How To Track Down a Manuscript of a Classical Text

Over on another site, Anoneuoid asked how to track down the past owners of a manuscript of a classical text such as the “A” manuscript of Herodotus in Florence (manuscript Laurentianus 70.3).

The first place to start when tracking down the manuscripts of a classical text is a critical edition (that is, an edition in the original language with notes in the margins about how the manuscripts are different from each other and the printed text). I have the Clarendon edition by Karl Hude which was last updated in 1927 but still seems to be the standard edition of Herodotus (the 2015 edition by N.G. Wilson has some updates). Hude discusses the manuscripts in Latin because until recently that was the best way to give a classicist in Egypt and a classicist in Norway equal access to his thoughts. He does not say much on the history of the manuscripts because he is more interested in which are most useful for reconstructing what Herodotus actually wrote.

You can find a much more detailed discussion of the manuscripts of another ancient text and their owners in Philip Rance, “Aineias Tacticus in Byzantine Military Literature,” in Nick Barley and Maria Pretzler, eds., Brill’s Companion to Aineias Tacticus. Brill’s Companions in classical studies (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017).

Roger Pearse passes on this kind of information in English on his website.

Bilingual Loeb editions sometimes have basic information on the manuscripts in English but the Loeb Herodotus just refers readers to Hude.

Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, manuscript Plutei 70.3 has been digitized in colour at https://tecabml.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/plutei/id/1358114/rec/4 (there are handbooks for deciphering the abbreviated names of libraries, but the Laurenziana is famous- it started as the private library of Lorenzo de’Medici). The librarians refer readers to the Latin catalogue from 1768-1770 for more information about the manuscript. https://cdm21059.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/cataloghi/id/5013 20 years ago, you would write the library and ask for a microfilm of the manuscript, and see if you could borrow the catalogue by interlibrary loan.

The catalogue also does not talk about prior owners, but is more interested in Jacob Gronovius who realized it was a very good manuscript and used it in his edition of Herodotus in 1715. The market for manuscripts of ancient Greek texts in the 15th and 16th century was a lot like the art and antiquities market in the 20th century. Whereas in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries Christians from western Europe had very little interest in texts in Greek – like the Arabs, they preferred translations- in the fifteenth century the eastern Roman Empire was no longer a cultural or economic threat. So the same Italians whose grandparents and great-grand-parents had done everything they could to destroy the eastern Roman empire economically and militarily started to buy up manuscripts and hire away scholars to teach them ancient Greek. Looking into the history of manuscripts at this time turns up a crowd of shady characters, cash-poor refugees, and monasteries with sleepy librarians, and the details are hard to pin down.

Classicist Peter Gainsford discusses this history in a series on Who Preserved Greek Literature? and a post on How Far Removed Are We From Ancient Testimony?

Sometimes books with Companion or Handbook in the title have a chapter on the manuscripts, like the companion to Aeneas Tacticus above. Unfortunately, the Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola, editors, 2006) does not.

As you can see, the manuscript has notes in the margins and between the lines in a variety of hands with a variety of pens and ink. The critical editions are interested in these because some go back to ancient editions, but others were added in recent times by people trying to make sense of the manuscript.

A search in my library catalogue and on JSTOR brought up this open-access article which lays out many of the issues for fellow classicists (so some of the details might need expanding for other people):

The paradosis (inherited text) as we have it in Laurentianus 70.3 cannot safely be said to correspond to any earlier stage in the history of the text. The earliest medieval ms. is the end result of a whole series of editorial changes, the nature of which can be known only in the vaguest way. But the greatest stumbling block is the very unity of the textual tradition. Despite their superficial differences, all the mss. are alike. This sameness stems from the four major stages which shaped the whole textual tradition: (1) the work of Herodotus himself or of his immediate editor; (2) the Alexandrian edition; (3) the transition from papyrus roll to codex; and (4) the passage from majuscule to miniscule writing. The unity imposed on the text in each or all of these stages has given us the text as we have it. Unfortunately we cannot precisely date most of these changes. We cannot even be certain what most of the changes were. The history of the text before the creation of Laurentianus 70.3 is still largely a closed book

R. A. McNeal, “On Editing Herodutus,” L’Antiquité Classique, T. 52 (1983), pp. 125-129 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41653215

So the manuscripts which we have are very similar in general, but have many small linguistic differences such as verb forms, word order, spelling, and numbers. This is probably because whenever there was a change in book culture, a new version of Herodotus became standard and others ceased to be copied. We know that this happened when printing arrived, because often the first printed edition was based on whatever manuscript or manuscripts were available and it was copied and reprinted across Europe until someone took the time to make a proper critical edition based on comparing as many manuscripts as possible. We know that there was a program to find and copy ancient manuscripts at Constantinople in the 9th and 10th century, and that often all surviving copies were either produced for this program, or are descendants of manuscripts from this program (see the article by Philip Rance above). And papyri and stories about the Library at Alexandria show that the scholars there created standard versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Works from the second half of the middle ages often survive in many versions with significant differences which the author produced at different times for different audiences, but differences between manuscripts of ancient texts usually seem to be copyists’ errors, editors’ corrections, or the result of damage to the manuscript from which this manuscript was copied.

This post is clunky because I show how I approach a problem and the way an expert goes from tool to tool does not make a good story (check the first place, skim it to see if it has what you need, free-associate it with a second place). This is not my specialty so its a lot like asking a surveyor to do trigonometry in 2024 when ever since they left school they let the machine do it. My next post will talk about why ownership history is hard to establish, and why its usually not important if you want to use a manuscript to study the ancient world.

(scheduled 26 February)

Edit 2024-04-27: Lutra @juliegiovacchini suggests a one-stop shop in Pinakes | Πίνακες : Textes et manuscrits grecs https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/cote/16568/