Baum: An Early Family Tree

The search for the earliest use of "Baum" in German to describe a stemma continues. Currently the honour seems to reside with Heinrich Steinhöwel of Ulm who is thought to have used the term in his dedication of a book printed 1475 when introducing the following woodcut:

The male ancestor at the root, right, is designated Albrecht Hapsburg, landgrave of Alsace, Lord of Sassenburg. The main body of the book is a German translation of the Speculum Vitae Humanae of Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (1404-1470). Steinhöwel's German title is Der Spiegel des Menschlichen Lebens.

It is online as BSB incunable 2 Inc.s.a. 1264 digitized here (seek image 18), also at the LOC and in Heidelberg. ISTC: ir00231000.

The text preceding the woodcut says: "darumb will ich ... alleyn desletszen hauses österreich auff wachssen eynen bom beczeichnen ale er hie ynne mit bilden ist geformieret. Und vince ds anfang von eynem lantgraffen aus dem Elses dessun in die graffschafft ze habspurg komen ist als dr in nachgenter geschrifft v[o]n in dem bom mit geleich-en büchstabben wirt ausgezeichnet. (That's why I wish to draw all of the latter house of Austria on a full-grown tree. Each is shown by pictures. And those counts of Hapsburg arising from this landgrave of Alsace are each marked in the tree with the same letter (of the alphabet) as is used in the subsequent list.)

This praise of the Hapsburgs is not part of the original Speculum Vitae Humanae itself (see the Latin version at Gallica), but an appeal for patronage from the Hapsburgs. Given that aristocrats were the principal customers for books in Steinhöwel's time, the genealogy was a crude but entirely normal attempt to secure sales.

No date or place of printing for the incunable is given, but it seems from the type-face to be settled that the printer was Günther Zainer of Augsburg, and that the year was most likely 1475. The translator's manuscript (which still exists) was completed March 19, 1474 and an entry in the genealogy on folio 10v mentions the baptism of Prince Maximilian in Augsburg "this Easter" on Maundy Thursday of 1475. It is to be assumed the printing was completed later that year. The book is overlooked by Klapisch-Zuber, who opens L'Ombre with a family tree of 1491 (see below), the earliest she could discover.

The book is prefaced by (1) a foreword and overview, (2) a dedication to Duke Siegmund of Tyrol, (3) a one-paragraph explanation of the family tree, (4) the full-page engraving, and (5) a tabular listing of the genealogy keyed to the sketch. (4) and (5) appear to be the work of Ladislaus Sunthaym (ca. 1440 – 1512).

Walther Borvitz is dismissive of (2) as fawning hack-work, which perhaps leads him to his peculiar view that (3) is a boiler-plate insertion originating with Sunthaym. Perplexingly, he refused to transcribe (3) in his edition (Archive.org) although it continues in the same first person (ich) as the paragraphs above and is almost certainly of a unity with them. It is hard to follow Borvitz's justification for this omission, since his contention that the text of (3) appears at col 1004 of Scriptores Rerum Austriacarum Veteres ac Genuini, vol 1, by Hieronymus Pez does not seem to be correct. The Latin text there is by Pez and makes no claim at all about the Steinhöwel book of 1475:

Harum Tabularum Clauftro Neoburgensium praecipuus Auctor est Ladislaus Sunthaim seu Sundheimius, Ravensburgio Sueviæ oppido oriundus, Dioecesis Constantiensis Presbyter. Quod mirum est in laudatarum Tabularum editione fuisse dissimulatum: cum in MS Claustro-Neoburgensi quod nos coram inspeximus, diserte Sunthaimii nomen, patria conditioque habeantur. Porro eas Sunthaimius condidit sub annum 1491, quo ipso Basileæ typis excusæ fuerunt in majori forma, quam vocant. Ad cuius editionis fidem & hanc nostram adornavimus, cum sæpe memoratæ Tabulæ manuscriptae vix commodum Mellicium perferri potuerint, & nos, dum in lustranda Claustro-Neoburgensi Bibliotheca versaremur, ab ipsis integris describendis angustia temporis exclusi fuerimus. In vulgatis Tabulis ad calcem, Reverendissimus Dominus Jacobus Praepositus Clastro-Neoburgensis ad eas concinnandas symbolam contulisse memoratur, qui ab anno 1485 usque ad annum 1509 Claustro-Neoburgensem praefecturam gessisse dicitur apud Adamum Scharrerum in Vita S. Leopoldi Auftriæ Marchionis. Cæterum Ladislaus Sunthaimius is præterea fuit, qui Historiam de Guelfis sub annum 1511 composuit, quam ex Caesarea Bibliotheca fecum communicatam Cl. Leibnitius Tom. I Script. Brunswic. a pag 800 ad pag 806 publico exposuit. Ex qua etiam intelligimus, Sunthaimium postea Viennensis Canonici dignitate fuissse auctum. Sed de his fatis. En ipsas Tabulas Claustro Neoburgenses.

There is thus no reason to attribute (3) to Sunthaym, and every good reason to regard Steinhöwel as the writer who chose the word "bom". Barbara Weinmayer offers a very different perspective on the section (3), seeing the dedication as a valuable source of Steinhöwel's genuine views about the science of translation, although she makes no comment on the content of our disputed final paragraph (3) and its bom.

For the time being it seems best to leave the authorship of (3) with Steinhöwel. Perhaps an expert on Renaissance German style could ponder the issue.

The woodcut employed at Basel in or after 1491 for the printing of Der löblichen Fürsten und des Landes Österreich Altherkommen und Regierung (full text on Wikisource) of Sunthaym is not the same as this one, though it is similar. Sunthaym is often treated in the literature as father of the royal "tree", but it would seem that the "tree" was already part of the vocabulary of man one generation older.

Borvitz, Walther. Die Übersetzungstechnik Heinrich Steinhöwels: dargestellt auf Grund seiner Verdeutschung des ‘Speculum vitae humanae’. Hermaea 13. Halle: Niemeyer, 1914.

Dicke, Gerd. ‘Steinhöwel, Heinrich’. Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, 1995. vol 9, cols 269ff. http://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/cgi-bin/mgh/allegro.pl?db=opac.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’ombre des ancêtres. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

Weinmayer, Barbara. Studien zur Gebrauchssituation früher deutscher Druckprosa. Literarische Öffentlichkeit in Vorreden zu Augsburger Frühdrucken. Munich: Artemis, 1982.

