EDITING AND EDITORS:

A RETROSPECT
Papers given at the twenty-first annual
Conference on Editorial Problems
University of Toronto
1-2 November 1985
EDITED BY
RICHARD LANDON
AMS PRESS, INC.
New York
/ Icb
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conference on Editorial Problems (21st : 1985 :
University of Toronto)
Editing and editors.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. EditingCongresses. 2. EditorsCongresses.
I. Landon, Richard. II. Title.
PN162.C62 1985 808'.02 87-45816
ISBN 0-404-63671-3
All AMS books are printed on acid-free paper that meets the
guidelines for performance and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on
Library Resources.
Copyright 1988 AMS PRESS, INC.
All rights reserved.
AMS PRESS
56 east 13th Street
New York, N.Y. 10003, U.S.A.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Notes on Contributors
G. E. BENTLEY JR., Professor of English at the University
of Toronto, is one of the founders of the Conference on
Editorial Problems.
LEONARD E. BOYLE O.P., Prefect of the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, taught for many years in the
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of
Toronto. His Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical
Introduction was published in 1984.
BRUCE M. METZGER, Emeritus Professor of the Princeton
Theological Seminary, has published extensively on the text
of the New Testament. His The Canon of the New Testament,
its Origin, Development, and Significance appeared from Ox-
ford University Press in 1987.
'Epistulae Venerunt Parum Dukes' :
The Place of Codicology
in the Editing of Medieval Latin Texts
Leonard E. Boyle O.P.
The title of this twenty-first annual Conference on Editorial
Problems is "Editing and Editors: A Retrospect", and I am
glad that such a broad title has been chosen. Too often the
general heading for a conference such as this is "Textual
Criticism" or "Problems of Textual Criticism" and the like.
Maas's well-known manual, to which everyone turns, is enti-
tled Textual Criticism; so is Martin West's recent attempt to
replace Maas.
1
There has been a spate of conferences of a
similar bent over the past twenty or thirty years, notably, for
legal circles, the two-volume La critica del testo which em-
bodies the proceedings of an international congress of the
1/ P. Maas, Textkritik (Leipzig, 1937
1
, 1950
2
, 1957
3
, I960
4
), English trans-
lation by B. Flower, Textual Criticism (Oxford, 1958), from 3rd edition;
M. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek
and Latin Texts (Stuttgart, 1973).
30 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
Societa italiana di Storia del Diritto, and ranges far and wide
in the field.
2
To me, the problem is that a title such as "Textual Criti-
cism" presumes that one already has a text to criticize. Martin
West in his recent volume even goes so far as to counsel his
readers that when one is preparing an edition one should first
provide oneself with an interleaved copy of an existing edition
of the text in question, and then proceed from library to
library, noting on the interleaves the chief variants that one
comes across in the various manuscripts in those libraries.
This sort of approach is, I am sure, quite all right in its
way, but it has its dangers. Taking the trouble to consult
other manuscripts of a text, if it be discerned in a medieval
scribe or scribe-scholar, is dubbed "contamination." When
practised by a modern scribe-scholar (and the modern editor
is no more than that) it is termed "scholarship." Yet contami-
nation, if one accepts the term at its pejorative worst, is not
confined to the medieval scene. If contamination means, as it
seems to mean, an unwarrented influence of one textual trad-
ition on another, then the most pernicious form of all is the
printed text. A printed text has a stark, imperative quality,
and it is hard not to be influenced if not overawed by it.
Generations of Roger Bacon scholars, for example, have
fought over the date of his birth and the stages of his early
career, the chief cause of contention being an autobiographical
statement in one of his works that survives in one manuscript.
Yet, in fact, it is not the autobiographical statement that proves
to be the problem, but the manner in which the editor,
Rashdall, punctuated it when editing it for the first time.
2/ La critica del testo, 2 vols. (Florence, 1971); see also L. E. Boyle,
Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction (Toronto,
1984), nn. 1954-2042, for various works on the approaches to textual
criticism.
