Like others, I have had my plans overturned by the pandemic. The manuscript hunting envisaged for this spring and summer had to be cancelled. I haven’t been to my office since the end of March, and our library is only now beginning to re-open. I had to rejig and reconsider, and ended up relying on whatever tomes I happened to have at home, and on what I could find online.
That has proved to have been an unwelcome but productive detour. In future posts I will say a bit more about the various little gems that have surfaced. For now, I will write about the people who made finding those gems possible: the angry dwarves of last week’s post – the MGH. Like other posts, this one is also intended to show how research actually works, the technical underpinnings of the stories we tell in books and lectures. And it is about conveying a sense of why historians trained as historians (not all of whom work at universities) find it so annoying when disgraced newspaper columnists and political novelty acts think that writing history consists of reading a few books, or when yet another newspaper columnist pontificates about the technical language of scholarly papers (well, it’s because there is a lot of technical work involved). Above all, though, what follows is a declaration of profound admiration and deep respect for, as well as of mild exasperation with angry dwarves.
Thorough and prolific
The MGH house journal contains a number of Reiseberichte, or accounts of archival trips. Both the range of materials consulted, and the relentless pursuit of manuscripts are quite something to behold.
Georg Waitz’ (1813-1886) three months archival sojourn in Italy in 1876 may serve as example. Between April and the end of June, he visited Rome, Naples and Monte Cassino, and was joined by Sigmund Heller, who had visited Milan and Modena en route to Rome. This was a preparatory scouting, in preparation for a series of new volumes in the MGH Scriptores, and to build on earlier trips by one of Waitz’s colleagues. Some of the problems he encountered sound eerily familiar. Manuscripts had been lost, while some libraries had ridiculous opening times (the Vallicelliana, for instance, was open only until noon, three days a week). The difficulties of gaining access to the Vatican library, Waitz drily remarked, were so well known that there was little point in rehearsing all too familiar grievances. Still, its prefect did what he could to assist, but the number of religious feast days (when the library would be closed) nonetheless grated with the Prussian bureaucrat.
Waitz and Heller consulted materials relating to writers from the seventh to the sixteenth century. They included fragments of Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, of a Neapolitan Chronicle from the fourteenth century, lives of SS Athanasius, the versions of the Lorsch Annals (a text of central significance for Carolingian history), Flodoard of Rheims (a major tenth-century writer), various eleventh-century treatises by Cardinal Peter Damian on the relationship between emperor and pope, one of the oldest manuscripts of the Gesta Treverorum (among the most popular historical narratives of the central middle Ages), Lambert of Ardes on the history of the counts of Guisnes (an exceptionally detailed history of a noble family), and manuscripts relating to Carolingian capitularies. The appendix runs to forty pages of manuscript lists and preliminary transcriptions.
Yet even Waitz’ efforts pale in comparison to Karl Hampe’s trip to England from July 1895 to January 1896 – the account of which fills 240 printed pages. It’s available here, here and here. Hampe trawled through materials at the British Library, the Public Record Office, various Oxford and Cambridge colleges, Durham, Winchester, Lambeth Palace, and Thomas Phillipps’s private library in Cheltenham. He compiled transcripts of papal letters, notices about thirteenth-century Austria, Italian chronicles, polemics from twelfth-century Germany and eleventh-century France, letters to and from Rudolf of Habsburg, by Hincmar of Rheims, Eduard I, II and III, and Hrabanus Maurus. During a single day at Winchester (24 December to boot), Hampe not only consulted a tenth-century verse poem, but also transcribed in its entirety a copy of Martin of Troppau’s thirteenth-century history of popes and emperors, which covers about 60 folios (pages).
Hampe and Waitz were as thorough as they were prolific. The RI-OPAC, the most comprehensive bibliographical database for medieval studies, lists over 400 publications by Waitz. The number is inflated: it includes pieces reprinted in his collected papers, later reprints, etc. Even so. Moreover, the chronological and geographical range evident in the trip to Italy also characterised Waitz’ published output. He edited texts as diverse as Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century History of the Lombards, Gerhard of Augsburg’s tenth-century Vita of St Ulrich, and Godfrey of Viterbo’s late twelfth-century verse epic about the deeds of emperors Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI. That’s on top of roughly 200 shorter items in the various Scriptores volumes that he oversaw.
And that’s still not all. Waitz pursued his editorial projects on top of an – initially – active political career. He had been elected a delegate to the National Assembly that convened at Frankfurt in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution. In characteristically eclectic fashion, he served on both the constitutional committee, and the one in charge of casinos (a delicate matter, given that the revolution had begun in Homburg over plans to close the local casino). Since 1844, he had also been a professor of history at the University of Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein. In addition, Waitz wrote a treatise on the origins of vassal-lord relations, a multi-volume history of Schleswig-Holstein, and an 8-volume constitutional of history of Germany from the fourth century to the later twelfth. In between, he and his wife Clara Schelling also managed to have seven children. Hampe’s merely 90 publications, most of them popular potboilers, pale by comparison. Yet even he published on subjects as diverse as Charlemagne and Widukind, Emperor Frederick II, a thirteenth-century Sicilian letter collection, and the concept of fortuna in the Middle Ages. They were as prolific as they were versatile.
