When medievalists play parlour games …

Because what’s a party without a game of ‘Guess the medieval Bible story’? (Scroll to the end for the answers.)

(1) British Library, Kings MS 5, fol. 2r
Clue: It helps to know that Moses is often portrayed in medieval artwork with horns, based on Jerome’s literal translation of the Hebrew word ‘qaran’ as ‘cornuta’ (‘horned’) to describe the shining of Moses’ face after speaking with God on Mt Sinai (Ex. 34:29).

(2) British Library, Harley MS 1527, fol. 12v

(3) Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Clm 14159, fol. 2r

(4) British Library, Kings MS 5, fol. 10r

(5) Bodleian Library (Oxford), Arch. G. c.14, fol. 27r

(6) British Library, Harley MS 1527, fol. 13r

(7) British Library, Kings MS 5, fol. 20r

(8) Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Clm 14159, fol. 3r

Next round, it’s going to be Guess the Medieval Animal …

(9) Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), KA 16, fol. 50v

Answers:

1. Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3)
2. An angel visits the Magi in a dream (Matthew 2)
3. Jacob wrestles with the Angel (Genesis 32)
4. Moses and the Israelites receive manna from heaven (Exodus 16)
5. Jonah and the whale (Jonah 1-2)
6. Jesus in the Temple as a boy (Luke 2)
7. Samson carries away the gates of Gaza (Judges 16)
8. Rahab hangs a scarlet cord from the walls of Jericho (Joshua 2)
9. A camelopardalis (otherwise known as a giraffe!)

More information on these manuscripts:

• Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14159 – Dialogus de laudibus sanctae crucis, late 12th c.
• Bodleian Library, Arch. G c. 14 – Biblia Pauperum [blockbook], late 15th c.
• British Library, Harley 1527 – Bible Moralisée, mid-13th c.
• British Library, Kings MS 5 – Biblia Pauperum, early 15th c.
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KA 16 – Der Naturen Bloeme, mid. 14th c.

Love at first folio

I’ve been adding some much needed colour to my research lately–quite literally.  I had been asked to present a little on my period of research to some history-teachers-in-training in the Education Department, and so naturally was looking for some appropriate images to liven up my PowerPoint. At the same time, I had also started work on an upcoming conference paper touching on the categorisations of medieval virtues, and was interested in moving from textual descriptions of virtues to more visual ones.

In other words, I wanted some pretty pictures. Which is how I came across my new favourite medieval manuscript, the Liber Floridus, or The Flowering Book (MS Ghent 92).

Scribal Higgledy-Piggledy

I don’t expect too much from a medieval scribe. I accept that he may not always know the correct spelling of a classical name or whether he needs a subjunctive and he might occasionally have to fudge it a bit. I accept that he contents himself with only writing about a quarter of the letters, leaving me to fill in the rest. I accept that his speed of writing may result in a certain loss of legibility.

I would, however, expect him to write from left to right in a reasonably straight line.

Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries

Introduced last year, the online catalogue Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries provides descriptions of the 10,000-odd Western medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, as well as those of a few Oxford colleges, and saves one entering the somewhat bewildering world of the Bodleian’s print catalogues.

Eureka! (and some elephants and Mongols…)

Lest I paint too grim a picture of the doctoral student’s life and efforts, I should clarify that while there are days when researching with medieval manuscripts feels like a very slow attempt to squeeze meaning from a stone, there are at least, in compensation, the days when you actually find something, even the something, that makes the previous weeks of fruitless research almost worthwhile.

Latin & Palaeography Tools

Two invaluable online resources that have been lifesavers for me as I’ve started to work with unedited manuscripts:

A. Cappelli’s Dizionario de Abbreviature – The indispensable and definitive guide to Latin abbreviations, this online version of the Italian edition is much more comprehensive than the later English edition.

Some academic libraries (including the Bodleian) also have subscriptions to Abbreviationes Online, which allows you to search a growing database for any medieval Latin abbreviation.

Enigma – In what I can only imagine was the result of an inspired friendship between a medievalist and a computer programmer, this brilliant tool allows you to enter as much of the word as you can make out, together with a host of wildcard options, and then provides you with a list of every possible option, courtesy of Whitaker’s Words. Particularly cleverly, it allows each minim (the identical vertical strokes found in ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘m’, and ‘n’) to be entered as a ‘!’, so for example,  ‘!!!!!!!ere’ spits out only three possible options (innuere, munere, numere) which you can then narrow down based on context.

