’t bother to bookmark Mane itaque – because it’s not one of the main divisions in the text like Pontificalis or Praeterea.  But I could have done.

On my first pass, I added a sticky note for where I was looking at Nacta / Nactus / Notata.  Three lines down, there is “O novi iacob stropha”, from this morning.  I only add a sticky for that where there is an omission, because I always know that it’s just below the Nacta text.

Notice that the sentences in this 11th century manuscript all begin with a small capital.  The big red capitals allow you to find big places in the text.  Once you’re on the right page, the small capitals allow you to find the sentence you want.  When I was looking for these two places, I found myself looking for “Rumpe”!  Because that was a line or two above.

These little tricks all allow you to speed things up.

But back to what am doing right now.  Well, I clicked on every one of those manuscripts.  And I noted down the reading.

I started, of course, with:

** Mom. “in vocem”; Fal. “in clamationem”, crying out against; Corsi: “in cachinnationem”, in immoderate laughter.

Initially I added the manuscripts after the editions.  But actually it’s better to turn it around, and give the text, with the edition against it, and then add manuscripts on the end.

So I ended up with this:

  • “in vocem” – Mom., Lipp. Means nothing.
  • “in clamationem” or “inclamationem”, crying out against, criticism, abuse – Fal., Angers BM 802 (11th ), Balliol 216 (13th), Harley 3097 (1124), BNF lat. 196 (12th), BNF lat. 5284 (13th), BNF lat. 5308 (12th), BNF lat. 5346 (13th), BNF lat. 5624 (13th), BNF lat. 989 (10th), BNF lat. 1864 (14th), BNF lat. 2627 (11th), BNF lat. 18303 (before 968), Bruges BP 402 (13th), Cambridge CCC 9 (11th), Durham B.IV.14 (12th), Fribourg L 5 (13th), Milan P113supp (10th), Munich Clm 3711 (11th early), Orleans BM 342 (10th), Vat. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro A.5 (11th), Vat. lat. 1197 (11th), Vat. lat. 9668 (12th), Vat. reg. lat. 477 (12th), Vat. reg. lat. 496 (11th), Wien ONB 12831 (15th),

“in cachinnationem”, jeering, immoderate laughter – Corsi, Berlin theol. lat. qu.140 (11th), Linz 473 (13th), Munich Clm 12642 (14th),

Because I did this immediately after the last post, some of the manuscripts started to sound familiar!  That group at the bottom had an eccentric reading for the “O novi Iacob stropha” search too.  It’s a group, a family of manuscripts that share common errors.  This is precisely what we are looking for: a way to group manuscripts in order to get a stemma if we can.

The first collation I did took quite a while.  The one this afternoon was quicker.  This one took very little time.  Why?  Because I’m getting used to it, and developing my way of working.

Of course I am lucky to have four different early editions.  If I did not have this, if I only had one, then I would have to manually read through a manuscript PDF and manually compare it with my electronic text.  If I didn’t have an electronic text at all, I would have to transcribe one manuscript, and use that as my framework electronic text – not my final text – to translate, and on which to hang readings, in order to analyse the text.

I am rather enjoying this!  Maybe I’ll look for another passage next!

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O novam Jacob stropham! – Recensio part 3

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The earliest printed editions of a text are often merely a printed version of some manuscript that the editor had to hand; or are based on a prior edition, plus readings from such a manuscript.  In some cases all the manuscripts were destroyed afterwards, and we only have the printed edition.  This is the case with  Velleius Paterculus, and also with Tertullian’s De ieiunio.  So these editions are a “manuscript witness”.

I’ve scanned four such editions of John the Deacon to Microsoft Word, and carried out a machine comparison.  There are quite a few differences.  But in order to establish a “family tree” of manuscripts, which differences are significant?

At the moment I have two tentative guidelines.  They may be wrong, but it’s what I have.

