All the Isidorian Bibles Online

A very special set of medieval bibles is complete at last, thanks to the recent digitization of the Foigny Bible in the French National Library, some of the best news of last year for codicologists.

These rare Vulgate bibles, one from Burgos in Spain and three from the Meuse Valley on the Franco-Belgian border, offer the sole surviving evidence of a shadowy struggle over belief in seventh-century Visigothic Spain.

Four years ago, I celebrated the arrival online of the Floreffe Bible (now in the British Library). Now the fourth and last is there to appreciate, the Foigny Bible, thanks to the Polonsky Foundation funding a project to virtually unite treasures of London and Paris that belong together. The illuminations in the Foigny Bible (here the Nativity) are wonderful:

Here are links to the whole set of four:

• Parc Abbey Bible , London, British Library Add.Ms. 14788
• Floreffe Abbey Bible, London, British Library Add.Ms. 17737
• Burgos Romanesque Bible, Burgos, Biblioteca Pública deL Estado MS 173
• Foigny Abbey Bible, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 15177

The Foigny Bible starts off with a prologue set which is found in the others too, a fairly sure sign that all these 11th and 12th century bibles derive from a much earlier model:

• an arbor consanguinatis;
• the Great Stemma, with a 6,000-word epitome of exegesis by Isidore in the blank spaces;
• the Prologus Theodulfi
• a second Prologus (Stegmüller, Rep. Biblicum, n° 284).
• a second Prologus (Stegmüller, Rep. Biblicum, n° 285).
• a capitula

And what were the Visigothic Christians arguing about? Whether St. Joachim, the supposed grandfather of Jesus existed! 

A late-antique "family tree" of Jesus, the Great Stemma (above), had been spreading through Iberia in the seventh century and it showed a legendary sheep-farmer, Joachim, in pride of place. Isidore of Seville thought this claim was nonsense. We don't know if Isidore himself altered the chart, but someone very smart and aligned with Isidore's thought took pen and rewired the "tree", cutting out poor Jo like a gastric bypass.

As for the 6,000 words of Isidorian Exegesis written in the gaps, you'll  have to make up your own mind who wrote it. Maybe that was Isidore too? Since it had never been identified or published previously, I edited the text some years ago.

Floreffe Bible now Online

The only way that we know that a graphic artist – or studio – in the fifth century CE drew a magnificent chart of biblical history and genealogy is from the later copying of that work onto parchment manuscripts during the medieval period. Fortunately, 24 such copies are still in existence.

Since I began studying the Great Stemma in 2009, there have been constant advances by museums, archives and libraries in bringing digital versions of this chart online. The British Library has now added the Bible of Floreffe Abbey to its collection of over 1,000 online manuscript digitizations. This must have happened rather quietly, as I have not seen it mentioned in the BL blog yet.

For the study of the Great Stemma, this is a rather important development. Until now, just seven of the manuscripts had been issued online, but nowhere on the internet could one study a peculiar evolution of the Great Stemma into what I call the "School Stemma," a revision of the graphic to bring it in line with orthodox, 12th-century doctrine about the ancestry of Christ.

The Floreffe Bible contains a beautifully coloured version of the School Stemma, with exquisite script that faithfully reproduces all the defects and nonsenses of whatever text it was modelled on. Check it out and page through its glories.

We do not yet know where the revision took place. I call it the School Stemma because I guess that it was "cleaned up" so it could be safely taught to impressionable young monks. Charts containing this version also come from Parc (now Belgium), Foigny in France and Burgos in Spain. The chart may also have been copied at Arnstein, Germany as well.

As a result, I have revised my table of Great Stemma manuscripts, doing a good deal of re-arranging to make the layout more user friendly. It will be clear after consulting the table that not only are eight of the 24 manuscripts now available online and readable in their entirety, but that these neatly cover six of the seven recensions (alpha, beta, delta, gamma, epsilon and School). Additionally, the sigma recension is online at the BNF, though the resolution there is too low for a visitor to read the script.

As a result, the Great Stemma can now be seen on the internet in its complete range of forms. By the greatest of good luck, the four manuscripts which offer the best evidence about the fifth-century ur-form (Plutei, Roda, San Millàn and one of the School group) are now all accessible. One could hardly wish for more.

My table tabulates all these online witnesses. The amber-gold squares in the table mark all the high-resolution images where you can click through to each archive's website. The paler yellow squares mark low-resolution images and snippets.

Happy clicking.

School Stemma

A couple of days ago I published a post about an adaptation of the Great Stemma that appears in the bibles of Parc, Floreffe, Foigny and Burgos. For a long time, my working name for that diagram has been the Lesser Stemma, built on the sense that it employs fewer diagrammatic features than the original 5th-century document.

It has been rightly pointed out that this is misleading, since in sheer bulk it is one of the biggest biblical stemmata ever made.

Counted in pages -- 18 -- it is bigger than the other versions. (Epsilon: 16 pages. Alpha and Beta: 14.) Counted in words, it is vast, inflated with supplementary material from Isidore's Quaestiones including the elaborate allegorical account of the Wandering in the Desert divided into 27 stages or mansio. Even counted in roundels -- Burgos has 529 of them -- it is on a par with the other versions which have an average of 540.