BOYLE / 31
Because it was in print, it was sacrosanct, and no thought was
given to the fact that the punctuation was the editor's not
Bacon's, and was plainly at variance with the syntax of the
passage.
3
I think it therefore not unfair to say that the greatest threat
to an editor's independence and to an unprejudiced presenta-
tion of a textual tradition is the presence of an existing edition.
Yet this threat is rarely seen for what it is, the modern equi-
valent of what is decried as "contamination" in a medieval
setting. Hence a recent and distinguished editor unblushingly
states that his base text for his edition "was constructed from
five manuscripts which were collated in their entirety against
the most recent edition." Another editor, an apostleand a
very good oneof computerized editions, dismisses as
inadequate a previous edition of a work he is editing, yet, in
a twinkle, informs us that the first stage of his own edition
will consist of recording the earlier edition on magnetic tape,
there to eliminate its errors. In both these cases, not to speak
of West's interleaving, the danger is that one will wind up
with an edition of an edition. It hardly can be called a new
edition based on the manuscript tradition, unless one were to
allow that existing editions are, to all intents and purposes,
3/ Fratris Rogerii Bacon Compendium Studii Theologiae, ed. H. Rashdall
(British Society for Franciscan Studies III, Aberdeen, 1911) 34: "Etiam
logicalia fuerunt tarde recepta et lecta [Oxonie]. Nam Beatus Edmundus
Cantuariensis archiepiscopus primus legit Oxonie librum elenchorum tem-
poribus meis: et vidi magistrum Hugonem, qui primo legit librum post-
eriorum, et [librum] eius conspexi." As the text is printed, Bacon seems to
say, and has been accepted by scholars as saying, that Edmund of Abingdon
taught at Oxford "in my day," whereas "temporibus meis" really goes with
the following "et...et" clause: "...Nam Beatus Edmundus Cantuariensis
archiepiscopus primus legit Oxonie librum elenchorum; temporibus meis
et vidi magistrum Hugonem, qui primo legit librum posteriorum, et librum
eius conspexi."
32 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
part of the manuscript tradition, and should be treated as
such.
4
The real trouble with all of this is that it puts the cart
before the horse. It presumes that one already has to hand a
ready-made text, all nicely parcelled, to work on, whereas
the primary problem with which most editors are faced, no
matter what editions exist, is the fact that they have to deal
with a text that is in no way set, but varies from manuscript
to manuscript.
I am not suggesting that Textual Criticism is a bad or
unnecessary thing. Far from it. It has a definite and essential
role to play in the editing of texts, but it is a role that cannot
be played out until there is first a criticism of the tradition of
the text.
Unfortunately, criticism of the tradition of texts (I do not
say of the textual tradition) does not have as large an appeal
as textual criticism. Everyone wishes to be an editor and not
simply a reporter; and to be in a position to note sagely in
one's apparatus, "conieci", or, rapturously, "scripsi." These
heady moments when one makes one's own contribution to
the textual tradition are indeed to be savoured, but they may
only be indulged in if one is quite sure just what the tradition
of text is to which one is adding.
An assessment of the tradition is a prerequisite of textual
criticism and it is time-consuming, demanding and, or so it
seems to some, degrading. At times it seems to be miles away
from the text because it has to concentrate not on the text but
on the textual setting, on the codices, that is, that carry the
text rather than on the text itself. Yet this is the only logical
4/ The two cases above, and other similar cases cited below, are not inven-
tions on my part. But I do not give the name of the author or the source
in these cases, lest in any way I should seem to impugn the professional
integrity of authors or editors who have a different approach to the very
personal one expressed here.
BOYLE / 33
procedure to follow if one is ever to arrive at a text upon
which to bring textual criticism to bear. For it is an inescapable
fact that the only way in which we know of the text we are
editingeven when it has had many editionsis through the
codices that carry it. And unless these carriers are examined
as thoroughly as is possible, one is never going to be in a
position to subject that text as it is carried by the codices to
anything approaching a critical analysis.