  1.  The scribes do not care all that much whether they put down “at”, “et”, “ac” or “atque” – all of which mean “and” – regardless of which was actually in the text in front of them.  So “variants” which mean the same thing are not really useful to us.  What we need is a difference in the text which has a real difference in meaning.
  2.   Because the endings of so many words are abbreviated in medieval copies – “ū” for “um”, etc – these variants may not be significant either.  Let’s not spend a lot of time over “explicare” vs “explicarem”.

The next real variant is not much further down the text from the last one.  At the dead of night, St Nicholas has secretly visited the house of the poor man, tossed a bag of gold through the window, and secretly disappeared.  So now, time for a quick comparison with a biblical figure! The text continues:

O novi Jacob stropha!**  Ille commentatus est, qualiter Laban, mercedem non amitteret; hic autem, ut coelestibus non privaretur commodis.

O the trick of the new Jacob!**  The former devised it, with Laban, to avoid losing his wages; but the latter,  to avoid being deprived of heavenly rewards­.

The reference is to Genesis 30:32-3, where Laban agrees to pay Jacob for looking after his sheep by allowing him to keep any offspring that are striped; but, trickily, Laban gives him only monochrome sheep.  Jacob gets round this by putting branches of various colours in the drinking troughs, which cause the sheep to produce vari-coloured offspring.  By his trickery, Jacob gets the wages that he was promised.  St Nicholas, by his own strategem, gets the heavenly reward promised to those who do good in secret.  It’s not a great comparison, but there’s no doubt that this is what John is attempting to say.

The first three words of the text, however, vary in some interesting ways.  I only have 46 manuscripts at the moment, but here are the readings:

  • O novam Jacob stropham. — Mombritius (1477), Lippomano (1553)
  • O pueri Jacob stropham.  (what?!) — Falconius (1751)
  • O nova Jacob stropha. — Corsi, based on Berlin theol. lat. qu. 140 (11th c.), BNF lat. 5284 (13th c.), BNF lat. 5308 (12th), BNF lat. 5345 (13th), Vat. lat. 1271 (12th c.), Bruges BP 402.
  • O novi iacob stropha. — BNF lat. 2627 (11th c.), BNF lat. 18303 (=early 10th c), Angers BM 802 (11th c.)  Balliol 216 (13th c.), BNF lat 196 (12th c.), BNF lat. 1864 (14th c.), BNF lat. 3791 (12th c.), BNF lat. 3809A (15th c.), BNF lat. 5572 (11thc), BNF lat. 5573 (12th c.), Durham B.IV.14 (12th), Fribourg L 5 (13th c.),  Milan P113 supp. (10th c.), Munich Clm 3711 (11th), Orleans BM 342 (10th c.), Vatican Arch.Cap.S.Pietro A.5 (11th c.), Vat. lat. 9668 (12th), Vat. reg. lat. 477 (12th), Vat. reg. lat. 496 (11th c.), Vienna ONB 12831 (15th c.)
  • O novi iacob tropha — BNF lat. 1765 (13th c.)
  • Omitted: clamque discessit is followed directly by Mane itaque, omitting the whole digression. Vat. lat. 5696 (11th c.), Vat. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro A.3 (12th c.)
  • Omitted: clamque discessit is followed directly by Hic est magister bone, omitting two sentences, but retaining some of the digression, then Mane itaque.  Vienna ONB 416 (12th c.), Klosterneuburg 701 (14th), Linz 473  (13th c.) – The Linz manuscript is a contaminated text, however, containing material from BHL 6118.  Munich Clm 12642 (14th).
  • . Vat. lat. 5696 (11th c.), Vat. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro A.3 (12th c.)

A couple of oddities:

  • BNF lat. 989 (10th c.) is impossible to read, but the last word is stropha.
  • Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 9: O novi iacob stropha, but, above the “i” in novi there also appears an “a”.

