Pliny's Natural History

Among the new arrivals online at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana on April 29 is a fine Renaissance copy of Pliny's Natural History, Borgh. 369. This fifteenth-century copy is not one of the ancient manuscripts used to establish the critical editions of Pliny (see a list by Roger Pearse), but it is evidence of the humanist enthusiasm to rediscover the great classical Latin authors.

Here is how the artist fancied Pliny in expository mode:

Also new is Vatican Vat. lat. 3375, a late sixth-century Neapolitan codex excerpting the works of Augustine of Hippo. It is acopy in half-uncial of an anthology that had been composed just a generation earlier by Eugippius of Naples and is an important link to Christian culture at the end of late antiquity.

We also have what looks like a couple of chaps with paunches, receding hippie hairlines, and glass steins in the hand. But I am guessing they are actually sirens. They appear in Barb.lat.409, which is a liturgical office for the feast day of King Louis of France (1214-1270), after he had been made a saint.

A further portolan chart, Borg. Carte. naut. V, is in this batch, but sadly the resolution is so low that it is impossible to read the text. Reader Jens Finke points out that a just-about-readable black-and-white image of this appeared in Heinrich Winter, "The Fra Mauro Portolan chart in the Vatican" (Imago Mundi, 16 (1962), pp. 17-28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1150299.)

Here is the full list:

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.A.32
2. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.C.98
3. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.157
4. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.169
5. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.193
6. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.E.33
7. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.F.27
8. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.3
9. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.54
10. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.52
11. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.K.1
12. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.K.2
13. Barb.lat.409, liturgical office for feast of Louis IX of France, image above
14. Barb.lat.679, a compilation of canon law, with a folio about the Council of Carthage of 390 CE  (summary)
15. Borg.Carte.naut.V, illegibly digitized portolan chart, see above
16. Borgh.22
17. Borgh.43
18. Borgh.53
19. Borgh.91
20. Borgh.93
21. Borgh.99
22. Borgh.104, 14th century codex of Petrus de Ilperinis, Tractatus de praedestinatione
23. Borgh.113
24. Borgh.127
25. Borgh.143.pt.1
26. Borgh.145
27. Borgh.155
28. Borgh.168
29. Borgh.176
30. Borgh.180
31. Borgh.201
32. Borgh.207
33. Borgh.215
34. Borgh.238
35. Borgh.251
36. Borgh.257
37. Borgh.281
38. Borgh.301
39. Borgh.305
40. Borgh.310
41. Borgh.313
42. Borgh.334
43. Borgh.369, Pliny's Natural History
44. Borgh.384
45. Borgh.387, anonymous compilation of rules and figures of geometry (ff. 1-27)
46. Cappon.1
47. Cappon.2
48. Cappon.3
49. Cappon.8
50. Cappon.10
51. Cappon.11
52. Cappon.16
53. Cappon.19
54. Cappon.20
55. Cappon.21
56. Cappon.22
57. Cappon.23
58. Cappon.25
59. Cappon.36
60. Cappon.37
61. Cappon.38
62. Cappon.40
63. Cappon.49
64. Ott.lat.356
65. Reg.lat.1484
66. Vat.ebr.119
67. Vat.ebr.130
68. Vat.ebr.143
69. Vat.estr.or.4, Latin-Chinese dictionary
70. Vat.estr.or.8,
71. Vat.estr.or.40, panorama painting of qinqming festival
72. Vat.estr.or.64.pt.2,waterfall drawing
73. Vat.estr.or.83,
74. Vat.estr.or.85, Sinhalese
75. Vat.estr.or.86,
76. Vat.estr.or.97,
77. Vat.estr.or.99,
78. Vat.estr.or.101,
79. Vat.estr.or.114,
80. Vat.estr.or.117,"Cahier siamois", only the container!
81. Vat.estr.or.118, ditto
82. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.1.2,
83. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.6,
84. Vat.estr.or.156, folder of ink sketches, whereby Twitter user @MareNostrum2 points out that Digita Vaticana has (inadvertently) digitized a page from a 1909 Japanese newspaper with it: was this used as wrapping material to send the item to Rome?
85. Vat.estr.or.159, 19th century (?) Japanese drawings
86. Vat.gr.180
87. Vat.lat.3375, excerpts from Augustine (see above)
88. Vat.turc.50

Here is a detail, sadly darkened, from the qingming festival scroll above. It might reveal more with some photoshopping:

That makes 88 in all. Please add any contributions by way of the comments pane below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 9.]

