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An Introduction to Manuscript Studies [Disclaimer: I may have no idea what I am doing]

As per my previous blog (no, not email), I said that I would be writing a blog to help students find and look at manuscripts. This blog has been written to specifically copy information I am going to provide to students in a "conversational workshop" which is part of the UQ Classics and Ancient History Society's Curiosities and Conversations series and give participants in the workshop access to the various links. While some of the statements regarding the availability of critical editions are specific to UQ, the vast majority of what I have written and linked to is available to anyone. I decided to devote this last session of the year to this topic instead of a text because a student made enquiries as to how manuscripts might be located and whether I might help them at some point. I suggested that we could discuss the issue of manuscript studies at the next session and this was well received. 

So why the disclaimer in my title? Well, I was never taught any of this stuff as a student. Everything I know about locating manuscripts I figured out for myself. I don't know if maybe classics honours students covered this material, but I can promise you that as an ancient history student, this was never addressed. Then again, when I was a coursework student, no digitisation projects existed and being in Australia, the only way to look at manuscripts was to travel to the holding institution. Maybe the prosaic attitude of students had no means to use these skills, so why not teach students skills they could immediately use existed. Digitisation has changed this. People have the opportunity to use these materials from anywhere in the world now, and thus teaching these skills is relevant. So everything included in this blog is what I have taught myself about finding and using manuscripts. There might be better ways than what I outline here, but I don't know them.

Please note that all links in this blog were active in September 2024, but I have just looked at a blog I wrote in 2017 on how academia is being made more accessible via digitisation, and the majority of those links are now obsolete. Despite what we have all been warned regarding social media, no the internet is not always forever. The October 2023 cyber-attack on the British Library has shown just how susceptible our online materials are. I thoroughly recommend reading Jonathan L. Zecher's piece "Digital technologies have made the wonders of ancient manuscripts more accessible than ever, but there are risks and losses too" for The Conversation to better understand some of these issues surrounding digital decay and other weaknesses.

While my examples below relate to Latin material, it is equally valid for Greek manuscripts and critical editions.

Where You Will Find References to Manuscripts

Critical Editions

What Are Critical Editions?

In preparing a blog, I have realised I was never actually taught just what a critical edition is. Like the use of manuscripts, there are plenty of things I have come to realise that I was self-taught. Maybe it was covered in the classics honours coursework. I wouldn't know, as I am not a classicist, but an ancient historian. Yes, I have published a translation of a Latin text, but I do not consider myself a classicist (this might be either reality or imposter syndrome) because I was never officially trained as a classicist.

An excellent introduction to critical editions and how to use them has been created by the College of the Holy Cross, including an explanation of many of the terms, and a handy pdf of the most common abbreviations and signs used in these editions. I am saving this for myself as I have never seen an explanation for many of these. I have been winging it for years in this area. The College of the Holy Cross guide to classics describes critical editions thus: 

A critical edition tries to reconstruct some earlier version of a text, usually whatever the author originally intended, by drawing on a variety of available sources. Some, but not all critical editions are based primarily on a single "control" version of the text, which is adjusted to show the differences in other versions as the editor sees fit. The "control" text in this scenario is sometimes called the copy-text. Sometimes, a critical edition may also draw from an indirect witness, that is, a quotation of part of the text which has been found in another work.

If you want to know more about how to use critical editions than this blog covers, I thoroughly recommend this page.

Most critical editions for classical texts are published by various institutions. Some of the most common are 

Understanding the Manuscript List in Critical Editions

Each critical edition will give a list in the prefatory material which will outline the code used for each manuscript throughout the edition. This example is taken from Önnerfors' critical edition of the Medicina Plinii which is a part of the Corpus Medicorum Latinorum. The reason for using the Medicina Plinii is that I am most familiar with it and I am preparing a paper using the various manuscripts of it, and I am lazy efficient.