Backbone of Europe

The oldest chart of the western world, the Tabula Peutingeriana, would be better known to map enthusiasts if it were an approachable document. But on a first look, the scroll, which was designed in the Roman Empire, seems pretty incomprehensible. Of course it's in Latin, but that's not even the biggest problem. The chart is not to scale, but uses a strange squashed "projection", and it's infernally hard to guess where any of its roads go.

Help is at hand at last with my new chart of northern France, Germany, northern Italy, Austria and Slovenia which picks out what you need to know about the part of the Tabula covering Europe's most prosperous areas today.

What is striking is that the ductus of the Tabula -- and an awareness of the geography on the ground -- points to our designer having chosen a main road leading all the way from Boulogne, France to Rimini, Italy as his centerpiece.

This backbone, colored wine-red in my analytical diagram, passes through Reims, Besançon, Lausanne, the Great St Bernard Pass and Cesena. It's not the same as the medieval Via Francigena which led from Canterbury via Florence to Rome, but both the high roads served the same traffic and had many stretches in common.

Another big takeaway: the Tabula Peutingeriana is not oriented north-south. "Up" is north-west. Use the interactive control "Landmass" to see the coasts which the late antique designer had in mind. Of course the match is not perfect: Boulogne ends up on top of London, Leiden in the North Sea and Milan perched on the bank of the Rhine. But it's remarkable that anything matches in something that initially appears so chaotic.

What we are seeing is a very different take on Europe from that we are familiar with in modern maps. This is Roman Europe, with a fortified border in the north along the valleys of the Rhine and Danube (the dark blue line at top). It's also a Europe where most long-distance travel is obstructed by the Alps. The interactive control "Passes" shows how these seal off northern Italy. You can't go round them (except by ship): you have to over them as the playground song tells us.

To prove I haven't cheated, use the interactive control "Manuscript Sections" to see how the places form columns. The vertical layout precisely matches that in the Tabula, a UNESCO Memory of the World treasure now kept in a vault in Vienna. Tell me if you spot any errors. And if you want to see a similar chart of southern Europe, check out my previous blog post, Two Frances.

Michel and Marianne

A scala in Latin is a ladder. The German artist who drew the infographic below in 1965 must have had an education in the classics, because a ladder was the figure he chose as a matter of reflex to compare factory pay-scales around the globe.The dpa-infografik company recently re-issued it to mark its 70th anniversary in business.

-- dpa-infografik GmbH

As an information visualization this is fairly simple, setting up the vertical scale and scattering the data loosely to draw the reader in. The scattering is an early version of a technique known as the jitterplot, which is handily explained in this infographic from @joemako

These numbers are an education in what has changed in the world. Back then, US factory workers had the "good jobs" that have now been destroyed by Washington's economic policies. Curiously, German workers earned only half as much. I was surprised to see New Zealand workers were so high up. New Zealand did not feel particularly prosperous in those times. It was hard to buy quality goods. Availability of everything from cars to shoes was limited by a legal regime called import licensing.
Still, the numbers here supposedly factor all that in, comparing hourly rates of pay, converted to Deutschmarks and adjusting for differences in purchasing power. A US worker got 8.70 DM and an Indian worker 0.51 DM per hour.

The figures are types: Uncle Sam, a RCMP mountie, an English trawlerman, the typical German Deutscher Michel, an Austrian in gamsbart hat, a shapely French Marianne, an Argentinian gaucho, a Japanese salaryman, a Yugoslav miner and an Indian porter. In those days it was thought clever, not racist, to depict people by stereotype.

Storm on a Pie Chart

Longtime German infographics company Globus has just re-released an entertaining pie-chart graphic from 1962 which harks back to the day when travelling outside your home country for a vacation was rather a foreign idea, but the economic miracle had creating this new option for middle-income Germans.

The artwork shows a German man in the inevitable Roman sandals smirking on a lounger with a Chianti wickerwork bottle next to him (Italy was the place Germans adored visiting). The graph says: "Per 100 adults in West Germany, 32 plan a holiday abroad this year," and offers a breakdown of why: better weather (8%); to meet foreigners (8%); see foreign sights (4%); it's cheaper (4%); get away from the same-old (4%); other (4%). The source of the survey data is not given.

-- dpa-infografik GmbH

Look closely for what has happened to the rest of the pie: it has vanished into a storm-cloud. Probably an allusion to the summer thunderstorms enjoyed by the stay-at-homes. Incomplete pies are not so common in infographics, but the artist took this liberty because pies were and still are common and familiar in German information visualization.

The art was released in 1962 with the ironic strapline: "Every third adult German wants to shake the dust of West Germany from their feet in the 1962 holiday season. But why? Are the attractions of Germany really used up? (Jeder dritte erwachsene Deutsche will im Urlaubsjahr 1962 den Staub der Bundesrepublik von seinen Füßen schütteln. Warum? Sind die Schönheiten Deutschlands schon allzu bekannt?)

A subtext that is not mentioned: East Germans were mostly forbidden to travel abroad. The Berlin Wall had just gone up. In later years they were able to visit Hungary and the Black Sea.

The Housewife

Back in 1960, Globus, the syndicated infographics agency in Germany, ran this remarkable visual analysis of what a German housewife did with her 10-hour working day.

Image: obs/dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

Globus, which was founded in 1946, just after the Second World War, has just republished this in a media release to mark its 70th anniversary and the design rewards some analysis. The graph is the much-aligned pie chart design, which some critics claim is misleading as a visualization of data, but here it works perfectly well.

Because Globus worked mainly for the educational market rather than news media, it was vulnerable to one of those folk fallacies which holds that narrative symbols are easier to understand than synthetic ones. That is why it converted the perfectly good pie chart into a fob watch (people still had those in 1960) and added a skillet and broom for good measure.

The data itself is intriguing. In 1960, German women as in many other nations had "returned to the home" 15 years after the war's end amid a sentiment that this made it easier for men to find work, but a patronizing, even nasty tone towards the "common housewife" was common in news broadcasts of the era. What stands out here is that there was a massive amount of work in keeping a household.

An hour and a quarter of the average day was spent sewing and repairing, an extraordinary effort in the eyes of young moderns who just discard clothing when it tears or gets a hole in it. But I grew up in that era and it was a matter of course to darn socks, fix hems and sew on buttons. We even inspected clothes while buying them to judge how solidly the factory had done the buttonholes.

The two hours spent house-cleaning and the three and a half hours spent cooking indicate the time cost before home appliances were widespread. The hour a day shopping was another inefficiency that my own New Zealand mother had no time for in the 1960s. She phoned her orders to the grocer and had them delivered, and would have been delighted with today's online food.