Most manuals of textual criticism make little or no distinc-
tion between the criticism of the tradition or transmission of
texts and textual criticism. And because textual criticism is
generally the goal of these manuals, the tradition is only
examined from the point-of-view of the text, with little or
nothing on the codices as such. Yet without these codices
there would not be a text to edit. Editing, in a word, has to
start from the codices, has to respect the codices at all points,
and may only depart from them when the editor is sure that
they have been squeezed dry of every possible piece of evi-
dence, whether textual or physical.
In a piece I read recently, which I shall not identify further,
the one extant codex of a text is described as a "slovenly
copy", which in itself is a rather ungracious remark, since
without this unique slovenly copy the editor would hardly
have been in a position to edit the text and makeor unmake
his name. But, the author goes on, "grammatical errors are
common in the text", and he promises to correct them. Need-
less to say, this is a hazardous procedure at best. Our modern
scribe-scholars are all too eager to re-write and all too often
fall into traps as horrendous as those for which, again all too
temerariously, they would crucify medieval scribe-scholars,
or even simple scribes. Above all else, some modern scribe-
scholars (and, I repeat, an editor is no more or less than that)
are inclined, perhaps under the influence of Housman, to pay
little attention to two fundamental principles that should guide
criticism, and especially emendation: no emendation should
34 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
be attempted until what is in the MS (or MSS) has been viewed
from every possible angle; and second, if an emendation has
to be made, then the less tampering the better with the text
as it is transmitted in the codices.
In the present case, there is a nice example of a failure to
observe these principles, when the phrase "ut lectoris meus
videat prae oculis ea quae dicimus", which clearly is awry, is
emended to "ut lector meus videat prae oculis ea quae
dicimus." Since a confusion of "n" and "u" is rampant in
medieval MSS (and in most of our own handwriting), then
the first thing to do before rushing to emendations such as
"lector meus" for "lectoris meus" is to see whether "lectoris
mens" makes any sensewhich of course it does ("ut lectoris
mens videat prae oculis ea quae dicimus", i.e. in the diagram
immediately following), where "lector meus", apart from tam-
pering with what is in front of one, betrays an acute insensitiv-
ity to what is going on in the codex.
Since it is what is in the codex that matters, the first step,
then, on the way to an edition is the tiresome one of catalogu-
ing or describing each of the codices as carefully as possible.
It is not sufficient to note the size, the date, the script of each
codex. The whole physical setting of the text has to be ac-
counted for, from the binding to the flyleaves and pastedowns.
From this point of view it is surprising to find that there are
editors who do not bother with the physical make-up of a
codex. Too often they rely on descriptions in catalogues and
are happy to work from microfilms or photographs of the
part of the codex in which their text occurs and without ever
seeing the whole codex itself. This is quite perilous. One
edition which came my way recently, but luckily just before
publication, made much in its introduction of the fact that
the medieval author, whose work survives in just one codex,
had taken a firm stand against the mainstream of allegorical
interpretation of the scriptures. The editor based himself on
a gloss of the author, which, when examined in the codex
BOYLE / 35
itself, proved to say exactly the opposite of what the editor
had concluded. What had happened was that, because of the
tight binding of the codex, the microfilm on which our editor
had relied had been able to record only the outer part of the
glossa part which, oddly, made perfect sense on its own
and, although it held an unusual opinion, was never questioned
by the editor.
But even where the codices are examined at first hand,
some scholars are content to give what are no more than
perfunctory descriptions. Obvious things such as foliation
and gatherings are noted, but few scholars, if any, bother to
note second or third folio incipits, the size of the frame of
writing, the presence of such details as "fillers" and other
scribal conceits. In the light of the work of Gilbert Ouy, Leon
Gilissen and others on, for example, the make-up of quires
and the layout of pages, old-style descriptions have had their
day.