Now by chance I got some help from a google search.  I wasn’t familiar with the word “stropha”, a strategem or trick.  Googling the words above produced a passage about this in Jerome’s “Hebrew Questions on Genesis”, (Quaest.Heb Ad Gen.30.32-3):

Itaque Iacob novam stropham commentus est, et contra naturam albi et nigri pecoris, naturali arte pugnavit.

Jacob therefore invented a new trick, and by natural art fought against the nature of the white and black cattle.

There’s an awful lot of the same words in there, isn’t there?  Although they’re doing different things.   This perhaps explains why we find all those accusatives like stropham in our text.  Quite possibly they are the result of the copyist being more familiar with Jerome than with John the Deacon. On seeing the unfamiliar text, the copyist “normalised” it.  Jerome has “Jacob” as a nominative, the subject of the verb in his sentence.  But it can’t be the same in John the Deacon.

“Iacob” is indeclinable, so we could read the genitive, sometimes as “Iacobi”, “of Jacob”.  The sense is that Nicholas is the new Jacob.  So “novi” and “Jacobi” would agree.  We end up with (in English word order) stropha novi Jacobi, “the strategem of the new Jacob”.

Of course I only have a selection of manuscripts.  But all the same, it’s clearly necessary to look at them.

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The December Poems in the Chronography of 354

Posted on by Roger Pearse

For December, the images are preserved in the usual four manuscripts.  The poems are mainly preserved in various unillustrated manuscripts, but also appear in R1, the Barberini manuscript.

Here is the 4-line poem (tetrastich):

Annua sulcatae connectens semina terrae
Pascit hiems; pluvio de Iove cuncta madent.
Aurea nunc revocet Saturno festa December,
Nunc tibi cum domino ludere, verna, licet.

Mixing the furrowed earth with the annual seed-sowing,
Winter lets them grow; all things are soaked by the rain from Jove.
Now let December bring back the golden feast days of Saturn;
Now, slave, you are permitted to joke with your master.

The first two lines refer to the activities of the season, the last two relate to the image in the manuscripts.

The 2-line verse (distich) is as follows:

Argumenta tibi mensis concedo December
Quae sis quamvis annum claudere possis

I leave the subjects of the month to you, O December;
You can end the year however you like.

The second line is, apparently hopelessly corrupt and is variously emended.  Housman suggested instead:

Argumenta tibi mensis concedo Decemb<ris>,
Qui squamis annum claudere piscis <amas>.

The image for the month is about Saturnalia, naturally enough.  It shows a slave in front of a gaming table with lion-feet.  On the table are dice and a dice tower, for random throwing.  A theatrical mask hangs over his right shoulder.  In his left hand he holds a full-height torch, and a flock of birds hangs on a hook behind that.  Some sort of heart-shaped vegetable lies by his left foot.

The most faithful representative of the renaissance copies is the Barberini manuscript, R1 – MS Vatican Barberini lat.2154, part B, f.23r:

MS Vatican Barberini lat. 2154B f.23r. December.

This has the tetrastich written in the right margin, obviously later.  The first line of the distich is underneath the frame.

The Brussels copy  makes the theatrical mask more obvious:

Brussels MS.

The Berlin copy:

Berlin MS.

The scene is redrawn in the16th century Vienna manuscript 3416, folio 37 (online here):

MS Vienna 3146, f.37. December.

As ever, Divjak and Wischmeyer supply the details of what is shown here.

And here we are – the end.  Io Saturnalia!  Merry Christmas!

(For more information on this series of posts, please see the Introduction to the Poems of the Chronography of 354).

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Another couple of manuscripts were located today, and the relevant portions downloaded.

Today I worked out how to download manuscripts from the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and indeed wrote a little post on how.  One of these is listed in the Bollandists website; the other is not, and contains only one part of the text, BHL 6105.  Indeed it seems as if the text has more or less dissolved into the mass of Nicholas material in circulation by that date.

The other two were both from Britain.  Curiously I found the details that I needed using Google searches, and located the IIIF manifests.  The first one I had seen before, but not known how to access the page images.  The second one I knew nothing of until today.

