"Standing on the Shoulders of Giants": recognising the work required to give us the ancient texts in our libraries

One thing I love about researching history is coming to realisations and sharing them with others. Last  night was one such occasion for me.

While I do use the term "classicist" to describe myself it is usually because it's shorter than "ancient historian", which is a better description of me. Yes, I can translate Latin, but I don't study Latin for the sake of studying Latin; I study it for what texts written in that language can tell me about the past. As a result, I went through my undergrad and postgrad education not thinking too much about how we came to have the lovely printed critical editions of Greek and Latin texts in our libraries, let alone what all the obscure footnotes at the bottom of their pages actually mean. 

Now that I am writing a commentary and translation of a rather obscure Latin text, I have had to finally look at those footnotes and figure them out. I don't know if students who did classics majors with advanced language classes were taught about them, but for me I had to figure it out for myself. Looking at these opened my eyes to the wonders of manuscript traditions, which with amazing digitisation projects, led me to looking not at these critical editions, but the centuries old manuscripts from which they were derived. To look at these manuscripts and then at the printed texts, you come face to face with the amazing scholarship which has preceded your own. You often hear about "standing on the shoulders of giants" in academia, but rather than sounding like an annoying phrase spouted by professors to belittle the work of students, it really came into focus for me when looking at these. Not since reading Denis Feeney's Caesar's Calendar had I found myself in awe of the generations of work which belie the texts and dates which underpin the discipline of ancient history.

So last night I gave students and members of the public a taste of this work looking at texts which have not undergone the process: the so-called Vulture Epistles.

Vulture Epistles are short magical texts which outlined the use of various parts of vultures as charms and the treatments for diseases. They often took the form of letters, often from authoritative figures from Persia or Arabia to Roman emperors (though most often called kings instead). Their letter format was a literary device, and the eastern figures were normally made up from whole cloth. The copies of these letters which have survived do not always include a salutation, and they appear in both Greek and Latin. While these texts have been published piecemeal in various books and articles, no critical edition has been made. Being short texts, they are great for illustrating the decisions which need to be made to create such an edition. 

I started the discussion by pointing out how many manuscripts have survived in both Greek and Latin, and which salutations survived in which manuscripts. The majority of these people had never seen a manuscript before, so I was glad I had prepared a small PowerPoint presentation in which I included two different digitised copies of the Vulture Epistles. The first was the manuscript from 9th century which provided the text which was translated into English:

The second manuscript image I had brought was not one which had been used as a source for the discussion. Instead it was a partial copy without any salutation which seems to have been included as a footnote (my brother pointed that out to me) in an 11th century volume:

I then moved on to looking at the differences in texts. Because I was talking to people with no classical language skills, I used an English translation of an early manuscript and three other different Latin versions which had been analysed in the 1920s. I then showed the group where the basic recommended use of parts of vultures matched between the English translation and the three Latin manuscripts. I did not go into the differences in the language because that would require a greater Latin knowledge than the reading group presumes. 

By focussing on the English text and showing the group where the texts match with other versions, I think I managed to convey that for every published text we have, someone had to decide what was included and from which manuscripts. While all but one section of the translated text appeared in at least one other Latin versions, the translated text did not include all the material the Latin manuscripts included. 

By taking this basic approach which did not go into too much detail, I think I managed to convey to the group the kind of work which had to be done for every text which has had a critical edition published. 

Vulture Epistles are fun to read, and I think using an entertaining text is essential for introducing what are difficult concepts to a group of non-specialists. Once I finally finish my work on the Medicina Plinii, the work I put into this might constitute the beginnings of creating my own critical edition of this text.

Bibliography for people interested in these texts:

F. Cumont, (1926). "Le sage Bothros ou le phylarque Arétas?", Revue de Philologie, vol. 50, pp. 13-33. This paper includes copies of three different Latin texts which I used to compare with the English translation.

L. Mackinney, (1943). "An Unpublished Treatise on Medicine from the Age of Charlemagne," Speculum, vol. 18, pp. 494-6. This paper includes what I consider a partially faulty English translation of the text (the identification of ingredients is occasionally wrong because Mackinney hasn't studied similar texts medico-magical texts elsewhere) and a poor copy of the manuscript when compared to what is available online now (compare the first picture above). You can find a copy of that page at: BnF Paris. lat. 9332 folio 251v.

A. A. Barb, (1950). "The Vulture Epistle," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 13, pp. 318-22. This paper is mostly a critique of Mackinney's paper (the most significant of which was the failure to acknowledge Cumont's work on the topic), but it also includes great references to various manuscripts which contain copies of Vulture Epistles.

The manuscript details for the texts which I discussed were:

Paris, BnF lat. 9332

Montpelier, École de Medicine, no. 277

British Library, Egerton 321

Paris, BnF nouv. aquis. Lat. 229