Military technology at the Vatican

The seven manuscripts digitized and released April 1 by Digita Vaticana include an important 11th-century codex explaining and illustrating contemporary Byzantine military technology, Vat. gr. 1164 (link below). Here is an armoured vehicle that let attackers approach a wall, presumably to work to undermine it, defying boiling oil and stones from above.

Twitter follower Mare Nostrum offers an image from it showing the framework used to swing a battering ram to break a heavy stone wall. It would have been slow, thump-thump work, as he comments:

むかしの兵器はどんな動きをしたのだろうなぁと思いつつ。おやすみなさいませ。11世紀 BAV Vat.gr.1164 f.97v-98r pic.twitter.com/bQrNb8auAT
— mare nostrum (@marenostrum2) April 1, 2015

• Vat.gr.747, one of the six known illustrated Byzantine Octateuchs, full of strange and extraordinary pictures. It also contains the Letter of Aristeas, the earliest text to mention the Library of Alexandria. Here is a scene in which a mortar and pestle are used as a painter is at work, folio 114r
  
• Vat.gr.752.pt.2, magificent golden illuminations.
• Vat.gr.1156, Lectionary 120, designated by siglum ℓ 120 in the Gregory-Aland numbering (Wikipedia).
• Vat.gr.1164 (above), Byzantine military tactics and technology, see Pinakes.
• Vat.gr.1513, Gennadius Scholarius, Pinakes, quite short
• Vat.gr.2195, Leontius of Byzantium.
• Vat.lat.39, 13th-century New Testament from Verona, apparently with the newly modern chapter divisions devised by the English scholar Stephen Langton

If you know more about these volumes, let us know through the comments box below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 8.]

Prudentius and the odd word

Sometimes we get asked what use old European manuscripts are. The simple answer is that we need them to recover the literature and the histories of antiquity, the medieval period and the Renaissance, and we need to compare lots of manuscripts if we are to establish the most faithful editions of those texts.

Sometimes, though, when you are busy with a topic, a particular manuscript suddenly expands in importance and seems like missive from the past directed at you personally.

I am writing a book about the invention during antiquity of node-link diagrams. The book mentions the probable Latin term for such a diagram, stemma. This is not a book about linguistics, but you need to make sure there is no unseen linguistic evidence lurking there.

As often happens in research, both journalistic and scholarly, you can spend a whole day combing the forest for a catch and come home empty-handed.

In this case, there is no trace of anyone living during antiquity proper who calls one of these diagrams a stemma. My book will simply skip the whole matter, because it will not be an academic thesis and will only concentrate on the fruitful and interesting things I found. What I did discover about the word, I lodged as a bunch of notes in a new page on my website. I don't need such notes, but I routinely archive such things because they might help someone else some day.

What that page says is that stemma meant:

• a garland of leaves, straw, wool or other materials (in Greece)
• a niche in a Roman palazzo containing paintings of noble ancestors (in the Republic)
• a snob's genealogy (under the Empire)
• ancient glories (in literary vocabulary in Late Antiquity)
• a twig-like node-link diagram as drawn by lawyers (in 620 CE)

In a poem, Hymnus Epiphaniae, Prudentius, who is among the most obscure of Latin poets, uses a formula, apostolorum stemmata, to refer to 12 rocks set up next to the River Jordan.

The Hymnus Epiphaniae can be conveniently read in full at the Perseus Digital Library if you read Latin.

The Australian coast of Victoria has got a famed set of rocks, the Twelve Apostles, off the shore of the Port Campbell National Park, and South Africa has a Twelve Apostles Range, but Prudentius (348-about 405) seems to have beaten both to the name. Perhaps pilgrims did once get such a feature pointed out to them in the Jordan. [Late addition: It seems Prudentius is referring to the biblical Book of Joshua, the writer of which says 12 stones were taken from the Joshua in the river and placed nearby and are "still" there.]

Why does the poet call the 12 rocks a stemma of the apostles? Could he have possibly meant:

• an ancient glory of apostles?
• a node-link diagram of apostles?

[Late correction: A recent translator and commentator on the poetry, Gerard O'Daly, thinks the proper meaning is simply "pedigree".]

