Looking at Vulture Epistles again: received errors or how to make a simple task difficult

August 24, 2023

Looking at Vulture Epistles again: received errors or how to make a simple task difficult

Sometimes it's a great idea to revisit discussions you have had before. It is something you might do when you are being lazy. In my case, I was trying to be lazy. "Trying" is the pertinent part of that sentence.

Following a poor turn out at the first session of Critical Dialogues this semester, I decided to reuse a topic I both discussed and blogged about five years ago (you can find the previous blog here), because I didn't want to research a new topic and possibly have no one turn up.

Well, that was my lazy plan. When I hatched this scheme, my first thought was to dust off my old notes, but I remembered that one student who always turns up when not ill (the reason he wasn't at the previous session) attended that session. That previous discussion mostly focused on Latin texts, but I know this student is more interested in Greek.

While this discussion is at its most explicit an examination of fake literary letters outlining the medico-magical use of different parts of a vulture's body, the main thrust of the discussion is to show how the classical sausage is made. Typically, in ancient history and classics we use critical editions of texts and rarely give a thought to how those editions came to be. I know I never looked at a manuscript as an undergrad. Hell, I didn't even look at them as a postgrad. So I really just wanted students to be aware of all the forgotten work which had gone into creating our neat, east-to-use texts, often more than a century ago. Looking at Vulture Epistles, which are fairly short and getting them to imagine how you might try to create a definitive version of this text acts as a pretty good thought experiment.

When critical editions of texts were made in the past, scholars had to physically go and look at the individual manuscripts at each manuscript's collecting institution, so not only were these huge projects, they were also expensive in relation to travel. Today, thanks to the internet and institutional digitisation projects, I could look at the majority of the Vulture Epistle manuscripts from my home in Brisbane, Australia.

So, I figured I would simply be a quick add on to the PowerPoint presentation that I had used in 2018. Grab the Greek manuscript pages for which I had the relevant shelfmarks, and add them. Well. The best laid plans of mice and lazy academics...

Firstly, what's a shelfmark? These are the means to which we identify manuscripts. Manuscripts are called that because that is pretty much what the anglicised Latin word means: written by hand. Hand written books are by their nature usually centuries old and were originally parts of old (think medieval, Renaissance, and early modern) libraries, and the shelfmark worked the same way as today's library call numbers: they told readers where to find the book. Modern collections have preserved this artefact, and these manuscripts are now effectively "named" by the position on a shelf they once held in now often non-existent libraries. If you would like to now more about medieval shelfmarks and how they worked, check out Erik Kwakkel's blog on the topic (and if you have an interest in really old books, his blog is awesome).

So, thanks to the work of earlier scholars Franz Cumont and A. A. Barb, and some judicious googling I had the shelfmarks of most Vulture Epistles, so I shouldn't have too much trouble. Or so I thought.
These were:

National Library of France, Paris, B.n.F. lat. 9332 (8th Century) fol. 251v - Latin text*
University of Bonn 218 (11th Century) - Latin text*
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 681 (2nd 3rd of 11th Century) fol. 56 - Latin text*
British Library, London, Egerton 821 (12th Century) fol. 53v - Latin text*
National Library of France, Paris, Nouv. acquis. lat. 229 (12th Century) fol. 3v-4r - Latin text*
British Library, London, Sloane 745 (Hippiatricorum) (13th Century) fol. 37r-v - Greek text*
National Library of France, Paris B.n.F. grec. 2243 (AD 1339) - Greek text*
National Library of France, Paris, B.n.F. lat. 6972A (AD 1404) fol. 42v-43v - Latin text
National Library of France, Paris B.n.F. graec. 2419 (15th Century) fol. 153 - Greek text*
Montpellier, Ecole de Medicine 27 (or 277) (15th Century) fol. 81 - Latin text
Codex Abrosianus 1030 (repeat text 2419) (16th Century) - Greek text

Those manuscripts marked with an asterisk (*) are purported to be digitised. I had included a couple of the Latin manuscript pages to my previous PowerPoint, I thought I'd simply add the rest. Nice, easy job. Shouldn't take too long...