5
Even if one does not take to the term "Codicology ",
the plain fact remains that a rigorous physical description of
each codexcall it Codicology or Handschriftenkunde or
L'Archeologie du livre or what you willa rigorous physical
description is now de rigeur. I may add, however, that "phys-
ical setting" is probably a more useful term than "physical
description." "Physical description" of itself only covers the
make-up as such of a codex, whereas "physical setting"
includes both the codex and the text as it is found from page
to page, with marginal or interlinear notes, rubrics, decora-
tions, gibbets, fillers, doodles and the like. Just how a text is
physically transmitted may be just as important for the overall
tradition of the text as the quality of the text itself in a given
codex.
5/ See for example L. Gilissen, Prolegomenes a la codicologie (Ghent, 1977);
G. Ouy, "Pour une archivistique des manuscrits medievaux," Bulletin des
bibliotheques de France 3 (1958) 897-923; and nn. 1570-1594, 1616-1632,
etc. in Boyle, Medieval Latin Palaeography.
36 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
This codicological setting is, as I see it, the first of three
stages through which one has to pass when preparing an edi-
tion, the second of which is the establishing of the text from
the extant codices, the third the editing of that established text.
The second stage, establishing the tradition of the text
precisely as it is found in the codices, has, I need hardly
remark, received far more attention from scholars than the
first stage, that of the physical settingand this in spite of
the fact that it is something less than prudent to attempt to
establish a text from its codices if one does not know the
codices intimately.
There are two main theories as to how one extracts or
establishes a text from a plethora of codices. The first, which
for obvious reasons one may call "Optimist", argues, in the
wake of Bedier (1928), that the sensible thing to do, when
confronted with a number of codices of a work, is to single
out for editing that codex which is on the whole the most
satisfactory, and then to follow this "codex optimus" through
thick and thin, except, of course, where it is obviously defec-
tive or unintelligible. The second, to which one may assign
the label "Recensionist", argues, claiming Karl Lachmann as
its progenitor, that one should make a complete "Recensio"
or review of a given text as it is found in each of its codices,
and this in order to find out, first, what is transmitted in
common by the extant witnesses, then what is not held in
common.
6
The Recensionist procedure is tedious if followed faith-
fully (and even if one cuts corners). First of all, one of the
codices (it does not matter which, but usually the oldest) is
transcribed faithfully, completely slavishly, and with every
6/ On the two main systems see L. E. Boyle, "Optimist and Recensionist:
Common Errors or Common Variations?", in Latin Script and Letters A.D.
400-900: Festschrift presented to Ludwig Bieler, ed. J. J. O'Meara and B.
Naumann (Leiden, 1976) 264-274.
BOYLE / 37
cancellation, annotation, gap, erasure, correction, inversion,
misspelling, filler, grammatical inanity, homoeoteleuton and
all.
What the Recensionist editor winds up with at this point
is simply a scrupulously transcribed but utterly unedited text
of the chosen first witness. Since this text opens the way
to a Recensio of the codices as a whole, it may be called a
Recension-text. With its help, the other codices may now be
recorded on the recension sheets with a certain expedition,
for only the variations, whether textual or physical, from
codex to codex, will need to be set down or transcribed.
When all the witnesses have been set out in relation to
one another on the recension sheets, it should not be too
difficult to see at once what is common to all the codices (a
line here, a paragraph there) and what is not. The difficulty,
of course, is defined by what is not common. All the same,
the position is not hopeless. For although one is now faced
with passages or phrases which are not common to all the
witnesses, it is possible, the Recensionist claims, to find out
which witnesses depend on or are close to one another. And
thus the Recensionist achieves, by cataloguing and plotting,
"common variations" in the codices at the points where they
differ.
The usual term found in manuals and articles is "common
errors", but "common variations" is more appropriate, since
it eliminates the subjectivity present in the term "errors" and
embraces both textual variations and those of a codicological
or physical kind.