It’s really a case of hitting Google, hitting the websites, trying out different forms of the author’s name – today I tried “Jean le diacre” rather than “John the Deacon”, which gave me the second hit.  It’s really very random a lot of the time.

Onwards.

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How to download a manuscript at the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This is for all you non-German speakers out there.  Yes, it is indeed possible to download a PDF of manuscripts at the ONB in Vienna!

All the fully-digitised manuscripts for the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek are listed on a page here: https://manuscripta.at/lib_digi.php?libcode=AT8500.  (The link doesn’t look very permanent, so you might have to search at manuscripta.at).  [Update: drill down from https://manuscripta.at/digitalisate.php]

But it is very useful to have them all on one page!  Ctrl-F to find the manuscript you want by number.

Here’s a screen-grab of the top of the page:

Click on the manuscript you want.  I’ve highlighted ONB 6.  Here’s the next page:

What you want is the “Volldigitalisat” – “Fully digitised”.  Click on the “Quicksearch” link:

I had to use Chrome’s automatic translate facility to work out which, if any of this, was relevant.  It’s “Online-Zugriff”.  Click there.  That will take you down the page, to somewhere seemingly random:

Clicking on “Digitales Objeckt” will, at last, take you to the online manuscript.

Right-click on the image, and the menu above will appear.  This contains the exciting words “Objekt herunterladen” – “Download Object”.  If you click on this, you will be prompted to download a PDF of the “Gesamtes Objekt” – the whole thing.

Marvellous!  Well done the ONB.  Now I can mark up the PDF and do some work on the manuscript.

Update, 11 March 2023: the website has now changed, and none of this now works.  There is a download link on the manuscript itself, but this does not seem to work.  If anybody knows where they have hidden the link, please add a comment.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first sounding for variants in the Latin text of John the Deacon was a decided success.  Now we have four variants for a single word, which seems to divide the witnesses quite nicely.  There is another doubtful place a couple of lines below, to look into next.

I’ve downloaded around 30 manuscripts so far, and there are more that I can get at.  I suspect there are around 200 manuscripts.  It is unfortunate that only one of those in Milan is online, and none from Naples, because these two sources probably influenced the early editions.

In the middle of this busy activity, a week ago, I was struck down by a winter virus, and had to cancel all my engagements and lie on a sofa, day after day.  No sniffles, just a headache and weakness.  I started to recover last night, but it will be a day or two yet, I think.

Last night I came across a Latin idiom which I wanted to add into the help for QuickLatin.  This I did and … the whole program refused to compile.  Some mysterious problem with “mshtml.dll”.  Nothing to do with my changes.  Suspiciously the files referenced on disk were “updated” by a Windows update earlier yesterday.  Fixing the problem involved two hours of googling and some rather hairy messing around.  Had I not been a professional programmer, I would have been defeated.  Even so I was frustrated that my development environment broke, for no reason.  It  did remind me of how poor is the quality of the development tools for Windows.   Now that Bill Gates is no longer in charge, there is nobody at the top of the company who programs.  It shows.

I’m looking forward to getting back to John soon!

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How to lose the first letter of a word in transmission

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post I looked at how to decide what the genuine reading was of a single word in John the Deacon’s Latin text.  Among the variants was “Nacta” and “Acta”.

Purely by chance this evening I have come across a perfect illustration of how Nacta became Acta.  It is to be found in Ms. Vatican Barb. lat. 586, on fol. 3v, where the text appears like this:

Nacta written but the initial never inserted, leaving "acta".
Nacta written but the initial never inserted, leaving “acta”.

There it is.  The word is “Nacta”.  The scribe has left a space for the “N” to be illuminated, for a decorated initial to be inserted.  To help the artist, he’s put a written “N” in the space, and the text reads “acta”.

In this case the N is big, and bold, and clear.  But what if it wasn’t?  What if it was small, tiny, faint?