Infographics in Germany

The history of infographics in Germany is more closely tied to education than to the news media. The country's main syndicated infographics agency, Globus, was founded on 27 June 1946, just after the Second World War and had a large business supplying both textbook publishers and schools with maps and graphics. Its early hand-drawn work merits attention by everyone interested in data visualization history.

This month, Globus (now a subsidiary of dpa-infografik GmbH, part of the dpa news group -- statement of interest: dpa is my employer) is marking its 70th anniversary by re-releasing in its weekly packages for educational subscribers some of its early work. The media release today includes samples that reward a closer look, both for their focussed design and their historical circumstances.

The first dates from 1947 and neatly tells you how Allied-occupied Four-Zone Germany had gone from a housing stock of 18 million units when Hitler's war started to just 8 million. This was because 4.5 million apartments and homes had been lost to bombing, fire and other war effects, 3 million were left behind in the new territory of Poland and 2.5 million were so damaged as to be uninhabitable in winter.

Image: obs/dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

Great graphics use seemingly simple means to index numbers visually. In this case, the increased density per home is indexed by queues of apartment-seeking renters at each door that are similar in expanse, but more dense at the right. This is graphically viscous, but a closer match to what the numbers represent in real life: overcrowding. An amusing touch is the girl at left representing 0.8 and the arm-pulling child at right for 0.2. In 1947 the people are thinner and clothes shabbier, which is the way the postwar was. A Second World War veteran has only one leg.

In the bottom half is a stacked bar chart in the horizontal, which began  in the artist's mind like this:

What he or she did was to translate it into a row of gabled houses like those you see in old German towns, or perhaps like the cottages on a German housing estate. It's a neat way of enlivening the graphic and while some would argue it breaches Edward Tufte's data ink rule, I think it's just right, and suits the black-and-white line-drawing style perfectly.

Curly Braces

One of the great macro-typography inventions of the first 100 years of western printing was the curly brace (or bracket) as a device to organize hierarchical information. Initially the letterpress type-piece for a brace seems to have been cut ad-hoc by hand, as in this single example in the Margarita Philosophica of Gregor Reisch (1503):

In some work, such as grammar texts, the brace could soon be taken as read and simply omitted, as in a 1533 printing in Basle, Switzerland of the grammar of Donatus edited by Heinrich Loriti or "Glarean". But the normal procedure was for the typesetter to make a brace for such layouts.

Where the material in the stemma was more copious, printers laid it out with its root at the top. In a 1540 Basle printing of Livy's Decades in the edition of Glarean, the brace is still hand-cut:

Printers soon recognized it was quicker to resort to their typecases, combining the small pieces of straight rule and rounded corners supplied by their typecutters to form braces.

The first explicit explanation of this practice which I can find appears 200 years later in The Printer's Grammar by John Smith (link goes to a full edition of 1787, but the original seems to have come out 1755). It explains how a printer mainly resorts to his middle-length rules to do this:

Middle and Corners are very convenient in Genealogical Work, where they are used the flat way; and where the directing point is not always in the middle, but has its place under the name of the Parent, whose offspring stands between Corner and Corner of the bracing side, in order of primogeniture.

The "directing point" was a specially cut form to be found in the standard typesets in Basle. We see this in a 1557 example of a book by Wolfgang Lazius (1514-1565) (biography) in De gentium aliquot ... (online), page 589:

Elsewhere the point might be made from two corners, as in this 1556 book of genealogies (online) by Ernst Brotuff (1497-1565) (nasty biography) printed at Leipzig, Germany, where if one looks carefully, the joins between the rules are visible:

Sometimes the brace was reduced to a minimum as in a 1559 example. As another option, Johannes Herold (1514-1567), who was a publisher in Basle (biography), often preferred stemmata with the root at the left, as we see in his 1561 Churfürstliches Haus der Pfaltz an Rhein (online). Here too one can see that these braces were not hand cut, but assembled from smaller parts:

The curly brace was thus the printers' most important instrument in adapting the ancient graphic idea of the stemma to the technology of the printing press, where the need to square the forms that will be put into the type-bed presupposes that all elements fit together at 90-degree angles. When Leonhard Ostein of Basle came to print Hulderic Zwingli junior's edition of the Compendium of Petrus Pictaviensis in 1592 (previous blog post), he could hardly do otherwise:

Later tabular printing including some braces has been listed by an interesting Munich project, Historische Tabellenwerke (ended 2007), but I am not aware of any research on braced stemmata in incunables. What I am currently trying to do is take this history back beyond 1500. It is plain that the solutions then in use were not experimental, but settled practices. Can anyone help me find older examples?

Erlangen Tree

Until recently, a celebrated 12th-century manuscript, variously known as the Chronicle of Frutolf or the Chronicle of Ekkehard of Aura (Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek, ms 406), was not to be found online. On November 7, German archives blogger Klaus Graf published the news on his site of its arrival and within a matter of hours, my Twitter colleague Pierre Chambert-Protat (@chaprot) went online to alert me to it. Digital social media are a wonderful boon to scholarship.

On November 4, I had published on this blog a schematic outline of a "tree" at folio 204v of the selfsame manuscript. This is a plot, which I originally prepared for my own book but later decided not to use:

This figure, drawn in 1140 or thereabouts, is adapted from the century-old Stemma of Cunigunde, a drawing made in or shortly after 1013 when Cunigunde was anointed Holy Roman Empress. You can examine a reconstruction of that stemma on my website.

What does it show? The most important person here is R - Charlemagne - whose empire was divided among three of his grandsons by the Treaty of Verdun.

To enhance the chronicle, Ekkehard (or his predecessor editor Frutolf) repurposed the old diagram as a study in saintly ancestry by adding to it images of Arnulph and his holy mother Begga. Other manuscripts of the Ekkehard Chronicle present the Stemma of Cunigunde more or less faithfully, but the scribe-artist of the Erlangen codex decided to have some fun with it. He inverted it, and drew the figure of Arnulph at the left and Arnulph's saintly mother Begga at right. The bottom roundel (A in my plot) represents Arnulph.

Curiously, this artist omitted Cunigunde, although she had been the motive for creating the original drawing and she was revered in the entire Bamberg area, where this miniature was almost certainly made, as a holy figure and foundress of the cathedral. One must at least consider the possibility that the stemma was inverted in order to conceal her deliberate exclusion.

You can now enjoy the original at fol. 204v of the digital surrogate: 

What change in medieval culture had made this startling inversion of the stemma not just possible, but acceptable to the customer, probably the Cistercian Monastery of Heilsbronn in Germany which became the long-term owner of this codex? Is this quirky conversion on an artist's desk the precise moment when the family tree, later to become a prestigious badge of nobility, was invented?