7
What constitutes a "common variation" is
not whether it is right or wrong (for, with respect to the text,
we have no means at this point of judging this in most cases),
but the simple physical fact that two or more witnesses have
some feature in common that a third does not have. Anything,
in fact, that is not shared by all the extant witnesses can be a
71 Maas, ed. cit. n. 1, pp. 29, provides a classic statement of "errors".
38 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
variation, from a pressmark to a doodle, from a garbled word
to a cancelled passage, from a change of ink or a change of
hand to word-separation, from glosses to alternative readings.
Hence the importance of the "physical setting" which I noted
when speaking of the first stage.
It is a Recensionist belief that by observing what variations
are common to what codices where the codices differ and
what are not, one can trace retrogressively the path of these
common variations and arrive at the source or sources of the
different sets of common variations. If the Recensionist
wishes, he may plot or make a diagram of these variations.
He may even call it a Stemma codicum, but only if it is based
on common variations between the codices and not on com-
mon errors between the text as carried by the codices (in
which case it is not a Stemma codicum but a Stemma textuum).
From the relationships between the codices which he has
detected through the phenomenon of "common variations",
the Recensionist is now enabled to see a way through the
codices where they are textually at variance with one another.
He can see now which manuscript or group of manuscripts
is, where they differ, more likely to carry the text as it com-
monly circulated (I do not say the "true" text). And he is
now in a position to establish from the codices as a whole the
text that they on-the-whole carry. The text that he establishes
from the codices is thus the text that is common to all, plus
what he decides with the help of common variations to be the
likely vulgar text where the codices disagree.
There remains the third stage, that of textual criticism.
The established text is simply the text transmitted by the
codices and reported as faithfully as possible by the editor.
It is a wholly unedited text, and it may be inconsistent in
some spots and delirious in others. What it needs now is an
editorial eye.
Here in the third stage the editor really comes into his
own. He is in fact on his very own; and he is alone in the
BOYLE / 39
sense that no one has ever been on this road before. The
problems now are the editor's problems and his alone; and it
is here that his mettle as editor and critic is tested to the full.
It is of little use at this point to turn to theoretical approaches
or manuals of criticism. All they will provide are instances of
how other editors have proceeded when confronted with their
own problems. But these were their problems. They are not
the problems of this present or of any other editor, though
they may provide some useful parallels. The editor's problems
are his and his alone, just as his text is his and his alone. It
is no use wailing, "What am I to do now?" What to do is up
to him and to no one else. Here the editor has to rely on his
own intelligence, his own imagination, his own wide reading,
his own scholarshipand the help of his friends (not, of
course, to provide him with an answer, but rather to criticize
or to consolidate his own solutions from their varying areas
of expertise). Thus a recent edition of a medieval philosophical
text of no great significance could have benefitted from some
friendly criticism before being exposed in public to gleeful
purveyors of textual inanities. For at one point it proffers two
syllogisms which, as printed, might give medieval scholasti-
cism a bad name: "Omnis canis creditur; celeste sydus est
canis; ergo celeste sydus creditur. Iterum: Quidquid creditur,
habet pedes; celeste sydus, ut dictum est, creditur; ergo habet
pedes." A friend at least could have suggested without undue
strain that there is such a thing as a dog-star, and, since dogs
have legs and legs are for running, that "currit" might be more
logically and palaeographically believable than "creditur."
Helpful friends apart, being on one's own does not mean
that an editor now has a free hand to be creative: to emend,
to conjecture or, indeed, to invent. He must always remember
that he is dealing with the results of a tradition of text, and
that, if he must keep within the bounds of reason, he must
also not venture beyond the confines of the codices from
which he established the text now before him. At any point
40 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
of uncertainty all the codices may and should be called upon,
even those which the editor knows from common variations
and the resulting Stemma codium to be direct copies of earlier
codices.
