Vetus Latina at St Gallen

A highlight of this week's visit to the Stiftsbibliothek in St Gallen in Switzerland was to see in a glass case one of the leaves from the library's early fifth-century manuscript of the Vulgate translation of the Gospels. This manuscript, Cod. Sang. 1395, comprises parchment fragments recovered from St Gallen bindings. The digitized pages can be viewed online.

As the guide noted, the existence of the manuscript, estimated to have been penned in 410 or 420 CE in Verona, Italy when Jerome of Stridon was still alive in Bethlehem, is one of the great sensations of book history. That date is so old that it precedes by about a decade the compilation of the Great Stemma (which of course employs Vetus Latina, not Vulgate terms in its genealogical and chronicle material). Vetus Latina materials were also shown as part of the special exhibition, Im Anfang War das Wort.

I was very interested to leaf through the recently published Die Vetus Latina-Fragmente aus dem Kloster St. Gallen, a book of facsimile pages and commentary edited by Rudolf Gamper.

A striking feature of the permanent exhibition was an image of the so-called Verbrüderungsbuch, Cod. Fab. 1, which is digitized and available online. This contains lists of deceased monks of St Gallen and up to 60 other monasteries for whom the community prayed. As the online catalog notes, "starting in 830 the names of monks who joined the monastic community were listed in the empty canonical table frames."

Presumably the decorative arches were originally drawn on the 31 pages following a model devised by Eusebius of Caesarea. The neatness of the entries seems to decline with time. This use appears to be opportunistic, but elsewhere arches were an intentional meta-informational element. I have not yet got an overview of what range of significances such frames could bring to their content.

Gamper, Rudolf, Ph. Lenz, A Nievergelt, P Erhart, and E Schulz-Fluegel. Die Vetus Latina-Fragmente aus dem Kloster St. Gallen. Dietikon-Zürich: Graf, 2012.

Graph of Time

Some time ago, my attention was drawn to the graph of planetary displacement from the elliptic with respect to time that was devised for medieval schools. Until 50 years ago this was thought to be unique to a Latin manuscript in Munich, BSB Clm 14436, 61r, but it seems to in fact exist in numerous manuscripts.

Bruce Eastwood discusses it in Plinian astronomical diagrams in the early Middle Ages (1987) and returned to it in more detail in Planetary Diagrams - Descriptions, Models, Theories (2000, co-authored with Gerd Grasshoff, online) and Planetary diagrams for Roman astronomy in medieval Europe (2004, also with Grasshoff, online). If I am reading these articles correctly, the diagram is what the authors classify as "Plinian latitudes - rectangular" in their 2004 catalogue:
1 Avranches BM, 226, f.88r
8 Bern BB, 347, f.24v
10 Cambridge, St John's CL, lat. I.15, p.287
11 Cambridge, St John's CL, lat. I.15, p.353
12 Cambridge, Trinity CL, R.15.32, f.3v
13 Durham CathLibr, Hunter 100, f.66r
15 Erfurt StB, Ampl. 4°.8, f.1r
20 Genève FB, 111, f.41r
21 Glasgow UL, T.4.2, f.117r
22 Leiden UB, BPL 168, f.56r
24 London BL, Add. 11943, f.49v
27 London BL, Cott.Tib. E.IV, f.141r
32 London BL, Roy. 13.A.XI, f.143v (image in Eastwood/Grasshoff)
38 Milano BN, E.5 sup., f.1r
39 Milano BN, E.5 sup., f.53r
54 München SB, clm 6364, f.24v
57 Oxford BoL, Canon. Class. lat 279, f.34r
59 Oxford BoL, Lyell 154, f.26v
70 Paris BNF, lat. 5239, f.38v
71 Paris BNF, lat. 5239, f.39r
72 Paris BNF, lat. 6367, f.1v
79 St Gallen StiB, 250, p.2
81 Strasbourg BU, 326, f.122r
89 Vaticano BAV, Palat. lat. 1577, f.82v
94 Vaticano BAV, Regin. lat. 1573, f.53r
105 Wroclaw UB, IV.O.11, f.59r
108 Zürich ZB, Car.C. 122, f.42r

