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.

Books, Books, Books

I have just refreshed the bibliography on the Great Stemma which now runs to more than 180 items. The  major change is that it is now annotated, following the urging of Phoebe Acheson of the University of Georgia (Athens) Miller Learning Center, who founded the Ancient World Open Bibliographies (AWOL). She added the original bibliography to her list in May 2011, where it is tagged under both information architecture and paragraphy.

Additions include the article by Helena de Carlos which I recently posted about as well as a rather shallow discussion by Carlos Miranda in 2000 of the differences between the Great Stemma, Lesser Stemma and Compendium of Peter of Poitiers:

Miranda García, Carlos. ‘Mnemonics and Pedagogy in the Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi by Peter of Poitiers’. In Genealogia Christi, edited by Maria Algàs, translated by Anne Barton de Mayer, 29–89. Barcelona: Moleiro, 2000.

This appears in a very interesting volume devoted to a Rome manuscript in roll form of the Compendium. To my astonishment this is quite a rare book: there is only one copy as far as I know in any research or public library in the north of Germany (and only two in the south, at Passau and Munich). As an insert, it contains a printing of what I would guess is the first-ever digital plot of a medieval stemmatic diagram. The work on this very impressive poster-style, fold-out sheet is credited in the book (page 15) to Enrique de Castillo. I will give it a bibliographic reference of its own when I do a medieval book-list.

Avatars of the Word

Traditional scholars tend to sniff at the idea of the uncredentialed researcher searching Latin texts without the full classical education that one supposedly needs to do this. James O'Donnell welcomes the electronic machinery in his 1998 book Avatars of the Word, but his approving description of the mind of Jerome of Stridon as the model of the perfect search machine implies to me that he was not fully ready or able to foresee the Latin database as an app for everyone:

Jerome once ran across a Greek word in a text, and wrote to a friend that he remember seeing that word only twice elsewhere, once in scripture, once in an apocryphal religious work. As it happens, he was correct: the three passages he knew are the only places (still) where we know that word to have been used in the written legacy of Greek literature. Hearing that story, I marvel at the powers of Jerome's memory, knowing that as a modern scholar with some similar interests in scripture and translation, I would never dare to say such a thing (p. 4).

With the advantage of hindsight, I find O'Donnell's book stimulating, but somewhat off-beam, though in a contrarian kind of way. O'Donnell did not recoil from the digital database, but under-estimated its impact by arguing that the database which could compete with Jerome's memory is not really all that new, and that libraries in recent centuries have always been on the verge of doing the same thing:

If the essential feature of the idea of the virtual library is the combination of total inclusiveness and near-instantaneous access, then the fantasy is almost coterminous with the history of the book itself (p. 32).

Now of course the database is far more than just a library, because it lowers the barriers to entry: it is accessible to those who have not learned the professional codes, to those who have not paid to participate. There is at least a tangential awareness of this in Avatars, O'Donnell has some engaging thoughts about the uncredentialed (the move to do more and more teaching not only with teaching assistants (the invisibly uncredentialled whom we take for granted but with impermanent, nontenured, non-tenure-trace faculty, p. 180) and the shy (Th[e] classroom is a potentially frightening place because much of our traditional pedagogy depends on the managed infliction of humiliation ... Here is where electronic media can help innovation ... The student who now is unable to perform adequately in the face of perceived threat of embarrassment in class is the one who can be given a place to rehearse out of sight of classmates and teacher ... p. 185-6).
But O'Donnell failed in 1998 to foresee a positive: the sheer mass of accessible material that the internet would throw up and the radically democratic level of access to it. He also failed to foresee a negative: the growing difficulty, once the blogosphere had established itself, of assembling an audience.

Intriguing Lead

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

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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?

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* 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.

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.

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.