As with all big questions, the answer is not a simple one. A long inquiry was conducted into these issues by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. As a historian of Renaissance culture, she was curious about the roots of the craze from the 15th to the 19th centuries to depict European aristocratic genealogies by painting vast leafy trees where portraits of ancestors were pinned to a trunk and out onto the boughs. 

Researching her 2000 book, L'Ombre des Ancêtres, she cast far back into the medieval period, seeking precursors to those trees. This Heilsbronn tree of the late 12th century, as well as a couple of other painted trees made at roughly the same time at Weingarten, a monastery in the southwest of Germany, only dimly foreshadow the Renaissance craze. 

The Weingarten artist, working between the years 1185 and 1191, drew a leafy inverted stemma of the powerful Welf family with its most ancient known ancestor peeking out from inside the trunk at ground level, while a wide space was reserved in the crown of the foliage to be occupied by the Welfs' most illustrious offspring (by female descent), King Frederick Barbarossa. This is in Fulda, 100 D.11, folio 13v and is online. The other from Weingarten is now lost but an image of the tree was published by its owner, the collector and dealer Robert Forrer, in 1907. Unfortunately that book is not yet online. In Europe, it does not enter the public domain until 2018.

Klapisch-Zuber came, in effect, to the conclusion that it would involve an anachronism to call these drawings family trees or Stammbäume. There was no firm mental association between trees and the specific idea of ancestry yet.

The cultural change that took place in the 12th century with the rise of Gothic art was in fact much broader. Trees enjoyed a wide variety of uses in the graphic arts, ranging from trees of sevens as mnemonic devices to the tree manifestations of the Virga Jesse motif. Gothic cathedrals are in a certain sense trees of stone. This was what drove the experiments at Heilsbronn and Weingarten.

As I have already pointed out, inverted stemmata made to resemble trees with roots in soil are a rarity before the 16th century. It was 16th-century scholars like Scipione Ammirato who deserve the credit as the true originators of the family tree, not the medieval artists who created trees of ancestry more or less by fluke.

Forrer, Robert, ed. Unedierte Miniaturen, Federzeichnungen u. Initialen des Mittelalters. Strasbourg: Elsässische Druckerei, 1907.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’ombre Des Ancêtres. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

Rehabilitation for Forgotten Frick

When he was not at the blackboard, Carl Frick, a provincial German schoolteacher, studied the tangled world of Late Antique chronography. In 1892 he published Chronica Minora. This book was denoted volume one on the title page, indicating it was planned as the start of a series, but there was never any follow-up.

In a field where three celebrity scholars were at work, Frick (1848-?) was at a disadvantage, working without a place in the academic mill. He had the added misfortune to bring out the first volume in the same year as editions of chronica were also published by the legal historian Theodor Mommsen and by Paul de Lagarde.

Of Mommsen, the most eminent scholar in Germany in his own lifetime, and Lagarde, an unpleasant anti-Semite, we know a great deal. The story of another key scholar of chronography, Heinrich Gelzer, was recovered by Martin Wallraff in a book article in 2006. Frick however was largely forgotten.

Even the German national bibliography research unit with its vast documentary resources seems to have lost Chronica Minora and is apparently not aware of his date of death. One might note that here in Germany's second city, there appears to be only a single copy of Frick's main work in any Hamburg library today.

This week, Richard Burgess, the most eminent contemporary historian of Late Antique chronography, placed online an article which goes a considerable way to rehabilitating Frick and his achievements. The article seems to have been issued in print last month in the journal Traditio and is now also available via Burgess' repository on Academia.edu.

Professor Burgess's article acutely dissects a mysterious document, the Excerpta Latina Barbari, which forms codex Paris. Lat. 4884, now digitized at the BNF website (Catalog). He backs the BNF catalogers' view that it dates from about 780 CE, making it about a century later than supposed by some other authors, and that it was made at Corbie in France as a "perfect replica" (in Latin translation) of a "mass-produced" Greek codex which is now lost but was then in the possession of Bishop George of Amiens. His principal thrust is an argument, which is very much in the Frick tradition, in mitigation of the translator's so-called barbarian aptitude and a robust rejection of two recent alternative theses about the Excerpta from Benjamin Garstad and Pier Franco Beatrice.

Frick, who probably did not even see this Latin manuscript in Paris, tells us he borrowed in 1883 a sixteenth-century handwritten copy by Joseph Justus Scaliger from the Hamburg State Library. (This was in the day when the postman still brought thousand-year-old manuscripts to scholars' front doors.) Frick did not edit the text anew: he simply copied from a predecessor. But he had the creative idea of drafting up his own Greek version of the document. This was a central feature of Chronica Minora.

Burgess calls this (note 2) "still the most important study, which includes a surprisingly useful and insightful back-translation into Greek on facing pages" and praises (note 69) the "sensible comments of Frick in defense of the translator, whose Latin he says is no worse than that of Gregory of Tours (sixth century) or Virgilius Maro grammaticus (seventh century)." He also ridicules (note 10) Mommsen's claim to have personally examined the Paris manuscript, suggesting the polymath instead "had a student transcribe Schoene's text and add the entry numbers (for even they suffer from corruptions)." In conclusion he states:

Carl Frick's 1892 introduction and edition should have resulted in an intensified study of the Chron. Scal. But the earlier appearance that year of Theodor[e] Mommsen's own Chronica minora volume in the massive and authoritative Monumenta Germaniae Historica series, which has never gone out of print, meant that Frick's volume one was the last of the series, went out of print, and was on the whole forgotten ..." (page 43)

My own interest in chronography studies grew from the possibility that the evolution of chronicles might provide a key to date a fifth-century historical diagram, the Great Stemma, and a chronological text of perhaps the sixth century, the Ordo Annorum Mundi, which is transmitted with it. The Excerpta, or Chronographia Scaligeriana, as Burgess proposes it should be called, is not of direct assistance, since it is of a later date (Burgess proposes the final version in Greek cannot have dated any earlier than the 530s). However the chronographia comes from the same general culture as the Great Stemma and Liber Genealogus, where the uncanonical Protevangelium of James was regarded as a source of valid historical information.

In his volume, Frick has nothing to say about either the Great Stemma (imperfectly edited by me) or the Ordo Annorum Mundi (soon to be published by Brepols) and we cannot know what he planned to include in any later volumes, since his project collapsed. One is naturally curious about deserving figures who die in obscurity, so I find it touching that Burgess has now elevated Frick above Mommsen in his assessment.