As it happens, a bunch of manuscript releases by Digita Vaticana this week (here's my news item) includes a manuscript of Prudentius's poetry. Cilian O'Hogan says it is actually an important one:

Vat Reg 321, an important MS of Prudentius, now digitised http://t.co/DRL5Cv5fwZ (via @JBPiggin) pic.twitter.com/WEKbVtoFHh
— Cillian O'Hogan (@CillianOHogan) March 24, 2015

What makes codex Reg. lat. 321 so interesting is that its 10th-century editor has packed it with glosses and annotations. What I liked was that the editor seemed to have been baffled by the odd word "stemmata" too. He glossed it with the meaning "ordines" written above it here.

I'm still not clear about this. A similar word does show up in one description of the Great Stemma, Genealogia ab Adam usque ad Christum per ordines linearum. But I doubt if Prudentius had diagrams in mind. More likely the poet simply imagined those rocks in a orderly row or circle to represent the rock-like perpetual authority of the church. Stemma (ancestry) was a way to say in the language of Latin poets that the rocks were a precursor to the apostles [as Daly argues].

All very arcane, and from the manuscript, I knew that an unknown editor of 1,000 years ago had been baffled and had also done his best to unpuzzle Prudentius's odd word.

Ladder to Heaven at the BAV

Among the more remarkable items to be admire in the 13 codices placed online March 23 by Digita Vaticana is Ross.251 containing the Ladder of Divine Ascent by the 7th-century Greek-speaking monk John Climacus.

I am told this is Lenten reading among Greek-speaking Christians. There are some vivid illuminations in this Greek manuscript giving you a good idea of how medieval readers imagined the long steady climb through 30 steps of the ladder, assisted by angels if you were doing it right:

This crop of releases takes the tally of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) digitizations so far to 1,865. After this Lenten issue, I wonder if they are planning any Easter presents for us?

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.56, possibly from the collection of Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi (c.1270–1343).
2. Ott.lat.3119, engravings of Roman personalities of the 18th century.
3. Reg.lat.321: a fine old 10th-century manuscript of the poems of the Latin author Prudentius (348-405).
4. Ross.251, with the ladder to heaven (above). Pinakes tells you which folios to consult for the Scala Paradisi of Iohannes Climacus.
5. Ross.555, a beautiful Hebrew codex with four fine Italian miniatures. From Evelyn Cohen I read that this is Jacob ben Asher's legal treatise, the Arba'ah Turim, and that the images depict a synagogue scene, animals being slaughtered according to Jewish ritual, a wedding and a courtroom scene. Here is the synagogue, where men and women seem to be mixed:
   
6. Urb.gr.2, the Urbino Gospels in Greek with gold-leaf illuminations. Here is a most unusual Nativity composition and washing of the newborn, both at folio 20v:
   
   
7. Urb.gr.162
8. Urb.lat.346, Commentary on the Aeneid, 15th-century copy, attributed to Tiberius Claudius Donatus, but believed in fact to be the work of Suetonius.
9. Urb.lat.508, poetry from Duke Federico's collection. This item figured in the Rome Reborn exhibition at the US Library of Congress and St Louis University, where the catalogue identified it as the Camaldulensian Disputations by Cristoforo Landino and Anthony Grafton noted of the image below: "This portrait on the inside cover shows Federigo, duke of Urbino, standing behind a parapet holding a book, gazing intently at his companion, who is probably to be identified with Cristoforo Landino."
   
   Federico always appeared thus: check another image at his old home.
10. Vat.gr.344
11. Vat.gr.699, the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, one of the believers in a flat earth in the face of majority educated opinion in even his own day. This is a 9th-century illuminated copy with copious imagery.
12. Vat.gr.746.pt.1
13. Vat.lat.14933, Carlo Labruzzi vedute, possibly a volume inadvertently missed last week.

 If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 7.]

The Romance of Ruins

The 13 digitization jobs uploaded March 16 at Digita Vaticana include four volumes of vedute or landscape drawings by the 18th-century artist Carlo Labruzzi (1765-1818), mainly of ruins along the Via Appia outside Rome.

There is also a volume of views by the English artist and antiquary Richard Colt Hoare of buildings and towns on the road south to Naples.

The romance of ruins drew a steady stream in the 18th century of English visitors eager to spend plenty of money to take such pictures home with them and hang them on parlour walls. They are not great art, but certainly better composed than most of the smartphone snaps we tourists take today. It must have been a fascinating time to explore Italy's ruins, before urbanization spread over so much of the area.

