A New Appreciation for the Giants Whose Shoulders We Stand Upon

For close to 6 months now, I’ve been working on a bibliographic analysis of a medieval medical manuscript, Peterhouse MS 222. This followed on from the paper I gave to the Bibliographic Society of Australia and New Zealand in December. Within a week of that conference I saw a call for papers for a volume on the movement of documents in the Middle Ages, and I stupidly thought “what the heck. I’m not a medievalist. They’ll probably reject me.” 

Spoiler alert. They didn’t reject me.

Thus began a project which has made me realise just how spoilt we ancient historians and classicists are.

A major part of this research was reading the manuscript and identifying which texts were included in it. Some of this had been done by previous scholars, but a considerable amount had not. I was also identifying exactly what parts some of these works came from, by comparing the manuscript to printed editions, some published as early as the 1470s, or to other manuscripts because no printed editions existed.

This last part, comparing manuscripts to each other, is a skill which I think many of us have never even thought about, let alone appreciated. Working on translating the Medicina Plinii gave me a greater appreciation for translators, and my work on this project gave me an even greater appreciation for the work of early philologists who spent their careers creating the wonderful critical editions of texts we take for granted in our study. 

When I first started looking at manuscripts, it was like my eyes didn’t even recognise the images I was looking at as text, but the more I looked, the more I understood. Eventually I ended up with various screenshots on my pad that looked like this:

How much of this can you read?

I can’t even remember what I was looking at here, but the red lines show where I’d matched them before taking a break.

My work on this is just a sliver of the work which the editors of critical editions did, and I am in complete awe. 

So, next time you pick up a Loeb or a Penguin edition of an ancient text, don’t just give a thought to the wonderful translator, consider also the person who looked a numerous manuscripts like those pictured above or even more difficult to read, and think about how they read that writing, and pulled together a Greek or Latin printed text which combined all those parchment sheets together to form a consistent text.

By just reading those handy-dandy books, we are often standing on the shoulders of giants whose names we don’t know, whose work we haven’t appreciated, and without whom our area of study and research would not exist.

P.S. I haven’t sent away my paper. I’m writing this blog because my cat is sleeping on my lap and thus is not allowing me to make my final corrections and submission.

My cat Shelby preventing me from working.