Well for the most part, I was correct.

Well, I managed to access the Bonn University digitised collection via an online database manuscripta-mediaevala, but access to the better quality images is only available with Adobe Flash, which is no longer available apparently. So that image is completely illegible.

The British Library manuscripts are very easy to access, simply by googling the shelfmark, so adding the Greek manuscript was very easy.

The French National Library (properly the Bibliotheque Nationale de France) manuscript collection has been tricky to navigate in the past, but their creation of Portail Biblissima has provided an excellent interface by which to search their manuscript collection. And I used this to find all of the manuscripts and copied the relevant folios (pages of leaves depending on how the book was numbered) to show students what academics who created critical editions looked at and deciphered. That was until I got to Grec 2243.

I brought up the page I was referred to by Cumont and it looked like this:

Paris B.n.F. grec. 2243 fol. 100r and its facing page. The following pages are also blank.

Now my skills in Greek paleography are nothing to write home about, but this didn't make sense. Nothing looked right.

I looked at the description of the manuscript, and the website's description said this was a part of a text described as "remedia uaria" and a letter outlining how to use vulture bits to heal yourself might fit within "various remedies." I looked at what Cumont said the text said, and I could not match one word to what Cumont said this text said.

So, I decided to look at the work Cumont referenced as having published this Vulture Epistle previously: P. Boudreaux's Catalogus codicum astrologorum graecorum, vol. 8.3 published in 1912, p. 126-7 (don't be freaked out by the Latin, this just means a catalogue of Greek astrological codices and was fortunately also digitised and available online). Boudreaux does publish some parts of grec. 2244 (not 2243), starting at page 128 in the same volume. I was so brain tired I failed to see that Boudreaux actually headed his chapter publishing two Vulture Epistles "EXCERPTUM EX CODICE 38 (PARIS GR. 2180)." I compared Boudreaux's text to Cumont's and they matched, so I started just throwing random names into the Biblissima database starting with the name of the purported letter author, Bothros.

And, Paris B.N. grec. 2180 (AD 1339) appeared like magic. And grec. 2180 fol. 100r looks like this:

Paris B.N. grec. 2180 fol. 100r

The relevant part of the page is this:

Close up on the relevant part of B.n.F. grec. 2180

So why was I so sure that it must be B.n.F. grec. 2243? Well, Cumont wasn't the only person to make this error.

A.A. Barb's 1950 article, mostly devoted to criticising Loren Mackinney's 1943 paper which published B.n.F. lat. 9332 fol. 251v, repeated Cumont's error. Barb's criticism focused on Mckinney's failure to know that a Greek tradition of Vulture Epistles existed owing to their failure to read Cumont's 1926 paper. The irony of Barb repeating this error is somewhat delicious. Barb attacked someone who was looking at an actual page of a manuscript when they had never looked at Boudreaux's publication, let alone B.n.F. grec 2243, and just assumed Cumont was correct. Now, don't get me wrong, Franz Cumont was a superb scholar of ancient magic, and I like Barb assumed was he wrote was correct until I went to look at the actual manuscript, but I can't help but see a little hubris on Barb's part upon reflection.

I think there is a technical term for when a subsequent scholar repeats another's error, but I can't recall whether that term is "received error" or not, but it will do for now, and this is an example how one received error can literally eat up a number of hours of my day.

Working with manuscripts can be truly rewarding but can also be hard work. While digitisation programmes the world over are making more manuscripts available to scholars who cannot travel and to the interested public, reading them take serious skills, not just in the relevant language but also in palaeography (the study of old hand writing), patience (as often the page numbering used in the document viewer does not match the folio number referenced), and some out of the box thinking to address issues, like being given the wrong damn shelfmark.

Oh, and the one student with an interest in Greek that had been to the previous session back in 2018? At the end I said "I hope the additional Greek material provided some interest given you attended my previous discussion of Vulture Epistles." He responded by looking me dead in the eye and saying "I am fairly sure I didn't."

I could have just been lazy!