When Migne started compiling the Patrologia Latina, he did no editing himself. Nor would his business model allow him to hire anyone to do that kind of work. His was a grab-and-print type operation. This also required that he was able to draw on a rich tradition of printed sources and materials from which to select, and in which to find the kind of materials he wanted to disseminate. And those take us back, first, to the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries, and, second, a rather different kind of approach to the medieval past that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Migne’s was a commercial as well as a religious enterprise. As regards the latter, he could build on a well-established Catholic tradition. Of course, the desire to compile reliable copies of texts, to find the best version, and so on, was not a modern development. It already existed in the Middle Ages, though within somewhat different parameters (about which more in a future blog). For our purposes, a key event was the Catholic Reformation of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and Jean Bolland (1596-1665) a key figure. A Jesuit, Bolland became a member of a group of scholars – later named the Bollandists - who sought to find the best possible evidence for the lives of saints, edit it, and print it. Their project – the Acta Sanctorum – is still going, though now under the aegis of the Belgian government. The Acta are organised day by day, following a saint's feast day. Given the sheer wealth of writings about saints, the Acta remain one of the key sources for the lives of saints.
As with Migne, the endeavour wasn’t just scholarly: it was also aimed at rebutting protestant polemics against the cult of the saints, and to ensure that these cults were based on a credible and trustworthy textual basis. If necessary, this did mean ruffling some feathers even among Catholics: the so-called ‘Carmelite controversy’ provides a case in point. By the early modern period, the Carmelites, a religious order that had emerged in the aftermath of the thirteenth-century mendicants (think Dominicans and Franciscans), claimed that they had in fact been founded by none other than the Prophet Elijah (of the Old Testament). The Bollandists quickly proved that there was no evidential basis for this claim. The resulting controversy dragged on for nearly twenty years, until an exasperated pope finally put an end to it.
Bolland and his colleagues formed part of a broader movement to produce reliable versions of medieval religious texts. Another important figure was Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), a Benedictine monk in Paris, who initially started out as an editor of the works of St Bernard of Clairvaux. However, in the 1670s, the Jesuits began to raise claims about the supposed origins of Mabillon’s erstwhile community of St Denis. He responded by publishing what remains the oldest textbook on diplomatics (the study of charters), published in 1681. Its publication resulted in a commission from the king to collect and gather medieval manuscripts for the royal library. And in 1925 a Paris metro station was named after him.
Alongside religious motivations, the need to justify claims to antiquity and precedent also played an important part. That had, after all, provided the impetus for Mabillon’s work on palaeography. Combined with a more antiquarian interest in simply recording the past, both soon drew the interest of individuals as diverse as William Dugdale (1605-1686) and Georg Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum began as a rescue mission. In 1641, fearing that the Puritans - a veritable early modern English Taliban – would triumph, and weary of what this heralded for the surviving medieval archives of English cathedrals, Dugdale embarked upon a hurried tour of these archives, transcribing as much as he could. This was followed by further research in the Tower, and in Oxford, resulting in the publication of the Monasticon first in Latin, and then English. It remains the first comprehensive survey of England’s medieval monastic landscape, with copies of texts and documents, some of which have since been lost or destroyed.
Dugdale’s endeavours were rather a side interest. He earned his living as royal herald. Leibniz conformed to the same pattern. He was a courtier scholar, initially employed by the archbishop of Mainz, who even funded his stay in Paris for several years – just at the height of the Carmelite controversy. Leibniz’ interests lay in natural philosophy and astronomy, with history more a side pursuit. However, once the archbishop died, Leibniz needed a new employer. He eventually found one at the court of the elector of Hanover. Leibniz must have been quite a difficult figure to live with – to the end of his life, he dressed in the manner once fashionable in Paris in the 1670s, and complained bitterly about the mediocrities surrounding him in the intellectual backwaters of rural Lower Saxony. Which is understandable. Even today Hanover is the type of place that kind visitors might euphemistically describe as sleepy and quaint. This to a man who had been friends with Huygens and Spinoza, a rival to Newton, and at the heart of a network of correspondents that spanned most of Europe. Leibniz was not so much a big fish in a small pond, as a giant shark trapped in a tiny sink. That, on becoming king of England and Scotland, the elector refused to take Leibniz with him to London must really have grated. In the end, for Leibniz editing texts was partly an attempt to keep boredom at bay, partly one to curry favour with his increasingly disenchanted employers. Still, he was one of the first to see the merits of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia, a phenomenal compendium of useful and entertaining knowledge compiled in the early thirteenth century by an English cleric for a Welf duke (it will get its own post). For nearly two centuries the edition produced by Leibniz remained the most reliable one. He also produced a compilation of texts about the local history of Braunschweig and of the Welf dukes, the Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium (3 volumes, Hanover 1707-11). Like Dugdale, Leibniz was thus another example of history as something done alongside other things – a phenomenon with which most medieval chroniclers would have been familiar.