So I began to think about a better name for it.

One idea was to name it from its aggressive intention, which was first identified nearly three decades ago by Yolanta Zaluska. The new stemma employs the techniques of the old one, but to oppose the Great Stemma's purpose. The original explains Jesus's dual ancestries as a mother-plus-father descent. The revision explains the doubling as an effect of Jewish society's levirate marriage custom. One might therefore compare the new stemma to a ship captured by an enemy. Taken as a prize, it sails with a new crew and turns its guns against its former owners. However there is no simple, obvious word to describe this repurposing phenomenon.

One might equally well consider the uses of the new work. The original Stemma was a rather flashy infographic designed to demonstrate at a glance certain ideas about chronology and descent. The new stemma was more like a turgid textbook, loaded up with etymologies, explanations and lists (like that of the prophets). Like a textbook, it has been checked for its doctrinal orthodoxy and has clearly been approved for use by the impressionable student monk. It is not there for easy reading, but to supply information that can be learned by rote and tested.

From this more educational purpose, it might be best to describe the new version as a "school stemma". That is the working name I will employ for it in the next stage of research.

I have fixed the tabulation of "School Stemma" pages on my catalog page, and have discovered that two pages of the Foigny Bible version are online, though in low resolution: the page with Sem and Joktan, 4r, and the Incarnation page, 11r. These two links to the BNF images database work intermittently, but not always.

Zaluska, Yolanta. ‘Entre texte et image: les stemmata bibliques au Sud et au Nord des Pyrénées’. Bulletin de la Societé nationale des antiquaires de France (1986): 142–152.

Window into the Past

Until now I have paid very little attention to a derivative version of the Great Stemma which is found in four bible manuscripts of the 12th and 13th centuries (described here). There are however some indications that this version may provide a window into the past, since it was probably adapted from the Great Stemma at quite an early date.

At first sight, the version that is found in the bibles of Parc, Floreffe, Foigny and Burgos seems very different from the 5th-century original: it is a frontal attack on the Great Stemma author's belief that the Virgin Mary had a father, Joachim, and a grandfather, Joseph, who were direct male-line descendants of King David. It asserts the early medieval orthodoxy, based on the idea that Mary's spouse Joseph had two separate male-line ancestries.

This assault on the Great Stemma imitates its structure while condemning its author's theology and Umfeld as erroneous. Rather like silver-tongued Edmund Burke using radical argumentation to attack radicalism itself, the revisor has appropriated the diagrammatic technique of his opponent to defend the mainstream represented by the thought of Isidore of Seville. He wished to:

• erase the Joachimite explanation of the Gospel contradiction (it is replaced by part of Rufinus's translation of the Letter to Aristides); 
• add the etymologies of Jerome of Stridon (as adopted by Isidore) to explain the biblical names, implicitly rejecting the counter-etymologies in the Liber Genealogus; 
• adjust the content wherever possible to harmonize it with the Vulgate and suppress influences from the Vetus Latina biblical text. As an example, the order of the Minor Prophets is changed to that prescribed by Jerome.

Screeds of Isidore's Mysticorum expositiones sacramentorum also known as the Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum have been overlaid on the diagram, presenting Old Testament events as allegories of the New. "The Old Testament is exclusively read in the Quaestiones according to the allegorical interpretation," explains Claudio Leonardi in his essay, Old Testament Interpretation ... from the Seventh to the Tenth Century. "Allegory is used by him to read every Old Testament passage and to discover in it the proclamation of Christ's own message.

Despite this revised document's hostility to the Great Stemma, it does offer a few indications of how the Great Stemma might have looked before our oldest extant manuscripts came into existence. Comparing its page divisions with the "purest" recension of the Great Stemma, that in the manuscript of Florence, we are struck by some uncanny similarities.

The section describing the Horrite and Edomite rulers from Genesis 36: 20-43 appears precisely as in the Epsilon recension under the heading, Hi sunt filii Esau qui in Monte Seir nati sunt. The Horrites from Lotan to Anah appear on one page, while Dishon, Ezer and Dishan are delayed to the next page. The Judaean kings from Rehoboam to Ahaz are neatly fitted into a single page with some zigzags, avoiding the strange muddle that afflicts the 13th page of the Florentine manuscript where this succession ends in a kind of graphic traffic jam.

In the Judges section there are two interesting amplifications. For the foreign-rule period we read Alienigene annis XL, and for the peace period in the Foigny Bible we read, Pacem habuerunt et sine lege fuerunt.