Önnerfors' list of manuscripts from his critical edition of the Medicina Plinii, p. 2

I have written out this image just in case the image is difficult to read:

SIGLA CODICVM ET CETERA COMPENDIA SCRIPTVRAE
Medicinae Plinii (Med. Pl.)
 G   Sangallensis 752, saec. IX
 V   Vossianus Lat. O. 92, saec. X in.
 H   Hortensis med. 192, saec. XII, nunc deperditus
 A   Bibl. Cathedr. Lincoloniensis Lat. 220 : 4, saec. XII, mutilus
 L   Londiniensis Lat. Reg. 12 E. XX, saec. XII
(D   Dresdensis Dc. 185, saec. XII, nunc deperditus)
 R   Vaticanus Reginensis Lat. 1004, saec. XII uel in XIII, mutilus
 B   Cantabrigiensis S. Petri 222 : III : 1, saec. XIV
 C   Vaticanus Capponianus Lat. 129, a. 1501 scriptus
 Î©   consensus codicum GVALRBC ut quoque loco praesto sunt
 Z   consensus codicum GVALRB ut quoque loco praesto sunt
 t    codex uetus Torini

This list can be confusing if you do not know how to read it. The prefatory material might give you some explanation, but these are mostly written in Latin, and thus can be off-putting for those of us whose Latin is not great (and yes, I count myself among that group). So you can approach it as a code thus:

        G                       Sangallensis                                     752                             saec. IX
                                                                                                                          

Code for MS    Library or Collection which holds     Shelf-mark: where         Age of MS.

referral in         MS. Library of the Abbey of St         where MS was kept       "Saec." = 

in the edition   Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland           on shelf but now part    saeculum 

                                                                                         of the name                    = century

V = Vossianus Collection at Leiden University. “Lat. O. 92” is the shelf-mark. 
H = Library of Schloss Herten in Germany. “Med. 192” is the shelf-mark. It disappeared sometime during WWII.
A = Library of Lincoln Cathedral. “Lat. 220” is the shelf-mark.
L = British Library [Londiniensis is Latin adjectival form of London]. “Lat. Reg.” is the collection name “Latin King’s collection” - part of the Latin collection of King George III. “12 E. XX” is the MS shelf-mark. 
D = Dresden library. This MS was lost at the end of WWII.
R = Vatican Library. “Reginensis” is the collection name – it had belonged previously to Queen Christina of Sweden. “Lat. 1004” is the shelf-mark.
B = Cambridge University [Cantabrigiensis is Latin adjectival form of Cambridge]. “S. Petri” is the collection name – it had been given to Peterhouse College there. “222” is the shelf-mark.
C = Vatican Library. “Capponianus” is the collection name – it had belonged previously to Alessandro Gregorio Capponi. “Lat. 129” is the shelf-mark.
Ω = is presumed to have existed text and does not exist. This is relevant for looking at manuscript traditions.
Z = the same as Ω.
t = the lost manuscript which was the basis for the earliest edition of the Medicini Plinii which compiled by Albanus Torinus in 1528. 

Yes, there are some other numbers in the list. No, I don't know what they mean, but they have never helped me identify a manuscript, so I am ignoring them.

The basic information is essential if you are looking for a particular manuscript. Most of these Latin names will tell you where the manuscript is housed, although not always: the Vossianus manuscript entry does not mention Leiden, so you will need to use Google to help you identify the collecting institution. When confused, a Google search can really help but be prepared to see the manuscript referred to in a slightly different way as different abbreviations might be used. Knowing the Latin name for modern cities can help with this and I provide a link to a page to help this below in the "Resources" section.

So why are they referred to so strangely? Well, manuscript studies are an extremely analogue research area. Not only are you looking at a handwritten page, but the shelf-mark I refer to above literally was a label on the library's shelf saying where the manuscript belonged. The names by which these manuscripts are referred not only potentially contain clues as to the manuscript's provenance, but even a hint as to where in the library and with what other manuscripts it was found - so not unlike an individual library's Dewey or Library of Congress classification systems. These shelf-marks are possibly no longer relevant in the current housing institution.

Broadly speaking, a manuscript's name can tell us the following:

  • It might tell or hint at the holding institution​
  • It will give us a collection name, which might or might not relate to the holding institution​
  • The collection name might hint at the manuscript's provenance.​
  • Where it was shelved within the collection when it was formed and catalogued. This can inform us of how it fit within the broader collection​
A number of Medicina Plinii manuscripts have been digitised and can be found online:

How to Read Manuscript Tradition Stemmata 

Okay, so I am going to move away from the specific topic of this blog for a couple of subheadings. While understanding how to read manuscript list will help you locate manuscripts, it will also help you understand how to use other elements of a critical edition of a text. So, I am going to include how to use decoding the manuscript list to understand other parts of a critical edition, because I was not taught that either. If you already know this, just skip ahead - I have no idea if you read all this!

Each time you come across the stemma outlining the manuscript tradition, they use the code outlined in the list of manuscripts used. These are basically a family tree for manuscripts, outlining how manuscripts were thought to have been copied in the past, and identifying a "maternal line" for how manuscripts were copied in the past before they came to us and how they relate to each other. Unfortunately, often that list is several pages removed from the stemma. 

So each letter which is ascribed to a surviving manuscript (codices manuscripti seruati) matches the code used in the list of manuscripts used elsewhere in the critical edition.

Manuscript tradition stemma adapted from Ã–nnerfors' in his critical edition of the Medicina Plinii, p. xxx.

The non-surviving manuscripts (codices manuscripti perditi) are either known to have existed - the Dresden manuscript "D" is a perfect example - or are assumed to have existed based on Önnerfors' philological study of the manuscripts. Each of these hypothetical manuscripts represent a text from which all branches are thought to have been copied from. So "Ω" is believed to have been the copy of the text from which all the different copies originated from so the original copy written by the author, so like a "great-grandmother" text. Whereas the rest of the manuscripts differ significantly from what has survived as "C", so it is thought by Önnerfors that these other manuscripts had a different "grandmother" which he named "Z". He then gave "L", "R", and "B" a different "mother" manuscript he called "β" to "G", "V", and "A" whose "mother" manuscript he named "γ". When you understand the code, the stemma make a lot more sense.

How to Read the Critical Apparatus [those notes at the bottom of the page] in Critical Editions

The same code is used in those notes you find at the bottom of pages in critical editions which is called the "critical apparatus". This is a space-saving measure, as you could not name each of those manuscripts every time you needed to refer to them. 

Critical edition text from Ã–nnerfors' edition of the Medicina Plinii, p. 7.

The first number relates to the line number in the text above (most critical editions number each 5 lines) at the left-hand side of the text. When looking at poetry they might use the poem's line number instead. The material following that indicates how some manuscripts differ from the critical edition. Here's a few examples to illustrate from this section taken again from Önnerfors' edition of the Medicina Plinii:

  • On line 6, manuscripts "G", "L", "R", "B", and "C" read "permixtum" instead of "permixta" as has been published. I *think* Önnerfors changed the word to be grammatically correct.
  • On line 10, manuscript "A" reads "triti sucus instilletur in caput" instead of "tritae sucus instillatur capiti" as the other manuscripts likely read. 

The smaller line of text in the middle of the page indicates material to compare with this text. Its numbers relate to the chapter and subsection rather than the line number. This line of text is telling readers to compare the Medicina Plinii book 1, chapter 1, subsection 1 to Pliny's Natural History 20.45, 20.69, 20.73, and 20.121, and Medicina Plinii book 1, chapter 1, subsection 2 to Pliny's Natural History 20.135 and 20.152.

References in Publications

As an ancient historian or classicist, you are more likely to find references to manuscripts in academic works which predate the creation of a critical edition, or a reference to a text for which no critical edition has been made. An example of this that I have come across is the following passage in Heim's Incantamenta Magica Graeca Latina (1892) Teubner: Leipzig, p.501:

Nonnullas cantilenas edidit Valentinus Rose (Hermae t. VIII p. 54) e codice Sangallensi no. 751, qui librum 'medicina Plinii' cum multis superstitiosis rebus continet; compedia dissolvi et quantum potui emendavi. 

You don't need to understand all that Latin. The important part is "e codice Sangallensi no. 751" which refers to manuscript 751 in the Library of St Gall collection. This part of that manuscript is now identified as belonging the the Physica Plinii, the Medicina Plinii's bastard cousin. 

Searching for Manuscripts in Online Tools

Using an online tool like Portail Biblissima will allow you to search for particular works. It will not give you every manuscript of a particular author or work, but just the other day I used it and found a manuscript of the introduction to the Medicina Plinii which was not used by Önnerfors in his critical edition.