Of course, since most Stemmata codicum are really Stem-
mata textuum, it follows almost inevitably that when it is
evident from a stemma that one text is a direct copy of another,
or what is called a "codex descriptus", then that direct copy
is eliminated from textual consideration as a codex descriptus.
But here again, this is to take the text for the codex. For what
is really "descriptus" is the text not the codex. The codex
must retain its place in the tradition of the text, and may be
called upon when the work of editing begins. A so-called
codex descriptus may well have been in the possession of some
able scholar who had access to manuscripts or testimonia that
are no longer extant from which he made notes or took variant
readings. On a careful codicological examination they may
prove to carry discerning conjectures or readings which cannot
be overlooked.
No matter how logical or consistent or revealing a Stemma
codicum may turn out to be, it is the codices as such that
matter in the long run, not the Stemma codicum. For all its
seeming inexorable contours, the Stemma codicum is not a
vice from which there is no escape. At best it is no more than
a prop: an instrument that enables one to shore up some of
the text temporarily, where the witnesses are at variance with
one another, and hence have weakened the common bond of
text that holds them all together as the work of one author.
Where the established text is not common to all the codices,
an editor is not stuck with it simply because it is dictated by
common variations and the Stemma codicum. When this estab-
lished text, made up of common and uncommon texts, is seen
as a whole in this third stage of editing, one or other of the
alternative readings may well prove on critical examination to
be more fitting than that selected ad hoc for the established
BOYLE / 41
text on the basis of common variations and the Stemma. Nor,
indeed, is the common text itself sacrosanct simply because
it is common. It may make no sense at all on occasion. Even
when it does, one has to be on the alert.
In a recent edition of the letters of Seneca, for example,
the editor prints the sentence, "Quae sint quae antiquos mov-
erint vel quae sint quae antiqui moverint, dicam", noting that
the phrase "vel quae sint quae antiqui moverint" is found only
in a Bamberg MS of the 9th century, the earliest extant, though
"quae antiqui moverint" is found as an interlinear gloss in a
Vatican MS of the mid-12th century.
8
The Vatican codex in question, MS Pal. lat. 869, which
is MS C in Reynolds' edition and in his Medieval Tradition
of Seneca's Letters (Oxford, 1965), will occupy the remainder
of this paper. For in fact it proves to be more interesting than
one would have guessed from the somewhat bleak description
of it in Reynolds and others. When examined codicologically,
it shows signs on the one hand of having been copied from
an Insular model (on occasion the obsolete Insular symbol
for "eius" is reproduced, as though the scribe was not quite
sure how to expand it); on the other hand, the codex clearly
was collated, shortly after it was written, with a manuscript
of the Bamberg tradition, possibly by its very first owner.
This second conclusion is based on the presence in the
Vatican codex of a series of interlinear notes, most of which
are introduced by the "vel" siglum. Reynolds records a few
of these in his apparatus, but seems to look upon them as
simple glosses. This is not at all the case. These "vel" clauses
are in fact alternative readings, and their distinction from sim-
ple glosses is clear from the fact that the "vel" siglum is gen-
erally followed not by a full word but by the part of the word
underneath for which a variant has been found in another
8/ L. D. Reynolds, ed. L. Annaei Senecae ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
(Oxford, 1965), II. 473 (letter 113).
42 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
manuscript. Thus over the word "obiurgamur" in letter 93
(fol.33
r
) there is a neat interlinear note "vel mus" above "mur",
meaning that another MS reads "obiurgamus."
This "vel" phenomenon, indicating an alternative reading,
seems to have been a common feature of 12th-century schol-
arship, though I have yet to document it fully. It is nicely to
be seen in the earliest MS of the letters of Peter the Venerable,
attesting to the existence of a further early manuscript for
which in fact the recent editor of the corpus of Peter's letters
made no allowance in his discussion of the early history of
these letters.
9
In the present case of Seneca's letters, these "vel" clauses
are as much part of the tradition of the letters in MS Pal. lat.