Later we read, David filius Iesse, magnus rex et propheta, regnavit super Israel annis XL, in Ebron sex, in Ierusalem XXXIIII, and Salomon pacificus filius David rex Israel regnavit annis XL. As in the Liber Genealogus, durations are given for most of the reigns after the kingdom is divided as a result of the Judaean secession. Of interest is the inclusion in the Foigny, but not in the Burgos text, of certain chronological data from after the Exile which is notably lacking in the other recensions of the diagram. Whether it comes from Isidore or from the early diagram is uncertain:

• Regnum persarum et medorum a temporibus Cyri vel Darii usque ad extremum Darium qui ab Alexandro Magno victus occubuit fuerunt anni centum octoginta novem. 
• Rex macedonum a temporum et Alexandri Magni usque ad Cleopatram regnam Egypti. Rex Antiochus ex Syrie qui Iudeos varia calamitate oppressit plurimos que ex ipsis ob defensionem legis mortes? fecit.
• Iulius Cesar regnavit annum unum ex quo in regno romanorum imperatores et?? ceperunt. 
• Octavianus augustus regnavit annis LX iste obtinuit monarchiam. 
• Thyberius Augustus regnavit annis XXIII huius Tyberii imperatoris anno XVIII Christus passus est.

One also suspects a couple of the glosses in Foigny might pre-date Isidore, although there is nothing that verbally resembles them in the Liber Genealogus. The division into the Northern and Southern Kingdoms is explained with the words, Ab hinc regnum Israel in Roboam atque in Iheroboam divisum bipertitum est, effectum ex quo tribus Effraim principatum obtinuit, and the expiry of Samaria is explained: Osee iste est qui quondam fuit rex super X tribus Israel in Samaria qui temporum Salmanasar regis ab Assiriis captus ...

All of these passages need to be studied more closely, since they could potentially preserve lost text of the original Great Stemma. I am grateful to Dr Andrea Worm for sharing with me information and insights about the Foigny Bible which have led to these observations.

Translation Finished

Another marker passed: the translation of the Great Stemma into English is complete. Bar a few unintelligible passages where I may have messed up the transcription, the publication is now fully bilingual. Seumas Macdonald of Sydney took charge of putting 30 of the most difficult passages into English. With the text getting so long, I have now split the collation into four sections:

1. The Genealogy of Christ
2. Other Genealogies
3. The Timeline
4. The Interpolations

The latter section emerged as a separate entity during the recent research into where the many glosses had come from. It turns out that most are almost verbatim quotes from works of Isidore of Seville or from Jerome's Vulgate text. The only text where a clear attribution is not possible is the apocalyptic prediction about the defeat of evil and the coming of the Seventh Age which has been inserted into the Plutei manuscript. For the time being I am leaving out the mappamundi text, since its separate history remains unclear.

Peeling the Layers

I am picking another layer of skin off the Great Stemma at last. Yolanta Zaluska, in her study of the document, was the first to point out that large chunks of this Late Antique work have been copied from works by Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 636). She described the longest recension, the Beta, as being fortement interpolé, en grande partie, semble-t-il, à l'aide des Etymologies d'Isidore. She was sketchy about the details, but thanks to full-text databases I have been able to track some of these borrowings down.
(1 It turns out that the Table of Nations material, which Zaluska says goes back to Josephus, is quoted practically verbatim from the 9th book of the Etymologiae. These glosses on the biblical ancestors of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ethnic groups are uniform in both the Alpha and Beta recensions. (2) The so-called Recapitulatio comes from another book by Isidore, the Chronica Majora, a fact which Zaluska also noticed: On peut se référer par exemple à la Chronique d'Isidore, en part. n° 24, 26, 28, 30, 31a, 32a, 32; la phrase Belus pater Nini qui fecit Babiloniam n'est pas d'Isidore. The latter phrase could perhaps be a paraphrase of Isidore, who does insist that Ninus was the son of Belus. (3) Zaluska does not mention it, but a substantial passage dealing with Babylon's temples of precious stones and gold and the Tower of Babel has also been lifted from the Chronica and inserted into the chronology material of the Beta manuscript: perhaps she missed this. (4) Zaluska also considered the mappamundi in the Roda manuscript (Ro) and the Beta recension came from Isidore: Ro est très intéressant sur ce point car il interrompt le déploiement des tables à cet endroit et recopie autour de la mappemonde les textes des Étymologies d'Isidore qui s'y réfèrent: Orbis de rotunditate...; Asia ex nomine...; Post Asiam Europam...; Libia dicta... (Etym, lib. XIV, cap. II, III, IV et V), nous livrant ainsi la source principale de cette composition. She is perhaps right about this, but we will have to recheck the evidence. I will be looking for more borrowings as I go.
Naturally one should not exclude the possibility that it was Isidore who copied the material from the antecedent Great Stemma. However that seems implausible, since Isidore's material is not only much more comprehensive, but also seems to be drawn from a text-format source, perhaps the works of Jerome.
This analysis is important not only in explaining how the Great Stemma grew by accretion, but also in stripping off the accretions to get a picture of how it looked in the beginning. It is like peeling off the brown layers from an onion to get at the edible white interior.

Start of the History Section

The Macro-Typography website starts a new history section today. For several months I have been conducting research on the early history of the stemma, the text diagrams commonly known as trees. The first page deals with a key source in stemma history: the definition of the Latin term stemma by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae.