Ars Edendi LECTURE SERIES Volume II Edited by Alessandra Bucossi and Erika Kihlman ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Studia Latina Stockholmiensia ————————————— LVIII ————————————— Ars Edendi LECTURE SERIES Volume II Edited by Alessandra Bucossi and Erika Kihlman STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY 2012 Cover image: Miniature from Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ms 71 A 24, fol. 2v, containing the legend of the monk Theophilus. This is a print on demand publication distributed by Stockholm University Library. Full text is available online www.sub.su.se. First issue printed by US-AB 2012. © The authors and Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis 2012 ISBN 978-91-86071-95-0 ISSN 0491-2764 Distributor: Stockholm Unversity Library Printed 2012 by US-AB Table of Contents Introduction 1 Alessandra Bucossi and Erika Kihlman Contributors 7 Written Sermons and Actual Preaching: A Challenge for Editors 9 Nicole Bériou Tapestries of Quotation: The Challenges of Editing Byzantine Texts 35 Elizabeth Jeffreys Contamination, Stemmatics and the Editing of Medieval Latin Texts 63 David d’Avray Is the Author Really Better than his Scribes? Problems of Editing Pre-Carolingian Latin Texts 83 Michael W. Herren Comparing Stemmatological and Phylogenetic Methods to Understand the Transmission History of the ‘Florilegium Coislinianum’ 107 Caroline Macé - Ilse De Vos - Koen Geuten What Should an Editor Do with a Text Like the ‘Chrono- graphia’ of Michael Psellos? 131 Diether Roderich Reinsch Imprimatur? Unconventional Punctuation and Diacritics in Manuscripts of Medieval Greek Philosophical Works 155 Börje Bydén Introduction This is the second volume of the lectures given within the framework of the Ars edendi research programme. Based at Stockholm University and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation since 2008, Ars edendi is devoted to the art of editing, both in theory and practice, and centres around four genres of medieval Latin and Greek texts: commentaries and glosses, liturgical texts, collections of model texts, and anthological compilations. A common denominator for these kinds of complex texts is the fact that they challenge a straightforward application of traditional stemmatic, error-based methods. For instance, adaptations and different versions of a work, made in response to the changing needs of the users, may make the quest for a lost archetype, or the most original version, not only more problematic but even less desirable. This phenomenon comes to the fore not only in practical texts, Gebrauchsliteratur, such as commentaries and glosses used for teaching, but also in different kinds of liturgical texts that were adapted to fit a local liturgical use. It is noticeable also in collections of model texts that were put together precisely for the purpose of being continuously altered and improved upon by multiple users and in anthologies and other compiled texts, whose scribes could choose to make a selection of which passages in the exemplar to reproduce, having an agenda other than that of making an exact copy. Further- more, works in these four genres – educational, liturgical, model, and compilatory – often include multiple layers of information, be they in the form of texts, images, or music, which in addition have their own histories of transmission. The relationship between the various layers naturally affects the specific parts the editor is focusing on and needs to be accounted for in an edition. Other characteristics typical of, but not exclusive to, medieval texts are the use of sources, the practice of punctuation, a bewildering number of manuscripts, the trans- formation of languages from their classical into their medieval forms and other similar issues; these are all idiosyncrasies that necessitate and deserve the development of specific editorial tools. Ars edendi thus aims at devising and developing editorial methods that best respond to 2 Alessandra Bucossi and Erika Kihlman such challenges, tested in critical editions of texts from the four genres. To fuel the discussions within the research group and in order to raise awareness of textual criticism, we invite experts in the field to lecture on both theoretical and methodological aspects of the art of editing. This volume contains the lectures given between February 2010 and May 2011 by the following invited speakers: Nicole Bériou, Elizabeth Jeffreys, David L. d’Avray, Michael W. Herren, Caroline Macé and Diether Roderich Reinsch. In addition, a paper by Börje Bydén, given at the Ars edendi workshop organized in conjunction with Professor Reinsch’s lecture, is included since it engages in a dialogue with issues raised in the lecture and advocates an alternative solution. In medieval times relations and exchanges between the Latin and Greek worlds were more intense than is usually thought or might be surmised from the normal separation between the academic disciplines of Medieval Western/Latin and Byzantine Studies. The collaboration of textual scholars from both these fields is one of the strengths of the Ars edendi programme, and it is our belief that this cross-fertilization will advance our understanding both of the medi- eval world as a whole and of the editorial traditions that have developed around the two languages over the centuries. Aspects of this common medieval culture are present in both Greek and Latin manuscripts. The oral performance and its vestiges in written – and transmitted – versions of a text is a case in point. In this volume three of the seven articles discuss traces of orality in written works, one of these being the use of punctuation. In his lecture Diether Reinsch argues that editors should ‘respect the rhetorical logic of Byzantine Greek’ and strongly supports the adoption of the manuscript punctuation in modern editions if ‘we want to understand these works in their aesthetic dimension, if we want to comprehend the intention of the author and how these texts were meant to be presented to the audience’. At the same time he states that ‘for a modern editor it is not important to reproduce the punctuation signs as they are shaped in the Greek text, but to keep the places of the punctuation marks of the manuscripts and to put into the edited text signs which have a function similar to that of the signs in Byzantine manuscripts’. A different stance is taken by Börje Bydén, who bases his position on ‘the axiom about the editor’s duty’ and ‘to INTRODUCTION 3 whom the duty is supposed to be owed’. Should the editor’s allegiance be with the author’s use – intended or actual – or with the modern-day reader of the text? In choosing between these two options, Bydén strongly advocates service to the latter and believes it to ‘be ill advised [...] to impose Byzantine diacritics and punctuation on a readership that will not derive any benefit from it’. As is apparent even from such a brief recapitulation, these two papers reflect the on-going scholarly discussion concerning a crucial question: should we follow the manuscript usage or should we interpret and ‘normalize’ the punctu- ation of the codex? We recommend reading these two papers one after the other to recapture the flavour of the original dialogue between the authors and enjoy their well-explained and persuasive argument- ations. Nicole Bériou examines other traces of orality, using medieval Latin sermons, especially from the fourteenth century, as a point of reference. A central question for Bériou is to what extent traces of an oral performance can be detected in the written testimonies of sermons and how the editor can preserve and highlight them, which, she states, ‘should be [...] the ultimate goal of research.’ The traces Bériou identifies include repetitions, the use of interjections and exempla, references to preachers’ body language and the like. The actual reception of these sermons, on the other hand, is much more difficult to identify, although Bériou suggests a possible example of this in contemporary art. Specific problems arise for editors of Latin texts from the period between 600 to 800, when the rules governing Latin syntax and grammar were in upheaval and before the Carolingian language reform had been introduced. This challenge is discussed by Michael W. Herren, who uses Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks along with the old and new editions of Isidore’s Etymologies to illustrate different attitudes adopted by editors, pointing out specifically the disparate goals of a ‘Romanist’ and a ‘Classicist’ editor. Herren poses a number of questions relevant for editors of texts similar to these: ‘Are all or even most of the aberrations [...] authorial, or do they represent the scribbles of illiterate scribes, [...]? Did eighth-century scribes “translate” a correctly written text into their own unorthodox system of spelling and grammar, or did they simply copy what was in front of them? One might also ask: if the same work was also copied by ninth- 4 Alessandra Bucossi and Erika Kihlman century or later scribes, did these scribes correct and remove infelicities of spelling and grammar according to Alcuinian principles?’ With a discussion of these issues as a backdrop Herren turns to his own edition of Aethicus Ister’s Cosmography, not only exemplifying the range of linguistic peculiarities the editor must con- sider but also demonstrating how crucial an examination of such ‘deviations’ from a linguistic norm is, not least for anonymous texts of unknown date and provenance. Knowledge in these matters as regards the Cosmography has advanced greatly through Herren’s careful editorial work, as shown here. Similarly, when editing the letters of Iakovos Monachos (James the Monk), also known as Iakovos of Kokkinobaphos, Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys had to ponder the question of how far they should intervene in the text. These letters and homilies are presented by Elizabeth Jeffreys as ‘tapestries of quotations’, a useful and evocative image to understand their singular structure as an unbroken weaving of passages from previous sources stitched together by the minimal thread of Iakovos’ own words. In fact, James the Monk was so accurate in reproducing the original text that, sometimes even when he was writing to a female correspondent, his quotations remained in the masculine gender. Should the editor make the changes that the original author presumably forgot to do or, as Jeffreys phrases it, ‘Should the author be allowed to make mistakes, in what was after all a language with which he was more familiar than his editors some nine hundred years later and when there was perhaps only one layer of scribal intervention involved?’ The editing of Iakovos’ letters also presents another editorial difficulty, besides the laborious identi- fication of the citations, namely, how these sources should be presented in the apparatus. The structure and contents of the apparatuses are in fact a fundamental problem for the editor of Byzantine compilatory texts. Should only variants derived from the manuscripts of the letters be included, or should Iakovos’ minor changes and adaptations of the original passages quoted also be incorporated in the apparatus? Jeffreys guides us through the editing process and the experimentation that led to the decision of including a separate critical apparatus dedicated to the relation between the original patristic quotation and James’s version of it.