869 as the text itself, and they enable us to add a second lost
codex to the tradition of the letters, to go with the presumed
Insular model of the Vatican codex. Of course one may dismiss
these "vel" clauses as examples of medieval meddling or "con-
tamination", but they are part of the codicological tradition
of the text of Seneca's letters and, in fact, provide splendid
examples of what I have termed "codicological variations"
between manuscripts. To ignore them, or simply pass them
over as glosses, is to misrepresent the tradition of the letters
in this codex and so miss a rich part of the history of the text
as transmitted.
An awareness of the significance of "vel" clauses of this
kind may even be helpful when editing an established text. It
could, for example, lead one to question the accepted reading,
quoted above, of "Quae sint quae antiquos moverint vel quae
sint quae antiqui moverint, dicam", from the Bamberg
9/ The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. G. Constable, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967). The presence of the other early manuscript is
acknowledged in Peter the Venerable. Selected Letters, ed. J. Martin and
G. Constable (Toronto, 1974).
BOYLE / 43
manuscript, especially when one notes that this clause (though
without "vel") occurs interlinearly above the opening clause
"Quae sint quae antiquos moverint" in the Vatican manu-
script. Given that the sentence as a whole in the Bamberg MS
is a little odd, though seemingly all editors accept it without
question, and given the fact that "vel" clauses often denote
an alternative reading, it is at least arguable that the original
sentence may have been a simple "Quae sint quae antiquos
moverint, dicam", and that "vel quae sint quae antiqui
moverint" was originally an alternative reading over the initial
phrase in some manuscript or other from which the Bamberg
scribe, in a fashion not untypical of scribes, copied both the
initial phrase and the alternative as one sentence: "Quae sint
quae antiquos moverint vel quae sint quae antiqui moverint,
dicam."
My final example of the place of codicology in the editing
of medieval texts is that from which the title of my paper
comes. Again the text is a letter of Seneca, and again the
manuscript is Pal. lat. 869. Writing in his usual moralistic way
to Lucilius, Seneca chides him on feeling miserable and out
of sorts, saying "Vesicae te dolor inquietavit, epistulae vener-
unt parum dulces, detrimenta continuapropius accedam, de
capite timuisti."
10
This is the received text, except that where all MSS read
"epistulae vero erunt parum dulces", most editors read "ven-
erunt" with von Jan for the difficult "vero erunt." The meaning
is something like this: A pain in your bladder bothered you,
letters came from you that were hardly pleasant, everything
went wronglet me put it bluntly, you began to fear for your
life (or, as translated in the Loeb Classics) "It was disease of
the bladder that made you apprehensive; downcast letters came
10/ Ep. 96, ed. Reynolds (n. 8 above), II, 401.
44 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
from you; you were continually getting worse; I will touch
the truth more closely and say that you feared for your life."
11
Now in the midst of all these physical ailments, the refer-
ence to far-from-sweet letters may seem a little out of place.
But it does not bother modern editors, though one or two
cite an alternative to " epistulae" preferred by Erasmus and
others after him.
12
Where Erasmus got it I do not know as
yet, but the reading "epulae" is borne out by an erasure and
correction in MS Pal. lat. 869, that 12th-century codex which
was so assiduously collated against another manuscript or
manuscripts by its 12th-century owner, as I presume. In Pal.
lat. 869 (fol 44
V
) part of "epistulae" has been rubbed out to
make way for "epulae", and, for good measure, "epulae" is
written clearly in the margin. Granting, but not at all accept-
ing, von Jan's "venerunt" for "vero erunt", the text now reads:
"Vesicae te dolor inquietavit, epulae venerunt parum dulces,
detrimenta continuapropius accedam, de capite timuisti."
Seneca, then, according to the corrected text in Pal. lat.
869, is simply listing the complaints of Lucilius, and, for
effect, goes from bad to worse in, so to speak, ascending
order: "A pain in your bladder bothered you; eating became
less of a pleasure; everying went wrongto put it bluntly,
you began to feel that you were going off your head."