It is Frick's modesty and dogged work which makes him an appealing figure (see my previous post). Whether any of Frick's papers survive at Höxter, where he ran a well-provided school library, I do not know. I once emailed the school but got no reply. At least one of his Latin textbooks remained in use for a century.

In Frick's further defence, I would also stress that his employment as a schoolmaster (see his Prussian education ministry file) should not be taken as a sign that he had a markedly lower academic standing than his professorial contemporaries. We judge this from a 21st century perspective at our peril. He worked in schools in a period when secondary education attracted many superb scholars. The more conservative sort of German schoolteacher today still joins a union known as the Philologenverband. In the nineteenth century, many of its members really were philologists.

Teachers of Latin and Greek in Frick's day were often first-class scholars or writers, as I can attest from the example of my cousin John Henry Fowler, an Oxford graduate and talented writer who earning his living as a rather dour Bristol boarding-school master. But the profession has come down in the world. Andreas Schleicher of the OECD warned only last week that the demotion and reduced professionalism of teachers is the central problem in the steady decline of many western education systems.

Berlin Cab Fare Calculator

A while back I quoted Mark Twain on the subject of Berlin's cab-fare calculator at the end of the 19th century. This was a map where "every street is sectioned off like a string of long beads of different colors". I mistakenly described it as a tramlines map, since Berlin had horse-drawn trams at that time. However it is quite clear from Twain's text that this map was used to regulate hansom-cab traffic.

I have now located an online reproduction of the map dated September 1884. It is described as a Droschken-Wegemesser, a distance calculator for cabs, and it is plain that this is what Mark Twain was describing in his April 3, 1892 article.

The text indicates that each coloured segment was about 160 metres long and about 15 segments, or 2.4 kilometres, could be covered by a cab in a quarter of an hour.



The cabs must have been pretty speedy. Presumably major intersections had traffic policemen, but much of the traffic would have proceeded by the rule of shout and shove.

To ride a bicycle, morning and evening, between the main train station (then the Lehrter Bahnhof) and what used to be the site of the Jerusalem Church takes me 15 or 16 minutes in each direction. My route comprises 21 coloured segments of the map. So on the pedals, I am only about 40 per cent faster than a 19th century A-grade horse.

The reproduction is on a page presenting twelve historic Berlin maps. They have been re-published by the Berlin Public Library and I recommend you visit to see a greatly magnified version (under the heading Mai). Clearly this map is diagrammatic in use, but not diagrammatic in its overall form. The underlying form is a conventional street map.

Cassiodorus Digital

Since I first published several years ago a hyperlinked listing of the 37 diagrams "made up" by Cassiodorus for his Institutiones, two key sources have become available digitally: the great 8th-century codex from Monte Cassino now at Bamberg, Msc. Patr. 61, which contains the complete set, probably in the final form approved by Cassiodorus for publication, and Mazarine 660, which contains some peculiar variations in the motifs used in the diagrams. The tabulated listing now includes links to all these images, making it an excellent tool for comparing their evolution in the first millennium. The drawings from Mazarine 660 are to be found on the Liber Floridus illuminations site.

It is remarkable how much has changed in the 13 years since the definitive article on the Cassiodorus diagrams by Michael Gorman was published and included this comment:

Today it is relatively cheap and easy to buy a microfilm of a manuscript and print it out on paper, but in the 1930s this was a luxury that could probably not even be imagined ... I hope this note is sufficient to stimulate interest in preparing a facsimile of the Bamberg manuscript ... (pages 39, 41)

Since that was written, another unimaginable barrier has been breached and it has become possible for anyone to see these manuscripts at no charge via the internet, making facsimiles less necessary.

This update is one of three data upgrades to the Macro-Typography website that have been accomplished in the past month. The collation of the Great Stemma now contains a properly checked fifth and last set of text variations, from the Gamma manuscripts. This was previously bodged together from Fischer's Genesis edition and my transcription of the Urgell Beatus. The Gamma text is now based on a sounder manuscript, that in the San Juan Bible, with the Urgell Beatus only required to fill gaps. This data entry was a lot of work at an unwelcome time, but means that I can now close off the transcription phase with a good conscience.

The third of the upgrades has been some supplementing of the Petrus Pictaviensis table on my website. The major new find there has been a digitization (by Heidelberg) of one of the manuscripts in the Vatican Library. I have also restored the Walters digitization which for some inexplicable reason I had deleted from the list. This means there is an even wider range of quality digitizations -- 22 -- of the Compendium available for comparison.

In addition to these, I continue to keep an eye out for any more additions to the Stemma of Boethius tabulation I completed in the late spring.

Gorman, Michael. “The Diagrams in the Oldest Manuscript of Cassiodor’s Institutiones.” Revue Bénédictine no. 110 (2000): 27–41.

Pliny Manuscript

Roger Pearse's post also points us to the principal manuscript of Book 35 of Pliny's Natural History where the practice of placing a "stemma" in the entrance area of a patrician Roman home is mentioned at 35.2. The best manuscript of Book 35 is preserved in a very cleanly penned and well preserved codex in Bamberg, Germany.

A digitization can be consulted online. The text on stemmata can be consulted at Perseus, where there is also an English translation. The matching page of the Bamberg codex is 78v, first column.

New Eusebius Tables Coming Out This Year

Roger Pearse mentioned yesterday how "F. Mone" discovered in Austria in 1853 a key palimpsest containing books 11-15 of Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Roger links to a digitization where you can experience for yourself the frustration of trying to read a lower level of writing on an overwritten page.

I think this must be Fridegar Mone (1829-1900), since that is the name on the edition of 1855.  I wondered for a while if it was not the father, Franz Mone (1796-1871). Both men had fascinating, conflict-dogged lives. The elder was a religious controversialist who received manuscript-research commissions. The younger was essentially a manuscript hunter and dealer who was sacked at age 50 and had his "private" manuscript collection (which did not of course include the Pliny palimpsest) seized by the government from his Karlsruhe home in 1886.

Similar discoveries during the 21st century of miraculously surviving manuscripts of lost or semi-lost Latin or Greek works of Antiquity are likely to be the rarest events. The archives of Europe and the Middle East have been scoured so many times by so many generations of scholars that the pickings are now slim.

More likely is the reconnection of unlabelled manuscripts to their Antique authors, such as the discovery a year ago that an anonymous Greek-script manuscript in Munich contains Origen's Homilies on the Psalms, or my own proof that the "medieval" graphic genealogies in Spanish bibles are in fact a 5th-century Latin work.

