Sicut Lucas

Something I have just noticed is that the art historian Marcia Growden translated into English in 1976 the fulcrum passage of both the Liber Genealogus and the Great Stemma:

Just as Luke the Evangelist has indicated that his line was traced through Nathan to Mary, so also the Evangelist Matthew showed that his line was traced through Solomon to Joseph. That is, out of the tribe of Judah. That the divine tribe appears to proceed to them and thus to Christ according to the flesh that it might be fulfilled which was written. Behold the lion from the tribe of Judah has conquered for the family tree of the Lord. He is the lion from Solomon and descendant of Nathan.

As far as I know this is the first stab at putting into English this mysterious key passage which explains the purpose of both works, yet leaves as many questions as it answers.

The translation, arguably the first ever into English, appears in the text of her Stanford doctoral thesis on the Gerona Beatus, The Narrative Sequence in the Preface to the Gerona Commentaries of Beatus on the Apocalypse. I am a bit baffled by her phrase "for the family tree of the Lord". My translation (in fact mainly the work of Seumas Macdonald) appears in my online collation of the text, and there is some discussion of it on my Liber Genealogus page:

Whereas the evangelist Luke traces the origin of Mary back to Nathan, the evangelist Mathew traces that of Joseph back to Solomon, demonstrating an ancestry from the tribe of Judah. Thus it is clear that these two are biologically descended from a single tribe, leading down to Christ, so that what was written might be fulfilled, "Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has prevailed" (Rev. 5:5), whereby the lion is Solomon, the root is Nathan.

I have not seen Growden's dissertation, but the passage is quoted by Jessica Sponsler in her own 2009 thesis at the University of North Carolina on the same topic, Defining the Boundaries of Self and Other in the Girona Beatus of 975. Growden appears to have gone on to become an art history professor at the University of Nevada in Reno.

Ludicrous Cardboard Cut-Out

At the start of a justly celebrated 1996 article which theorized on why humans benefit by using diagrams, two British authors, the late Mike Scaife and Yvonne Rogers, quoted a bizarre scolding in Britain’s House of Commons by the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd.

According to The Guardian of 1994 December 7, she rebuked a legislator for using a cardboard diagram to explain overseas aid figures, saying, "I have always believed that all members of this house should be sufficiently articulate to express what they want to say without diagrams."

I was curious as to the circumstances of such a foolish statement and whether it was accurately reported, and located it in Hansard 1803–2005. The person who had held up the diagram was Tony Baldry, the under-secretary for foreign affairs, who was defending the Conservative government's allocation of aid to Africa on December 5.

It was immediately mocked by the late Derek Enright (Labour) as a "ludicrous cardboard cut-out".

Shortly after Dale Campbell-Savours (Labour) raised a point of order:

You will have noted during Question Time an incident at the Dispatch Box when the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs made what can only be described as an idiot of himself by holding up a handwritten sign showing misleading statistics on overseas development. Are you happy with such conduct at the Dispatch Box, Madam Speaker?

Boothroyd's  reply was not quite verbatim the same as the sentence in The Guardian, but the quote is close enough:

I am not happy with conduct whereby any Minister or any Member brings such diagrams or explanations into the Chamber. I believe that all Members of the House and particularly Ministers should be sufficiently articulate to express what they want to say without diagrams.

Politicians take note: Scaife and Rogers' article points out (very articulately) why diagrams (graphical representations) are enormously important and useful for clear thinking.

Scaife, Mike, and Yvonne Rogers. “External Cognition: How Do Graphical Representations Work?” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 45 (1996): 185–213.

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.

Road Trip

Lisa Fagin Davis has begun a blog, the Manuscript Road Trip, exploring US manuscript collections, east to west. It has begun excitingly, and who knows, she may turn up a Petrus Pictaviensis Compendium (my current tabulation) or some other treasure as she proceeds.

Lisa is the author of a new book appearing this year, La Chronique Anonyme Universelle, which explores one of the post-Petrus diagrammatic chronicles, compiled around the year 1410 in a French noble library. I'll have to look at her study, since the Compendium, and before that the Great Stemma, are clear roots of this tradition. I'm also curious about what the publisher calls "an innovative image-annotation platform" that allows this roll to be published digitally along with the book.

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.

Railway Diagrams

Credit to Daniel Stuckey for pointing out an interesting new diagram proposal for the New York subway from Max Roberts, as reported on Fast Coexist. This employs concentric lines, a very nice design idea, and it is a lot more evenly laid out than the Massimo Vignelli design which I discussed on this blog one year ago.



Roberts' website contains a wealth of interesting history and comment on the London Tube diagram. In particular, he points out a variety of continental precursors, and he discounts the supposed connection between the network diagram and electrical circuit diagrams. Go explore!

One of his most interesting pages is devoted to denying what he calls London Underground myths about the Harry Beck diagram. There he points to the following Berlin S-Bahn diagram of 1931:

 

One of my long-put-off projects has been to dig up the tramlines map used in Berlin in the 1890s and described by Mark Twain in The Chicago of Europe as follows:

Any stranger can check the distance off--by means of the most curious map I am acquainted with. It is issued by the city government and can be bought in any shop for a trifle. In it every street is sectioned off like a string of long beads of different colors. Each long bead represents a minute's travel, and when you have covered fifteen of the beads you have got your money's worth. This map of Berlin is a gay-colored maze, and looks like pictures of the circulation of the blood. 

I have not been able to discover any images or paper copies of the map Twain saw, but it certainly does sound as if it too was based on a system of nodes and lines.

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.