Reasons to Use Manuscripts in Your Research 

So, why might you want to look at manuscripts? I can give you four reasons off the top of my head.
  1. They are cool. Sure, this isn't an academic argument, but it is true nevertheless.
  2. They might provide information not published elsewhere like I explained above with my use of Codex Sangallensis 751.
  3. Philological reasons: let's say you are trying to create a new critical edition of a text. You cannot do this without looking at the original manuscripts to compare them. Also, depending on what you are looking at, you might have reason to want to double-check the published text against the original. Remember that many critical editions are quite old now, so you might be wanting to look at a newly discovered manuscript which was not available to the original editor or new imaging options have made the text clearer and might be read differently. 
  4. Bibliographical reasons: you might be wanting to look at the manuscript as an object and be looking at what evidence it provides separate to the text included in a critical edition. I am currently preparing a paper which will compare how a bibliographical approach to looking at Medicina Plinii manuscripts gives a different understanding to its manuscript tradition rather than looking at the text alone like a philologist.

With the rise in digital humanities and numerous digitisation projects, there has never been a better or easier time for researchers to use manuscripts in their research where appropriate.

How to Use Manuscripts in Research Responsibly

If you use a manuscript in your research, you need to reference it properly. Digital decay is a real problem, so you cannot just drop a URL link in your bibliography. When I referenced Codex Sangallensis 751, I made sure to give it its full shelf-mark name to ensure that if the digitised manuscript was lost online, readers still had the necessary information to be able to find the manuscript. The British Library cyber-attack has really made the problems with relying on digital infrastructure apparent.

Conclusion

I hope this has been a helpful introduction to manuscript studies. If you know of further helpful resources, please include them in a comment.

Resources

Digitised Manuscripts

e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland (unifr.ch): Every digitised manuscript in Swiss collections. I find this page to be extremely user-friendly to locate specific manuscripts: 

Portail Biblissima: A database which links to various digitised manuscripts as well providing a database related to manuscript transmission. It is worth a play around if you have time to see what it includes, but I don't find it as easy to use as e-codices to locate specific manuscripts. This might be a user error.

Mandragore - Digitized manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France: As you would expect, the page is in French.

Bodleian Library at Oxford's digitised Western Medieval manuscripts

Institut de recherch et d'histoire des textes du Centre national de la recherche scientifique - ARCA: This page is French, but the link takes you to the search page. You can search for any term, not just shelf-marks, and gives access to digitised manuscripts as well as lists those which are not digitised.

The Vatican Libraries have a couple of different ways to look at their digitised collections, but I do not for the life of me understand why:

Cambridge Digital Library: Cambridge does not have all of its digitised western medieval manuscripts all together because of how some of these were originally donated to particular colleges. Cambridge University has multiple collections containing medieval manuscripts. You might need to look at a particular collection and not just "Western Medieval Manuscripts". Its search option is very handy.

Digital Scriptorium: This is the result of many north American institutions coming together to digitise their material.  

Digitized Medieval Manuscripts database - DMMapp: is an independent initiative dedicated to simplifying access to digitised medieval manuscripts. This seems like a really awesome resource to look for particular collections and obtain links. 

Medieval Bestiary: While this isn't devoted to ancient texts, this is a really well organised and user-friendly resource which does have some ancient texts included among the later texts devoted to animals alone. And it is in English. It is worth a play with just to get used to looking at manuscripts.

Helpful Resources

The College of the Holy Cross guide to classics: Critical Editions Yes, I linked this above, but it really deserves a second plug. They also provide more info on how to read critical apparatus.

Latin Place Names: An RBMS Resource This was a list put together based on the use of Latin names used in books printed before 1801, but it very handy for when looking at manuscripts.

Some Important Terminology

Codex: Any manuscript which is made by sewing quires together. Most manuscripts are codices, but they can also be single pages or scrolls. 

Folio: Term used for the individual leaf within a codex. The folio number is sometimes written on the recto side of each folio.

Palaeography: the study of "old writing" in manuscripts. Palaeography is also the means by which some manuscripts are dated. Not all manuscripts are easily read, and a lot of time and effort goes into figuring out what was written. Here's a blog written on palaeography for further information.

Quire: This is the term most commonly used in manuscript studies to denote the pages which have been folded together to make each of the sections of the manuscript which are sewn together to create a codex. In book-binding these are sometimes also called a signature. You might come across the term when looking at information provided about a manuscript, especially those created by binding together originally separate manuscripts - for example Cantabrigiensis S. Petri 222. 

Recto and Verso: Manuscript studies use some of the same terms as papyrology. Recto relates to the page of text which you first write on and in a codex would be the right side of the open book, whereas "verso" is the reverse side or the left side, at least in books Western languages. Some collections use page numbering that count the individual folio and then defines it as either the "recto" or "verso", often shortening it to either "r" or "v". 










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