Leibniz also points to the developments of the eighteenth century – truly a subject worthy of its own and far more detailed investigation. Recovering the past moved from compiling sources for a particular region or court to those of a wider polity – whether real or imagined. The process was slow and by no means linear, and obviously reflected the developments sketched here so far. Edmond Martène (1654-1739) and Ursin Durand (1682-1771), both Benedictine monks, followed in the footsteps of Mabillon in scouting the archives of libraries of France to gather information about the rule of St benedict, but quickly realised the treasure trove that had unearthed, and which they published as Thesaurus Novus Anecdotorum (5 vols, 1707) and the Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum historicorum, dogmatiorum et moralium amplissima collection (9 vols., 1724-1733). In 1758, Giovanni Domenico Mansi (1692-1769), who eventually became archbishop of Lucca, began publishing a collection of the decrees and proceedings of church councils. The Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio (31 vols, 1758-99) ended with council of Florence in 1439, but only because funding had dried up in the midst of the Napoleonic wars. Only in the twentieth century were another 20 volumes edited, taking matters up to Vatican I. While Martène, Durand and Mansi were initially motivated by religious concerns, their fellow-priest Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), librarian at the ducal library of Modena, aimed to collate the entirety of medieval narrative sources for the history of Italy. The Rerum italicarum Scriptores ab anno æræ christianæ 500 ad annum 1500 was published in 28 volumes between 1723 and 1751.
What were the major themes running through these examples? First, these were attempts to collate and produce reliable and trustworthy texts. The goal was to provide in print and thus in a manner that was more easily accessible, key documents for the history of communities, religious practices, and legal customs and prerogatives. Often, editors had to develop methodologies from scratch, or at least attempt to systematise quite disparate approaches. Hence Mabillon’s textbook. They were still beginning to find their feet, hence collections like Mansi’s or Muratori’s have largely been superseded, while Martène and Durand’s is of use primarily because it contains snippets that have since been lost, or that are so opaque that no subsequent editor bothered revisiting them. Second, many of these endeavours were born from a moment of crisis or challenge. That was evidently the case with the Bollandists, but also drove some of Muratori’s efforts, and underpinned Mansi’s. Those challenges could be cultural and institutional (the Catholic reformation, aggrieved Carthusians), but also personal (poor Leibniz in his Hanoverian backwater). Third, and finally, in most cases these were side projects. Among Muratori, for instance, was much more famous for his writings on law, Christian theology, and the literature of the Renaissance. Mansi was banned from the college of cardinals because he had edited and annotated Diderot’s Encyclopédie. And we’ve already dealt with Leibniz.
In this sense, these seventeenth-and eighteenth century compilers and editors are little different from their medieval predecessors or their nineteenth-century successors. They were still moderns sitting on the shoulders of ancient giants. Yet they also alert us to lines of traditions, and to important antecedents on which the nineteenth-century developments built in turn. The foundations for the professionalisation of history were laid by learned monks and priests with often very different expectations and goals from their later readers. At the same time, the importance of outsiders continued – as with Giles or Migne or the story of the Cairo Geniza. Equally, there would have been no Migne without Muratori, Martène and Durand. Their efforts also provided the impetus for and a model against which to define the projects that emerged in the nineteenth century.
A note
This sequence of posts has become rather longer than I initially anticipated. It was fun, and I really enjoyed it, not least because some of the characters discussed are fascinating, because they are so important for our modern understanding of the Middle Ages, because they don’t really fit into the neat narratives often peddled by modern historians about the emergence of the discipline, and because they point to the importance of ‘outside’ actors, of – very accomplished and well-educated – amateurs, and so on. But it’s also rather a digression from what this blog – and this project – are about. Hence, there will be one more post on this topic. And here’s a few books by people who know much more about early modern historical culture, and which anyone wanting to explore these issues further is herewith most warmly invited to peruse.
Probably the best and most comprehensive (and very readable) general account is Daniel Woolf’s A Global History of History (2011). Woolf also wrote an excellent book on historical culture in early modern Britain, though the publisher’s pricing is rather offputting: The Social Circulation of the Past (2003). For the early modern texts, I rather enjoyed Anthony Grafton’s What Was History? The art of history in early modern Europe (2012). His Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (2009) shows how the ideal of scholarly communities, of a republic of letters extending beyond formal affiliation, continues into the twentieth century. See also Paulina Kewes, The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2006).
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