But perhaps I have not understood this correctly, since the specimen which is numbered Plin45 (clm 14436, 61v, link at the top of this blog entry) is absent from the above list, as is the specimen numbered as Plin83 in the 2004 article (Strasbourg, same codex as above, but folio 123r, reproduced in the 2000 article), along with six other references Eastwood gave in 1987:
Madrid 9605, f.12v
Zurich Car. C 176, f. 193v
Bern 265, f. 59r
London Cott.Vit. A XII, f. 9r
Baltimore Walters W, 73, f. 5v (mentioned in the note on page 11 of Eastwood's 2004 catalogue)
Oxford, St Johns, 17, f. 38r
London BL Eg. 3088, f. 83v
There is one corrigenda page in the Google Books edition, but these are not mentioned there. I do not know if further errata have been published. Perhaps I have overlooked some kind of filter that Eastwood and Grasshoff may have mentioned in their book, and I would be grateful if any reader could explain this to me.

Hans-Christoph Liess, supervised by Grasshoff and Eastwood during his doctoral studies at the University of Berne, later assembled a database of Eastwood's images, and published a description. The title page of this 2001 database project, code-named Compago, is still online, as is the diagram index page, and, perhaps most important, an interactive mind-map of the manuscripts listed above. A handbook was also published. But the back end with the actual images and the required software module, code-named Alcatraz, seems to have either been taken down or to have been put behind a wall. Google Chrome is able to open the interface, but a user name and password are required to proceed further. Liess completed his doctoral dissertation in 2002 (large file) and this is online. Both Liess and Grasshoff have since moved from Berne to Berlin.

What is curious is that all three authors are sure that the diagram is a simplification of a circular diagram of the Plinian latitudes which is found in 12 manuscripts. Pliny had presented the data as numerical data only. Then a Carolingian editor devised the circular diagram just before or following a conference on computus in 809 EC and "solved the problem of presenting to students the spatial meaning of the Plinian text" (Eastwood, 2000). Eastwood and Grasshoff continue:

Within a few decades after its creation, the circular latitude diagram was replaced by another, a rectangular diagram, which reduced the amount of theoretical content added to the relevant Plinian text and also offered a more easily produced and more quickly read image.

Edward Tufte reproduces the Munich rectangular diagram on page 28 of Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but curiously enough misses its significance for the history of simplification. He only cites an outdated 1936 article by Funkhouser on it. In fact, the diagram turns out to be exemplary of Tufte's principles of subtracting and simplifying to make graphics clearer and more communicative, and his term "reduction of data ink" to describe economy in an infographic:

A few graphics use every drop of their ink to convey measured quantities.

New Issue by e-Codices

E-Codices in Switzerland this week put Cod. Sang. 133 online, and I have accordingly added hyperlinks to my edition of the Liber Genealogus of 427 on www.piggin.net so that readers can read both side by side on a computer screen. This is the codex I blogged about earlier this year. Lowe's description of the script is also provided on the e-Codices website.
As always, it is interesting to "thumb" through the other material in a volume like this. This little codex is a jewel, and I quote the manuscript summary:

This manuscript, still in its original Carolingian binding, consists of three parts and was written in Merovingian script by numerous hands, apparently in the late 8th and/or early 9th century, probably at the Abbey of St. Gall. It contains reliable versions of many onomastic texts, including copies of the work Liber de situ et nominibus locorum Hebraicorum by Jerome, the Cosmographia of Aethicus Ister, the chronicles of Isidore of Seville, Chronica maiora and Historia regum Gothorum, Vandalorum Sueborum, as well as an excellent version of the Itinerarium Antonini Placentini, an account of the pilgrimage of a citizen of Piacenza in about 560/570 to the Holy Land.