I mentioned in a previous post that Martin Wallraff's paper revealing his attribution of a section of an Oxford manuscript to Eusebius would soon appear in print. The article will lay bare an Antique work, the Canon Tables of the Psalms, which no one had known about for the past 1,000 years. Professor Wallraff made his remarkable discovery public at the Oxford Patristics Conference in 2011.

Harvard University Press has now announced a publication date for this editio princeps. It will appear as an article in the next issue of the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. This ground-breaking paper will be available from December 16 this year and will be entitled "The Canon Tables of the Psalms: An Unknown Work of Eusebius of Caesarea", the announcement says. Presumably it will be on open access from 2024 under the periodical's web release policy.

Incoherent?

Some years ago, the French cultural historian Christiane Klapisch-Zuber examined the Great Stemma. Because she was in Paris, the nearest manuscript at hand was a late recension, from Gascony, which is held by the French National Library or BNF. In colour and effect, the sumptuous polychrome diagram in the Saint-Sever Beatus is a beautiful thing, but in organization it is curiously incoherent.

Among its great oddities is a fishnet pattern among the descendants of Noah that largely obliterates the careful encoding of their relationships which was characteristic of the original model. That led Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, who is the greatest scholar to have surveyed the full history of such diagrams, to dismiss the whole class of Spanish Bible diagrams as an affront to the principles of ‘graphical semiology’. She argued in her 2000 book that no coherent biblical genealogical diagram had existed before a medieval work, the Compendium, was devised by Peter of Poitiers.

Her point of view was taken up and amplified soon after by Beate Kellner, who is now deputy principal of Munich's  Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU), in her Habilitationsschrift, which was published in 2004. Kellner also focussed this part of her research solely on the Saint-Sever manuscript in Paris.

She seemed to be even more troubled by the way the diagram strung out siblings like beads on a string instead of exhibiting them in hierarchical fashion as we do in "family trees", and spotted another oddity of the Saint-Sever manuscript, its curious folding together of the descendants of Leah:

Here the organization of the panels avoids a coherent reading order as we would conceive it, from the top to bottom or from the bottom to top ... The genealogy below Jacob and Leah begins with their son Reuben ... His brothers Simeon, Levi, Issachar and Zebulun follow in a series of roundels which is open to interpretation as a genealogical line of descent since the line is graphically vertical, although in fact it links persons of a single generation. The sons of Zebulun are similarly connected by lines to one another in the vertical, and with their father, in such a way that the arrangement is effectively an ascending one. (JBP translation, hover for German original)

The sketch below shows the situation referred to, with the remainder of the environs omitted, and it must be agreed that the Saint-Sever artist took a very free attitude to his Vorlage when he arrayed Reuben's sons to both the left and right and ran Zebulon's sons up the page instead of downwards:

Now this is not the place to consider whether Kellner's overall characterization of medieval genealogy is correct or not. But the Saint-Sever treatment of the Great Stemma is so original and so untypical of its diagrammatic tradition (list of manuscripts here) that it can hardly be taken as representative of very much other than the artistic sensibility of Stephanus Garsia Placidus, the monk who seems to have been its creative director and principal artist. Yolanta Zaluska has pointed out odd inconsistencies in the diagram which suggest that something went wrong with the project and that someone other than the original director completed the diagram.

The classical arrangement of the sons of Leah in the Great Stemma is in fact severely regular, and it normally embraces all six sons, not five as in the Saint-Sever recension which omits Judah in this position. Here is a schematic of the same group from the Plutei manuscript, which contains pretty well the earliest format we can discover in the diagram's history:

Now it is true that the reading order of grandson 1, grandson 2 and so on is not the order that we in the 21st century could conceive as proper. But it does adhere to a broad logic in the Great Stemma where certain sibling groups which are only supplementary to the broad purpose of the document are always shown in space-saving fashion as vertical series. This is perhaps surprising to our eyes, but it is not chaos.

Following this generalization, Kellner then ventures the hypothesis that the crowded design of the Saint-Sever diagram deliberately establishes a stemmatic tangle, with extensions running every which way, in order to suggest that kinship by its very nature tends to be a network,

... that genealogy is being placed before us as a tapestry of relationships, as a complex structure oriented in multiple directions and not as a unitone line of descent... My hypothesis is that graphics, which are better able to exploit the two-dimensionality of the page, enable this particular form of discourse from the first glance, unlike a purely textual listing of genealogies, which certainly can employ linguistic features to link backwards or forwards and to that extend is capable of catering for genealogical cross-connections, but is ultimately bound by the continuity of script and creates an impression of linearity from the very character of text. (JBP translation, hover for German original)

One already hears an ominous creaking in this structure of ideas, built as it is on evidence that simply does not support it. Rather than building on the august traditions of German text-critical scholarship, on the detailed analysis of the full range of manuscripts, such an interpretation employs the semiotics approach of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Co. which was popular in the late 20th century, spinning creative meaning and significance around supposed "signs", while paying too little attention to verifiable data about what one might describe as the ecology of culture - the structures of the human mind, the evolution of artefacts and the phenomenal experience of human societies.

Kellner is undoubtedly right in her observation that Saint-Sever often lacks diagrammatic coherency, but her analysis is based solely on a single, rather non-representative manuscript in Paris and a series of creative blunders when an artist outran his own talents in a single scriptorium in Gascony, leaving her vulnerable to a whole herd of counter-evidence from nearly 20 other manuscripts.

Older recensions of the Great Stemma are generally more coherent and rational in the way that they map family relationships to a consistent code using connections, alignments and orientiations.

Developing her point, Kellner correctly intuits that the genealogical diagram belongs in a tradition where the expansive roll was the more natural medium than the cramped codex page, but strays into even more unsupported territory with a suggestion that medieval historians felt a 2D visualization to be inherently freer than text in its choices of content and arrangement:

The notion of genealogy as a network of relationships could be conveyed graphically using relatively simple shapes such as lines, strips and circles on codex pages - or doubtless ideally in scroll format - because arrangements of the genealogical elements in planar space - and this is the key objective - were able to be selected and combined with greater freedom. (JBP translation, hover for German original)

Here I both agree and disagree. Planar space is a far more comfortable medium to organize one's genealogical data and snippets of evidence than linear text. Sketching and diagamming often help us to organize our ideas and evidence better. Medieval diagrams do indeed breathe a certain air of nerdish delight at being able to amass the evidence to show some new view of it.

But diagrammatics are rarely a zone of freedom. Keller perhaps extrapolates from the freedom of art in comparison with the literary discipline prevailing over poetry and prose. But the overwhelming trend throughout the history of graphic charts and displays has been to bind them as tightly as possible to the habits of human spatial perception: without such discipline, diagrams simply fail to communicate.