The BAV digitization programme also now extends to a second Coptic codex and offers its first codex in the Bulgarian language. Here is my unofficial list:

1. Vat.ar.695
2. Vat.copt.59, one of a series of significant 9th-10th-century Coptic Bohairic manuscripts from Wadi el-Natrun
3. Vat.gr.901, miscellany; (Pinakes)
4. Vat.gr.1418, contains Dionysius Halicarnassensis's Roman Antiquities: (Pinakes)
5. Vat.gr.1422, (Pinakes)
6. Vat.gr.2118, (Pinakes)
7. Vat.lat.14929, 18th-century drawings of the Via Appia by Labruzzi, bound in London and formerly owned by Thomas Ashby, vol 1
8. Vat.lat.14930, ditto, vol 2
9. Vat.lat.14931, ditto, vol 3
10. Vat.lat.14932, ditto, vol 4
11. Vat.lat.14934, views 1790-91 by the English artist Richard Colt Hoare of ruins and towns on the road between Rome and Naples, with his annotations (in English of course); the BAV online catalogue lists this as a Labruzzi, but that seems to be a mistake.
12. Vat.sir.599
13. Vat.slav.27, Bulgarian codex

The new total: 1,852 items. As always, enter corrections or advice about the significance of these items in the comment box below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 6.]

Treasures of Urbino

Here's a list of the latest rush of newly digitized manuscripts at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. This release of 52 items was uploaded late on March 12 and brings the total number of Vatican Library works available on the internet to 1,839.

The oldest treasures this time are from the chapter library (Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.) which has only been part of the BAV since 1940.

Nearly half the items this week come from the great Renaissance library created by Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, who died in 1482 after a rambunctious life as a brutal mercenary general (he never fought for free) and refined man of culture (he had his own team of scribes at Urbino and a library considered the greatest in Italy after the pope's).

A couple of centuries after his death, that envied library was integrated into the Papal Library at the Vatican in 1657. We are now all privileged to be able to read Federico's exquisite books online. Here is a fine illuminated capital "S" from one of them, Urb. lat. 348, in a passage explaining the word stemmata.

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.A.13, Augustine of Hippo, sermons
2. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.B.63, Bolognese missal, 14th century, with lustrous miniatures that are now attributed to a painter known as Pseudo-Niccolò. See his Risen Christ and an image described as defence of the book. See listing Ebner.
   
   
3. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.C.103
4. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.173, Augustine of Hippo?
5. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.200, Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio de Adventu Christi and Contra Judaeos
6. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.E.15
7. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.F.16, liturgical (Salerno Pontificale) with wonderful initials, including the sun and moon:
   
8. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.39
9. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.42
10. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.43, possibly the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis, 12th century
11. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.26, Chinese?
12. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.I.17, autograph? Gregory XVI (1837)
13. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.I.18.
14. Borgh.14, liturgical
15. Borgh.95, 14th century, legal, Arnoldus de Augusta
16. Borgh.109, Thomas Aquinas, Summa
17. Borgh.110, Thomas Aquinas, Summa
18. Borgh.120, Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones
19. Borgh.154, Tancredus, 1185-1236, Opera, 13th-14th century
20. Borgh.194, Tuscan translation of the poem De rerum natura by Lucretius (97-55 BC); check out the 2014 book by Ada Palmer on its influence in Renaissance Italy.
21. Borgh.195, 18th-century European politics
22. Borgh.230, Iohannes de Lignano, 1320-1383 Lectura super decretales
23. Borgh.326
24. Borgh.343
25. Borgh.367, Il Governatore Politico e Christiano by Mezentius Carbonari
26. Borgh.377, Scripturales
27. Pal.gr.192, Hippocratic text
28. Reg.lat.525, hagiography
29. Reg.lat.554, universal chronicle, description of Holy Land, copy of BN lat. 4892?
30. Urb.ebr.3
31. Urb.ebr.13
32. Urb.ebr.32
33. Urb.ebr.35
34. Urb.ebr.36
35. Urb.ebr.41
36. Urb.ebr.42
37. Urb.ebr.43
38. Urb.ebr.44
39. Urb.ebr.45
40. Urb.ebr.48
41. Urb.ebr.49
42. Urb.ebr.50
43. Urb.ebr.52
44. Urb.ebr.53
45. Urb.ebr.54
46. Urb.ebr.55
47. Urb.ebr.56
48. Urb.lat.19, Psalter
49. Urb.lat.260, Columella's Roman-era treatise on agriculture (frontispiece below).
    