Clearly this has happened, sometime in the past, in some other manuscript.  The copyist did not notice the “N” and wrote “Acta”.  How do we know?  Because “Acta” is one of the variants that I found in some of the manuscripts, listed in my last post.

This, folks, is how you lose letters from the front of a word in transmission.

Update: Stephen Carlson points out that it actually looks as if it was originally an A, which was erased and the N written in.  The first “a” of “acta” is different to the other, and the surface looks erased!  And the other initials have been marked up in red.  So maybe… it means the opposite?!  Acta, corrected to Nacta!  Here’s the other A:

Folio 6v – A

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Inventa ergo… Or maybe not – Recensio, part 2.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Time to plunge into the text and see if I can find any errors in the manuscripts that might help me divide them up into families.

When I was collating the text of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas, I came across a passage, which is interesting for the sheer number of textual variants, for the first word of the sentence.  St Nicholas has learned that a starving man, unable to afford a dowry for his three daughters, has decided to prostitute them.  He decides to do something about this.

Inventa ergo** cuiusdam noctis hora, sumens non modicum aurum, ligansque in panno, perrexit ad domum viri, quam undique circumspiciens, per fenestram quae competens videbatur, clam intro projecit, clamque discessit.

Therefore, when the hour of a certain night arrived,** he took not a little gold, and tying it in a cloth, he went to the man’s house, which he surveyed from all sides, and then, through a window which seemed appropriate to him, he secretly threw it inside and secretly departed.

I noticed this place when I was machine-comparing the editions.

  • Mombritius, Lippomano: inventa ergo … hora – the hour having been found/reached, therefore.
  • Falconius: nactus ergo … hora – (he) having reached, therefore … the hour.
  • Corsi: acta ergo … hora – the hour having come, therefore.
  • Mai: infamiis notata igitur – their disgrace having been noticed, therefore.

That’s a lot of differences, and that’s what, from a text criticism point of view, we need to find!  So… good news!  Now here are some thoughts, based on what I generally know about these editions.

  • Mombritius printed some unknown (probably late) manuscript.  Lippomano may have just reprinted Mombritius at this point.
  • Corsi used Falconius, but also a Berlin manuscript.  At this point in the manuscripts, there is an initial.  Is acta really Nacta, copied from a manuscript where the initial “N” had never been painted in?  So we could ignore it?
  • Mai’s edition is a printed version of an abbreviated form of the text, which turns into a paraphrase.  Maybe the scribe of the abbreviation found something odd here – maybe just something he read as atta? and improvised?

Maybe we have manuscripts missing the initial letter.  Let’s go and look, and see what we have.  Maybe we have a point at which the manuscript tradition diverges?  (This will also help me get more of the manuscript material in order on my disk.)

The first PDF, alphabetically, in my folder of manuscripts is Balliol 216.  This I made from a zip file of images, downloaded from the website, and pulled into a PDF using Finereader 15.  I’m opening it for the first time (in a very old copy of Acrobat 9 Pro).  I wince a bit as I see images on their sides and upside down.  I read the folio numbers as I page down, and get Nicholas at folio 33r as expected.  I bookmark it, and save the PDF properties so that the bookmarks will open whenever I open the PDF.

The text isn’t that great to read – a Gothic hand, drat it – but I know what I’m looking for.  It’s an initial.

Ooo.  On folio 34 there’s an erasure.  I note that in the bookmarks.

I page down.  Some of the photos are lying on their sides.  I rotate them.  I look out for familiar initials and bookmark them.  Acrobat is amazing.  Pity you can’t actually buy a copy any more.

I page down, looking for the end of the text.  I must have passed it, because I have a red initial “Igitur postquem beatissimi nicholaus ex hoc mundo migravit” – “After blessed Nicholas snuffed it”; but I know this isn’t part of my text, but some of the tedious miracle stories often added on the bottom.  So fol. 42r is past the end.  Bookmark that.

Back up.  Aha!  Bottom of f41v is what I’m looking for – “remearunt ad propria” – “they went home”, plus some standard stuff “magnificentes doninum jesum christum”.  That’s the end.  Bookmark it.

