Ownership History is Hard and Often Does Not Matter

To establish the ownership history of a manuscript, you need to do archival research in auction catalogues and library catalogues and lists of bookplates and stamps. This history will usually have gaps, because ownership is not a physical property of an object which leaves indelible traces, but a social agreement. People steal books and manuscripts, people sell books and manuscripts which don’t belong to them, people forge evidence that a book or manuscript belonged to someone famous, and people burn the records of grandpa’s used books business to tidy up after his death. Its hard to track the ownership of Greek manuscripts during the fifteenth century for the same reason its hard to track the ownership of antiquities during the 1940s. And if you are using a manuscript to understand the ancient world, the ownership history is not really important. Let me explain.

Classicists are not very interested in the ownership history of the manuscripts because after eliminating manuscripts which are copies of other surviving manuscripts, they can use the remaining manuscripts, the papyri, and other early Greek prose to check each other. Lets imagine that Mirror Universe Uhura got stuck in the 17th century and offered to create a fake manuscript of Herodotus with her replicator in exchange for some refined antimony to repair her time machine (philologists don’t get many chances to use their powers for evil). Lets imagine that Jakob Gronovius knows exactly what a literary manuscript from the tenth century with annotations from the 13th century and the 15th century would look like, and is a master of Herodotus’ style of Greek and the archives of Italian libraries. Uhura’s replicator can easily fool tests from the pre-warp era like Carbon-14. Jacob Gronovius can make Herodotus say whatever he wants. There is just one small problem.

Every time that Gronovius changes something in his model, whether to add proof that Herodotus visited Leiden or because its late at night and he had a pitcher of beer, he still creates a signal which stands out as soon as scholars compare his manuscript to the other manuscripts. He is creating an innovation which separates his new manuscript from its model. And innovations are how scholars decide that one manuscript was based on another manuscript, or is generations farther than the last common ancestor than another manuscript. At best this change would become a variation noted in the critical apparatus, but as it happened more often it would cause A to be downgraded from ‘the most important manuscript.’

Ownership history is most important when there is just one copy of a text. Ever since Dirk Obbink announced a papyrus with a fragment of a poem by Sappho, there has been controversy because he can’t show where it came from and he appears to have sold off papyri from his employer’s collection to a private collection in the USA. A thief could easily slip into forgery. But I don’t know of any time since the sixteenth century that someone forged hundreds of pages of a classical text, because once the sciences of textual criticism and codicology were established its too much work and too easy to detect. In the article which I quoted in my last post, McNeal counts fifty manuscripts of Herodotus which nobody has cared about since it was demonstrated that they descended from an older manuscript which still exists (and we know what a Greek manuscript from the tenth century looks like through thousands of manuscripts, most of which are things like ‘acts of a church council on when penance by bread and water should be reduced due to infirmity’ or ‘the life of saint Obscura by someone who would rather be working in the monastery garden’). Hude knew ancient papyri with phrases from about 80 chapters of Herodotus, and these also provide an independent way of checking the medieval manuscripts of Herodotus (although most of these fragments are very short).

Research by and for classicists goes into issues like “did the text begin ‘Herodotus of Thurii’ like Aristotle says, or ‘Herodotus of Halicarnassus’ like in our manuscripts?” or “the manuscripts of book 7 chapter 65 say that Indians wear garments of tree, but by comparing other passages Herodotus clearly meant tree-wool or cotton, perhaps a word dropped out?” Public-facing research does not do this so often, because it takes time to set the stage and walk through the technical details. Audio and video presentations are especially likely to skip the details which are not essential to the argument because you just can’t fit as many details into a talk as a book. Pop natural science rarely goes in to which medium the bacteria was grown on or exactly what statistical tests were performed, even though these details can separate a convincing study from cargo-cult science. Its just hard to make them interesting to anyone who does not practice lab science or statistical science.

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Further Reading

Federico Botana and Laura Cleaver eds., The Economics of the Manuscript and Rare Book Trade, ca. 1890–1939 (Arc Humanities Press, 2024) https://www.arc-humanities.org/9781802700978/the-economics-of-the-manuscript-and-rare-book-trade-ca-18901939/

Maas, Paul (1960) Textkritik (B.G. Teubner: Leipzig) {the standard advanced textbook for classicists, an English translation by Barbara Flower entitled Textual Criticism is available}

Trachsler, Richard (2006) “How to Do Things with Manuscripts: From Humanist Practice to Recent Textual Criticism,” Textual Cultures 1.1 (2006) pp. 5-28

(scheduled 29 February 2024)