If Only They’d Thought of Me …

One of the inevitable frustrations of working with primary sources is that they don’t always say what you would like them to say. Worse, they don’t take what seem like golden opportunities to say what you’re pretty sure they were thinking, but never seem to actually articulate. It’s almost like they weren’t writing with you, a graduate student roughly 800 years in the future, explicitly in mind!

Minding My P[er]’s & Q[uae]’s

I have spent a concerning number of hours over the past month or two puzzling over pages that look like this:

Geoffrey of Trani, Summa super Titulos Decretalium (1491 ed.), fol. 47.

Gallica Digital Library

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) and is one of the best freely accessible digital archives online, crammed full of brilliant historical sources. It’s fairly easy to navigate, and you can register to save documents and books to your digital workspace.

I’ve personally been using it a lot lately to access all the 19th-century editions of my medieval primary sources from the comfort of my bed, instead of having to trot all the way out to the Bodleian Upper Reading Room!

Digital Bodleian

Digital Bodleian

Treasures of the Bodleian

Online digitized facsimiles of some of the best of the Bodleian collections, including quite a few medieval manuscripts.

Tip: The Digital Bodleian manuscript viewer interface isn’t the most user friendly if you’re trying to look through the manuscript as a whole instead of just one image, but if you look in the right-hand panel under the metadata, there are icons to view the manuscript in Universal Viewer or Mirador, both of which are quite good.

 

Forays into Manuscripts (5th Week, HT)

This week I requested my first manuscripts from Special Collections – which doesn’t sound all that impressive until you take into account that this involves a Bodleian librarian cheerfully handing over 800-year-old books into my grubby carefully scrubbed hands.

The Historian as Artist?

The first duty of a historian is to produce works of art. By this I do not primarily mean works that are finely written, but works that are emotionally and intellectually satisfying, that combine a clear unity of conception with a vivacity of detail, and portray people whose actions are intelligible within the framework of their circumstances and character. It is thus that one might describe as the aims of a Balzac or a Tolstoy: I say therefore that a historian should aim at satisfying the same emotional and intellectual needs as a novelist or poet. How he is to do this within the limits of the available data is the great question.

R.W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of History Writing’

Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript.

Preface to English translation of A. Cappelli’s The Elements of
Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography (1982) 

A very helpful resource which I had vaguely been aware of for a while but which I have only recently starting using more regularly is the Regesta Imperii OPAC Literature Database for the Middle Ages (RI-OPAC), available in English as well as German.

The database lists over 2.5 million academic books and articles on medieval topics, searchable by author, title, and thematic tags. Since it is limited to medieval research, even a search for a single word (e.g. ‘counsel’, ‘gestures’, ‘kingship’) tends to be much more fruitful than searching the entirety of a research library catalogue. While not exhaustive, the database is regularly updated and is therefore an excellent tool for investigating what research has already been done on any particular topic.

I recently came across these excellent guides to palaeography from the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (St John’s University). As well as access to a number of helpful resources, they have virtual courses in Latin, Syriac, and Arabic scripts, as well as guides for manuscript transcription.

https://www.hmmlschool.org/

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) and is one of the best freely accessible digital archives online, crammed full of brilliant historical sources. It’s fairly easy to navigate, and you can register to save documents and books to your digital workspace.

I’ve personally been using it a lot lately to access all the 19th-century editions of my medieval primary sources from the comfort of my bed, instead of having to trot all the way out to the Bodleian Upper Reading Room!

Word Tools: Thanks to the wonders of the internet, there are now various Latin word tools that will tell you not only what any Latin word means, but also that it happens to be a genitive singular future passive participle, or whatever the ‘case’ may be.

Whitaker’s Words – My personal favourite, partly because it does take into account some medieval spelling and vocabulary changes)

Perseus Latin Word Study Tool

Health Advisory: While brilliant for making your way through a tricky translation, I would recommend using online word tools sparingly when it comes to actual Latin study – it’s easy to get dependent and forget to actually learn the vocabulary and grammar yourself, which comes back to haunt you later . . .

Dictionaries: Most Latin-English dictionaries only reflect classical usage and vocabulary. The best dictionary for medieval Latin is the recently completed Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS) published by Oxford University Press, which is also available as a subscription service online and through the Latin/Greek online dictionary search Logeion.