So I’m not going to find a handy initial.  Rats.  Hmm… I can make out “Tunc om” and then an abbreviation.  I got to my working file: it’s tunc omnes, and I’m in the middle of chapter 7.  Too far.  Mark it up anyway.  His ita transactis, the start of chapter 7, can’t be far – oh yes, there it is.  Sticky note, and bookmark.  Back up I go… ah, there’s Laban!  Good old Laban, I’m not far now.  And … there it is!

Balliol MS 216 - position of our passage
Inventa ergo? Not in Balliol 216! It’s Notata igitur.

Immediately we find… “Notata igitur!”  (Words before it are patrem tuum qui in caelis est, your father who is in heaven.  Unlike me.)  Different again from any of the manuscripts, although clearly the Mai abbreviated text is working from something of this type.

I won’t drag you through this process for each manuscript.  But I’m doing the same thing in each case.  What do I get?

  • Balliol 216 (13th) = Notata igitur
  • Berlin theol. lat. qu 140 (11th) = Acta igitur, which is Corsi’s reading from just this manuscript
  • BNF lat 196 (12th) = Acta igitur, with the capital.
  • BNF lat. 989 (10th c) = v faded.  I think it’s a Notata igitur, with the capital, after some image manipulation.  The N and the ata are clear.
  • BNF lat 1765 (13th) = Nacta igitur.  But something is odd about this ms – the text is a lot shorter and ends with “accepit insulam”, part way through chapter 7, then another text, which seems to be called the “Relatio Simplicii” in another ms (below) and then an odd ending from BHL 6108a.  Then the Passio of St Lucy.
  • BNF lat. 1864 (14th) = Notata ergo.  This text ends with the usual remearunt, but then follows with material printed by Falconius as chapters 14 and 15 – the first manuscript copy I have seen of this.
  • BNF lat. 2627 (11th) = Notata ergo.  This too ends with chapters 14 and 15.
  • BNF lat. 3791 (12th) = Nacta ergo.  The front of the ms is missing.  This copy ends with remearunt and then follows the Life of St Lucy.
  • BNF lat. 3809A (15th) = ???  There’s definitely an ergo but what’s the first word, with the initial, following the “a – li – ud. -“?  It looks like “Clam“? “without knowledge of the hour”?  The thing ends with the ch.14, and a bunch of miracles, then the life of St Ambrose.

  • BNF lat. 5308 (12th) – Transacta ergo.
  • BNF lat. 5573 (12th c.) – Nacta ergo, but marginal correction to facta.
  • Fribourg L 5 (13th) – Nacta igitur.  This does not seem to have the usual remearunt, but does have chapters 14, 15 and then ending from BHL 6108a, and then the “Relatio Simplicii” about the transitus of St Nicholas.
  • Milan P113 supp – Nacta ergo.  This ends with “chapters 14 and 15” and then the Life of St Waleric (who?)
  • Munich BSB Clm 12642 (14th) – Nactus ergo, but the Nactus appears to be in a different hand, so an erasure and correction.
  • Vatican Barb. lat. 583, f.44v – blessed if I know!  It’s something in Beneventan, which I can’t read.  I’ve posted to Twitter.

  • Vatican Barb.lat.586 – Nacta ergo.  But with an unilluminated N.  Easy copyist error to write “Acta”.
  • UPDATE: Vat. lat.1271 (12th c.) – Inventa ergo.  Finally!

I’m beginning to wear out here, so I will stop for now. I’ve learned quite a bit. Clearly I need to catalogue exactly how each copy ends.

But notice what is not found in any of these?  The “inventa” that we started with!

Later: By chance I’ve found a perfect example of why the text cannot be “Acta”.  It’s in my next blog post, here.

Later still: Or maybe it was originally Acta, “corrected” to Nacta?

The Munich copy of vol. 2 of Mombritius, “Sanctuarium”, p.163, showing “inventa”

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