Given his ailing bladder, it is hardly unexpected to find
that Lucilius had gone off his food. This fact alone inclines
me to "epulae" rather than "epistulae." To insist, with Bam-
berg and other MSS, on "epistulae" is to disrupt what is clearly
one disaster after another. Hence Seneca goes on, "A long
life includes all these troubles. Did you not know, when you
prayed for long life, that this was what you were praying for?"
11/ Seneca. Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales, ed. R. M. Gummere, III (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1971), 107.
12/ Cf. Seneque. Lettres a Lucilius, ed. F. Prehac, V (Paris, 1964), 114
(apparatus).
BOYLE / 45
If I am correct in taking the text as emended in Pal. lat.
869 seriously, then what may have happened was that at some
point or other before the ninth century, when the Bamberg
MS was written, the "epulae" was contracted to "eple", with
a hook through the "1", and because this is very nearly the
abbreviation for "epistulae", it would have been quite easy
for the scribe of the Bamberg MS or its exemplar to have
expanded "eple", meaning "epulae", to the more common
"epistulae."
It is at least odd that the 12th-century owner of the Vatican
manuscript should have been moved to change "epistulae" to
epulae", if the presence of "epistulae" was as unexceptional
as modern editions suggest it to be. Was "epulae" a conjecture?
Hardly, when one remembers that Pal. lat. 869 was so labori-
ously collated with another or other manuscripts of Seneca's
Letters. But even if "epulae" be a conjecture, should it there-
fore be denied consideration or excluded from the apparatus?
If a conjecture or emendation by a modern scholar such as
von Jan is deemed worthy of attention, why should not a
medieval conjecture be granted a hearing? At least it is part
of the codicological tradition of the text and as such merits
the attention of any editor worth his salt.
These two examples from Seneca's Letters of a very ten-
tative application of codicology in editing text may not seem
very momentous. Perhaps I may seem to be making too much
out of nothing, especially in the eyes of these who see codicol-
ogy as simply an examination of the physical make-up of a
codex: size, stitching, gatherings, and the like.
But to me codicology in its full colours is an examination
of a codex precisely as it is a carrier of a text. If, as is the
general tendency, one simply extracts a text from a codex,
then the text is bereft of its setting, and the codex is ignored.
If, on the contrary, one concentrates on the physical make-up
of a codex, then the danger is that the codex will be treated
in isolation from the text, as though it were any codex and
46 / MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS
not just this specific codex carrying this specific text. Codicol-
ogy, then, must include the textnot of course, the text as
text, but as physically carried by the codex, whether this be
the size of the columns, the spirals of initials, the annotations,
or indeed, the smudges of readers.
So codicology is not at all "ueberlieferungsgeschichte",
which, as everyone knows, Housman characterized as "a
longer and more noble name than fudge."
13
In other words,
codicology is a history of the fortunes not of a text as text,
but of a text as it is carried by codices. It is a simple and
necessary recognition of the fact that texts have survived be-
cause of codices, and that each codex in turn carries a text in
its own unique fashion.
13/ M. Annasi Lucani. Belli civilislibri decent, ed. A. E. Housman (Oxford,
1926), p. xiii. This remark occurs in a characteristic introduction, in which
he excoriates previous editors and notably C. M. Francken, of whose edition
in 1896-1897 he writes: "Hardly a page of it can be read without anger
and disgust. Francken was a born blunderer, marked cross from the womb
and perverse; and he had not the shrewdness or modesty to suspect that
others saw clearer than he did, not the prudence and decency to acquaint
himself with what he might have learnt from those whom he preferred to
contradict." (p. xxxiv). It is therefore a shock to find that Housman's own
edition was not based on a first-hand acquaintance with the MSS of Lucan:
"My reports of the manuscripts are selected from the apparatus criticus of
Mr. Hosius' third edition, except in a few places,... where I chance to have
independent information." (p. xxxv).