The latest rush of e-codices material, placed online Tuesday, appears to comprise 65 more volumes, and includes wonderfully illuminated bibles and some magnificent compilations. A compendium of histories, Cod. Sang. 547, penned in about 1200, caught my eye. Its summary says:

This rather hefty tome (weighing nearly 17 kilograms) compiled around 1200 contains copies in Latin of major works of world-, church- and ethnic history; examples include the History of the World by Orosius, the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius of Caesarea, the Summa of Biblical history (Historica Scholastica) of the early Parisian scholastic Peter Comestor († ca. 1179), the history of the first crusade by Robert of Reims, the history of the Langobards by Paulus Diaconus, the History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede, and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne.

One cannot praise the work of e-codices (and the generosity of its benefactors) too highly. Christoph Flüeler, who leads the project, deserves high honour for this. I was shocked to hear that Switzerland not only has no system of honours to reward civic excellence, but also makes it an offence for its citizens to accept honours from other nations. I hope that Professor Flüeler can be assured in some other way of the high esteem in which we hold his work.

E-Codices

Some very good news from Professor Christoph Flüeler of the E-Codices manuscript digitization project in Switzerland. I asked him if Cod. Sang. 133, a little codex that is hugely important to the history of books, was likely to be released on the E-Codices website, and he replied that his team would speed this one up and make sure it is issued on the web in the next few months. This is magnificent. I am a big fan of E-Codices, which is a key source in Antiquity studies.

Cod. Sang. 133 in the Abbey Library at St. Gall in Switzerland is an important source in understanding the antique book trade, since it contains a set of more or less intact stichometric lists. These were computations of the length of books, calibrated in στιχοι or stichoi, that were used to set both the cost of transcription (the scribe's wages) and the book price (what the bookseller charged).

Cod. Sang. 133 contain fourth-century measurements of the books of the Bible and the 28 works of Cyprian. We know from the writer Galen (quoted here by Diels) that a Greek stichos or unit was 16 syllables, and this source confirms a Roman stichos, or verse, was similarly 16 Latin syllables.

Once described by Bernhard Bischoff as the "oldest document of the Christian book trade" and used by scholars such as Bruce Metzger to estimate the bulk of early bibles, this record gives us an insight into the economics of book publishing. The content is of course dry, for example:

This translates as:
The Four Gospels:
Matthew, 2700 lines
John, 1800 lines
Mark, 1700 lines
Luke, 3300 lines
All the lines make 10,000 lines.

But there are some interesting observations. The author lets fly for example at exploitative Roman booksellers for their slack and cheating ways with his beloved Cyprian:
Because the index of verses in Rome is not clearly given, and because in other places too, as a result of greed, they do not preserve it in full, I have gone through the books one by one, counting sixteen syllables per line, and have appended to each book the number of Virgilian hexameters it contains (Rouse translation).

The St. Gall manuscript, written during the late 8th or early 9th century, probably at St. Gall itself, and another manuscript, Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Vitt. Em. 1325 (handwritten catalog entry in Italian here, formerly Cheltenham or Phillipps 12266), written at Nonantola in the 10th or early 11th century, are the key practical records we have about the stichometric method.

These North African lists, the so-called indicula, were discovered (it seems) by the great Theodor Mommsen, who wrote them up in 1886. Mommsen expanded his fame with this codex in the late 19th century, publishing the Liber Genealogus in his MGH series. It also contains a curious work, the Inventiones Nominum, which mentions a good many unusual biblical names that never made it into canonical scripture.

The St. Gall codex was revisited in 2000 by eminent US professor Richard Rouse, who argued that the 11 items discovered by Mommsen in the collection (see below) were not a random group of texts, but formed an intact North African reference book or compendium. It had travelled through the centuries together and had been put together by Donatist scholars, according to Rouse and his co-writer Charles McNelis.

The St Gall codex is of quite a small format, which explains why the Liber Genealogus, not a very long work, fills 49 of its folios: there is not that much writing on each side. The script is very clear and the parchment clean, which suggests it was probably not very heavily used in its day. This text of the Liber is the earliest recension (the direct description of the Great Stemma) and therefore the most important.

Here is Mommsen's Latin description of the compendium, interspersed with text from Scherrer's 1875 St. Gall printed catalog, with one or two additions by me (the English bits, obviously):

Cod. Sang. 133

Pgm. 8° s. VIII u. IX; 657 (656) pages.