Diagrammers who ignore "programming" principles are not breathing the air of freedom or expressing a view about the complexity of kinship relations and the intricacy of existence. When they discard a coherent system that has been handed down to them, they end up writing bad code. The Saint-Sever diagram is an experiment, probably by Stephanus himself, that went wrong.

Kellner, Beate. Ursprung und Kontinuität: Studien zum genealogischen Wissen im Mittelalter. W. Fink, 2004. Discusses the Great Stemma pp 50-53.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’ombre des ancêtres. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

Zaluska, Yolanta. ‘Les Feuillets Liminaires’. In El Beato de Saint-Sever, Ms. Lat. 8878 de La Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, edited by Xavier Barral i Altet. Madrid [Spain]: Edílan, 1984.

Timelines Go 3D

It's always interesting to see where fifth-century educational techniques are getting us to, 1,600 years later. A couple of modern items from a single issue of the journal Instructional Science, arguing the agelessness of the timeline technique, caught my eye as I was doing some literature research for the philosophical/psychological section of my book.

Sadly, as one might expect, neither article mentions the origins of this venerable technique in the Great Stemma, its fresh exploitation in the Compendium of Petrus Pictaviensis and its great spread in the nineteenth century.

Prangsma et al. found that kids find it easier to learn history when they have both a timeline and a text, and younger children cope better if there are little pictures on the timeline as well.

Foreman found primary and secondary children learn best with a static series of images, but university undergraduates could also remember the correct order of events with the help of a "fly-through" in a virtual-experience game on a computer screen. For some reason, Foreman does not list this article on his academic publications tally at the University of Trier in Germany but does list a couple of more recent items dealing with virtual reality timelines in 3D.
 

Foreman, Nigel, Stephen Boyd-Davis, Magnus Moar, Liliya Korallo, and Emma Chappell. ‘Can Virtual Environments Enhance the Learning of Historical Chronology?’ Instructional Science 36, no. 2 (2008): 155–173.

Prangsma, Maaike E., Carla AM Van Boxtel, and Gellof Kanselaar. ‘Developing a “Big Picture”: Effects of Collaborative Construction of Multimodal Representations in History’. Instructional Science 36, no. 2 (2008): 117–136.

Biblia Pauperum

The Biblia Pauperum is a kind of medieval Reader's Digest version of the Bible which interprets the Old and New Testament as if the mass of biblical texts had been purposefully written as a book of allusions, where the events of Jewish history foreshadow events in the life of Christ. This exegesis, known as typology, goes back to Origen and beyond.

Each of these connections is demonstrated by a collage of images that comprises two Old Testament events (the types), one New Testament event (their antitype) and head-and-shoulder portraits of four patriarchs or prophets. Bruno Reudenbach of the University of Hamburg says the original Biblia Pauperum manuscripts comprised 34 groups in this format. In the beginning they were laid out two to a page, so that four were visible on a spread.

The usual first collation, for example, would link an image of the Annunciation to the temptation of Eve by the serpent and Gideon finding the fleece soaked by dew, along with David, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah. This can be seen in a British Library manuscript (King's 5 f. 1), in Tamara Manning's Internet Biblia Pauperum woodcut (reproduced with the Wikipedia article), or with a slight variation in clm 19414 in Munich.

There is another fine digitized example online at the Heidelberg manuscripts site. This German-language manuscript has extended descriptions of each group. Its first extant collation, for example, shows Joseph being cast into the well, Jonah being swallowed by the whale, Jesus being laid in the tomb and David, Solomon, Jacob and Isaiah (compare this to the English version on Manning's website, go to *g*).

Reudenbach's work at the University of Hamburg is a project of the Centre for Manuscript Cultures. The presentation by Reudenbach and Hanna Wimmer (PDF) says more than 80 such manuscripts still exist.

Finding Bernhard Pez

Bound into Heinrich Brauer's papers on the Compendium of Peter of Poitiers (the subject of my preceding blog post) is a library research report dated 1951 May 9 compiling reference-book data on this 12th-century work. It was drawn up by the Staatsbibliothek (then the Öffentliche Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek in the Soviet-controlled sector of Berlin).

It is evidence of the industrious help that could once be obtained from research library staff, back in the days before the budgets of such institutions were cut. Brauer was living and working in Celle, half a day's train ride from Berlin, but was able to save himself the trip to Berlin by simply writing and asking for an "Auskunft". We are immeasurably better off nowadays with the instant access available via the internet.

The reply from Berlin is of no great scholarly value and is defective in not containing any mention of the principal survey of Peter's work then in print, that published by Moore in 1930. The librarian also promises to inquire at other German libraries, but as there is no letter on file with any such results, this probably led nowhere. However one of its references, to Bernhard Pez, caught my eye.

The compilation duly mentions the editio princeps by Zwingli the younger published in 1592 in Basle and quotes from a series of reference works:

• Georgi: Allgemeines europäisches Bücherlexikon
• Jocher: Allgeneines Gelehrten-Lexikon
• Nomenclator literarius theologiae catholicae
• Wetzer und Welte: Kirchenlexikon
• The Catholic Encyclopedia
• Histoire littéraire de la France, vol 16

The last of these can be consulted on Google Books and the librarian quotes its mention of an edition by Pez based on the manuscript from "Metsen" in the diocese of Passau, Bavaria. This is a misprint or authorial error for the Benedictine house Kloster Metten.

Bernhard Pez was the librarian of the Benedictine abbey of Melk in Austria and volume 1 (published in 1721) of his Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus notes that he found a copy of the Compendium in the monastic library during a visit to Metten. The Thesaurus has been digitized by the MDZ (click on the link and go to page 59 of the scan). A researcher has usefully added the handwritten information that the Compendium is at folio 101 of the codex, and Pez states:

Petri Pictaviensis Compendium historie veteris ac novi Testamenti, quod incipit: considerans historiae sacrae prolixitatem etc.

One presumes this manuscript is now in the state library in Munich.

Study in 1951 of a Peter Roll

Heinrich Brauer, a German art historian, undertook a transcription in 1951 of a roll version of Peter of Poitiers' Compendium. As far as I know this typewritten text (the first modern edition since that by Ulrich Zwingli?)* has never been published. The only known copy is deposited at the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. I interloaned it last week for a look.

Brauer seems to have included both rolls, Blankenburg 305 and Blank.305a, in an exhibition he organized at Celle Palace, where he was art curator and the transcription and correspondence were apparently part of his work as a public official. The letters may be of some wider interest and I am therefore providing an English translation. Both were addressed to Erhart Kästner, director of the HAB.