    This is one of about 40 copies deriving from Poggio Bracciolini's rediscovery of the work in Fulda, Germany, while he was in the north for the Council of Constance exactly 600 years ago. Poggio probably stole it, as it ended up in Milan in the early fifteenth century, where is it now Biblioteca Ambrosiana L.85 su; summary. At the end of the BAV copy is a fragment of Augustine, Retractationes.
50. Urb.lat.348, Renaissance: poems, commentary on Horace: initial at the top of this post.
51. Urb.lat.349, Homer in Latin
52. Vat.lat.3836, Sermons of Augustine of Hippo, Leo the Great and others.

As always, if you see an unmarked gem here, or can explain to us the significance of one of these items to scholarship, or can point out an error, please add a comment in the box below. Most of these items have been discussed in scholarly literature that is not mentioned in the BAV's own very sketchy online bibliographies, but often with variant shelfmarks. Scholarly publications use a great variety of abbreviations to denote such manuscripts. For Arch.Cap.S.Pietro. above, try alternate searches using forms such as "cod. ..." or "cod. cap. ..." or "arch. cap. s. petri ..." or ACP.

If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 5.]

Older than the Oldest

After my post Is this the World's Oldest Bound Book? appeared, Cillian O'Hogan, who is the curator of classical and Byzantine studies at the British Library, kindly tweeted some comments making out a case that papyrus books older than the Codex Vaticanus do exist, and met the objection from Roger Pearse, who is an eminent citizen-science blogger, that only a bundle with more than one quire to it counts as a "book". He then wrote:

@roger_pearse @JBPiggin P66 is certainly multi-quire, but it may be only contemporary with CS and CV. Also P4+64+67 if all one codex (200)
— Cillian O'Hogan (@CillianOHogan) February 24, 2015

All those Ps refer to papyrus finds, along with numbers given to them by Christian scholars seeking the earliest texts of the New Testament. Some of these things are not online at all, but acceptable images of the 75 leaves of P66 are at EarlyBible.com. This is the one that is probably contemporary with the Codex Vaticanus.

As for the item Cillian O'Hogan dates to 200 CE, the biggest bit (P67) is in the fourth-century Barcelona Papyrus, which I discussed some years ago on my website. Sadly, that papyrus has never been viewable online. However there is an image of P4 at EarlyBible.com and P64, the three small fragments making up MS Gr. 17 at the Magdalen College Library, Oxford, are accessible online as the following tweet points out:

@CillianOHogan @roger_pearse @JBPiggin Late to the conversation, sorry! But P64 is online at http://t.co/JImx5z7c6r
— Magdalen Lib & Arch (@MagdLibAndArch) March 9, 2015

In addition, I pointed out myself that the 102 battered pages at the BAV in Rome of Hanna Papyrus 1, also known as P75, are supposed to date from approximately the same period. It has not been digitized yet, but there are a couple of leaves visible at VatLib. For low-res images, see P75 at CSNTM.

Finally, it was pointed out that there is a very old leaf of a secular work, Homer's Odyssey, dated to the period 200-400 CE. Click on the link below to see it:

@roger_pearse @JBPiggin Also, parchment, but 3rd-4th century, this fine Odyssey from @thejohnrylands http://t.co/BprqU1lkwC
— Cillian O'Hogan (@CillianOHogan) February 24, 2015

In addition, Cillian O'Hogan pointed to a very fine Medieval Fragments blog post by Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel), a medieval book historian at Leiden University, in December 2013 with a different tack on the topic, What is the Oldest Book in the World?

So where do we stand? A case could be made that one or all of these four items are books older than the Codex Vaticanus, but would they, in their incomplete and damaged state, be accepted by the average teenager as "books" in the common garden sense of that word? They have no covers and have been torn apart.

The Codex Vaticanus may not be in its original binding, and indeed it has had leaves inserted in it to replace its lost pages, but it exists as a bound codex that people (see the first post) have continued to open and shut (and handle without using tweezers) right up to the present day. I would compare this to the difference between a shipwreck and a ship. Every wreck was a ship, but is a ship no longer, unless it can be refloated and patched up and made to sail again. No one would dream of messing with the papyrii or "repairing" the indignities done to them by illegal diggers and dealers in Egypt, so I think that we would have to consider them, for now at least, to be the remains of former books.