Scherrer: Drei oder vier Handschriften in einem Band. [Preceded by Eusebius/Jerome on Holy Land place-names. Followed by Isidore Chronicon pp 523-590 and 'Incipit cuius supra Goti de Magog Jafet filio orti' pp 590-597. Pages 598-601 blank.]

Mommsen: saec . IX formae octonariae praeter alia quae recenset catalogus editus p. 48 [Scherrer] a glutinatore demum cum his compacta medio loco p. 299-597 continet commentaries qui sequuntur:

1. p. 299 – 396 librum genealogum infra editum. [Scherrer: S. 299-396: 'Inc. liber genera(tio)num vel nominum patrum vel filiorum vet. test. vel novi a s. Hieronimo prbo conpraehensum etc. Incipit genilocus sci Hieronimi prb.' Am Ende: 'Explicit liber genealogus.' (Unbekannt und nicht von Hieronymus; reicht, laut p. 396, bis zum Jahr der Welt 5879 oder bis zum Consulat 'hieri et ardabii.')]

2. p. 397 – 420 incipiunt prophetiae ex omnibus libris collecte. quae prophetiae membra habent .... cecidisse in hanc voluntate perseverantes caeci a dei fide lapsi sunt ignorantes. expl . coll . prophet . veteris novique testamenti. [Scherrer: S. 397-426: 'Incip. prophetiae ex omnibus libris collecte.' (Katechese).]

3. p. 420′– 421 incipiunt virtutes Haeliae quae eius merito a domino factae sunt. prima virtus. clausit caelum . . . sublatus est in caelo.

4. p. 421 – 426 incipiunt etiam Helisei virtutes. prima virtus. de melote divisa est .... post mortem suam revixit. expl.

5. p. 427 – 454′ inc̅p̅t̅ inventi̅o̅n̅ nomi̅n̅ , duo sunt Adam , unus est protoplaustus .... et alius est Domires vir sponsor Teclae: inter ambas autem sunt an̅n̅ ferme DCCLXX. [Scherrer: S. 427-492: 'Incipt. invention. nominum.' (Aufzählung von Personen- und Völkernamen des A. T.).]

6. 454′– 484′ sequitur liber generationis cum praescriptione hac: haec sunt diutissime . . . . . . anni sunt v̅dccccxviii (vide infra p . 89), sed c . 240 – 331 ad brevem epitomam redactis et ad eius finem inserta computatione quae statim referetur adsunt rursus nostrae editionis c. 333 – 361, abest pars extrema c . 361 – 398: subscriptum expl .

7. p. 484 – 485 item interpretationes filiorum Iacob de Hebreo in Latino. amen vere. Ruben dei spiritus cet.

8. p. 485 – 488 item interpretationes Hebreas in Latin translatas . Hebrea lingua triplex .

9. p. 488 – 492 incipit indiculum veteris testamenti , item novi et Caecili Cipriani, quos indices versum numerum per singulos libros enuntiantes ex gemello libro Cheltenhamensi edidi in Hermae volumine 21 p . 142 seq. librarius iam is qui archetypum scripsit indices eos ad librum generationis non pertinentes neque ei continuatos ad titulorum eius laterculum adiunxit (v. p. 89 not.).

10. p. 492 item interpretationes Hebreas in Latinum . Maria domina cet. [Scherrer: S. 492-522: 'Interpretationes hebreas in latinum etc. Nomina locorum et interpr. nominum de hebreo in latinum. (Excerpte aus Hieron. Liber de interpr. nom. hebr. Opp. ed. Mart. II, von p. 3 bis circa p. 83.)

11. p. 493 – 522 nomina locorum et interpretatio nominum de Hebreo in Latinum. Hermon regio Hebreorum cet. similesque interpretationes aliae.

There is a very old Wikipedia article on stichometry, which I have just fixed a bit. Not just old in the sense of posted in 2005, but old because it was copied from a 100-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica: it stated that one of the codices is at Cheltenham in Sir Thomas Phillipps's collection. In fact that collection was broken up and sold a century ago. This codex was purchased by the Italian state, and I have altered the Wikipedia article accordingly.