The first of the letters from the Kunstgutlager in Schloss Celle was dated 1951 June 18:
 
Dear Dr Kästner,
I ought to have reported back much sooner on my work on the Stemma of Christ manuscript rolls kindly loaned to me by the Wolfenbüttel Library. I would ask you to let me keep the two rolls for a little longer. I completed the transcription of the text some time ago and I am sending it to you to give you some idea, although it is obviously in need of improvement.
We are preparing to hold an exhibition on "Applied Arts and Manuscripts of the 15th century (Kunsthandwerk und Handschriften des 15. Jahrhunderts)". I had been thinking of asking you to permit the Wolfenbüttel rolls to be exhibited in this show, but did not know if a suitable placement would emerge for them. 
I now realize that both can be very well displayed as part of the overall context, which is why I have waited until today to ask for an extension of the loan. We will also be obtaining a pictorial tapestry from Wienhausen for the exhibition, and the rest will come from the stock of the Kunstgutlager, enabling us to assemble quite an impressive show. The inauguration is to take place on July 8 and I hope I will see you then here in Celle.
With best wishes, also to Dr Butzmann,
Greetings and thanks,
H. Brauer

The second is dated 1951 October 8:

Dear Dr Kästner,
When the manuscripts loaned from you were returned I was delighted to hear that my transcription of Blanc 305 ended up with Dr Butzmann. I have now been able to improve the text in many places with the help of the printed edition of 1592.
Blanc 305 and the unnumbered roll contain the same text, which begins with the word "Considerans ..." (....) and is attributed to Petrus Pictaviensis (chancellor of the University of Paris from 1192, died 1205). His works are printed in Migne PL 221 but there is no mention of the Considerans text. 
The Royal Library in Brussels has nine copies of this text, with a person called Gallus listed as the author. The British Museum catalogue names the author as Petrus Pictaviensis or Petrus Comestor without deciding the point. A manuscript (number 128) of the same text from the middle of the 13th century can be found at Admont and is entitled "Ottonis de S. Blasio Chronika prima", cf. Verzeichnis IV,1, editor Buberl (Leipzig, 1911), with two images of it. Buberl: "probably done in Salzburg".
Its script along with the characteristic initials is very similar to Blanc 305. I would therefore propose that Wolfenbüttel parchment roll Blanc 305 of the Stemma of Christ is also a product of Salzburg from the middle of the 13th century.
The paper roll without any Wolfenbüttel number is signed at the end by the scribe: "Pater Gallus presbyter ordinis Sancti Benedicti, Conventualis monasterii Sancti Galli." When I inquired to (the monastery of) Maria Laach, Rev. Dr. Volk replied:

The P. Gallus whose name is in the photo was Father Gallus Kemly of St Gall, born 1417 Nov 18, died soon after 1477. From 1465 he copied P. Comestor, Historia scholastica (i.e. Ms 605 of the St. Gall Library) as well as Excerpta ex historia scholastica et vitis patrum (i.e. Ms 607 of the St. Gall Library); cf. R. Henggeler, Professbuch der fürstl. Benediktinerabtei der Heiligen Gallus und Otmar zu St. Gallen, Zug, 1929, pages 234-236.

I understand the Considerans text circulated widely: it was translated into French, English and German (perhaps into Spanish and Czech too) and was often extended and revised. It is conceived for the education of students and is not just theological in purpose but is at the same time a tabulation of history as well, rather like our Plötz**. It employs Scripture as an historical source and its author sees no dilemma between faith and scholarship.
The text always accompanies the genealogical tables and is often employed as an introduction to the Historia scholastica of Petrus Comestor Trecensis although it contrasts strangely with that wholly theological work. A manuscript in Munich from Metten combines the Considerans text with the Biblia pauperum. Its scribe recognizes its historiographic character since he includes with it the Chronicle of Popes and Emperors of Martinus Polonus of Troppau. This may have been done in the 14th century. The Stemma of Christ precedes the Diadocheen of the Popes, with the emperors laid out in parallel, leading back via Caesar, Alexander, Darius, Cyrus, Nebuchadnezzar by a circuitous route to the archaic parents. It provides an historical vision of monumental simplicity.
We find it in the printed Universal Chronicles such as the Rudimentum of Lübeck of 1475, the Fasciculum temporum of Cologne by Rolevink of 1474 and the Chronicle of Schedel of 1493, which all derive from the Considerans text and even give it as their source. The Lübeck one names the author as Petrus Trecensis. Rolevink names Isidore, not for the entirety, but, as the context shows, as author of a short work dealing with the period of the Old Testament, which is namely our text.
Yours,
Dr. H. Brauer

Schloss Celle, a former royal palace in Celle, north of Hanover, seems to have hosted a large store of displaced art. Brauer's entry in the Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek indicates a date of birth of 1900 (data 1, data 2), while the German Archaeology Society indicates he died in 1983 (notice). He was an associate of Rudolf Wittkower (subject of a previous post), but I do not know anything else about him.

* [In fact the third: see my listing. Note added 2015]
** Der Große Ploetz, a standard reference book for German secondary schools by Karl Ploetz (1819-1881) which was in print from 1855 to 2008.

Who Was Carl Frick?

In the early stages of this study, I often used a compilation of Latin chronicles by Carl Frick, a German scholar. The standard bibliographic data as well as Franz Kössler's Personenlexikon indicate he was born in Schwerin in 1848. He published a series of books and articles, beginning with his 1872 doctoral thesis, De ephoris spartanis at the University of Goettingen, and then became interested in chronography.

Two of his articles listed in Grafton and de Jonge's 1993 Scaliger bibliography deal with the 8th-century chronicle in "barbarous" Latin, the Excerpta Latina Barbari.*

This was doubtless part of his preparations to publish volume 1 of Chronica Minora in 1892. Volume 2 never appeared and he seems to vanish from the record at the end of the 19th century. His involvement in publications for the König Wilhelm Gymnasium in Höxter, Germany makes it plain he was a secondary school teacher there, but I have not been able to find any account of his further academic career, or a date of death.

* Joseph Justus Scaliger und die Excerpta Latina Barbari, published in Rheinisches Museum, is online.

Late Add (2013-11-27): His Prussian personnel record with the last entry in 1893 is in the database Personaldaten von Lehrern und Lehrerinnen Preußens. There is a date, 1.4.10 on the front of this, which may indicate a 1910 death, but this is not certain. He is also mentioned in a history of the Höxter school library.

Marathon

I glimpsed an ARD television news report four weeks ago on the Berlin round of the Visualizing Marathon but cannot find the news clip any more. There is some coverage of the event on Vizworld.