Creating a text
Yet it is not just the range of their output that is impressive, but also the quality of the scholarship underpinning it. When Hampe and Waitz scouted the holdings of Modena, Durham, Monte Cassino and Rome, they built on earlier visits. Indeed, much of their work consisted of reviewing, revising and correcting transcriptions that had been produced during these earlier sojourns. They also spent a lot of time collating.
That is, they compared variations between manuscripts – a tedious but essential task. In a manuscript culture, there was not necessarily a clear standard text. Even the Bible was not immune to variations. However, unlike Scripture, chronicles, saints’ lives, treatises, etc. could be revised, improved, and added to. Scribes (or patrons) might be offended by a particular passage, and revise or amend it. They inserted additional information. They also left out things that they deemed to be too tedious or cumbersome. And sometimes they simply gave up because a text’s Latin was too abstruse, and produced a more readable and simplified version instead.
In order for a critical edition to be produced, these variations have to be listed. They offer insights, for instance, into a manuscript's provenance (changes might reflect regional scribal customs or vernaculars), and they tell us a lot about reception and scribal practices. They also provide a clue as to what the ‘best’ version of a manuscript might be – let’s say, if an author’s original copy no longer existed, that would be the oldest or, if a later copy, the one most closely related to what could have been the original text. It’s very complex and highly technical work (and one reason why to medievalists, unlike their modernist peers, editing a text does count as a major scholarly accomplishment).
After most of the manuscripts had been collated, editors produced a stemma of the likely transmission of a particular text. That included excerpts, revisions, and often different families of manuscripts – ones based or assumed to have drawn on a shared model. That’s rather useful if one is interested in pathways through which manuscripts circulated. Here’s an example from the MGH edition of Otto of Freising’s Chronica, of which over 40 medieval manuscripts survive:
It’s kind of confusing to look at, until one starts disentangling it a bit. In fact, the relationships were so complex that the stemma had to be divided into two (this is the second part). Nonetheless, the clusters of manuscripts, and putative lines of transmission become more easily visible (the description of the manuscripts on which this is based, by the way, runs to 60 pages).
Furthermore, in a manuscript culture, texts were often pulled together from a variety of earlier materials. That was the best way to ensure that important information survived. Sometimes writers copied other texts wholescale. This reflected the concept of authority and of trustworthiness, that is, authoritative sources ought to be copied at length (most medieval readers would also have been able to identify different registers and styles of Latin: there was no need to identify borrowings). Sometimes, though, they also mixed together bits and bobs from various texts to create a new narrative. One of the tasks of MGH editors was to identify such borrowings, and to make them visible in the printed edition. That can make pages quite hard to read, but then even Hampe and Waitz, one ventures, would not have proposed that Scriptores volumes made for great holiday reading. Here’s an example, from the MGH edition of the Annalista Saxo, a twelfth-century compilation:
Now compare this to what the same page looks like in the manuscript (Paris, BNF, Ms lat 11851):
The MGH edition shows nuances that merely looking at the manuscript would not convey. In this particular case, we can see how the scribe freely mixed his own words (printed larger than the others) with passages from other authors, which are helpfully identified, down to the respective lines in the relevant MGH edition. That approach is especially useful for a project like this, which is partly about tracing shared models, their uses and appropriation by medieval chroniclers, readers, and audiences. And hence one more reason why I am so in awe of those angry dwarves and their modern successors.
Against hero-worship
Nonetheless, it pays heeding some of the problems posed by the early MGH. As mentioned last week, its editors clearly were not interested in saints’ lives or religious matters. That can be frustrating. Worse, it could mislead about a narrative’s structure, content and purpose.
One of the writers I have recently been looking at is Reiner of St Lawrence, a Benedictine monk who lived in Liège in modern Belgium between c. 1120/30 and c. 1182. He was really a rather dull author. Max Manitius, writing in 1931, was probably right when he concluded that, given the overall quality of Reiner’s oeuvre, it was no great loss that his history of the First Crusade no longer survives. Still, Reiner is intriguing because of the range of subjects on which he wrote, and because of one particular text: the De ineptiis cuiusdam idiotae libellus (Little Book on the inadequate doings of an idiot), composed c. 1158-61. There, Reiner did something very, very rare: he recounted the texts produced by the monks of his community, followed by a list of his own writings, and a short treatise on the antiphons sung during Advent. I will come back to Reiner on another occasion, but suffice it to say that this kind of information is not easy to find. We can sometimes reconstruct the production of a monastic scriptorium from the handwriting or general design of manuscripts, because of incidental references to individuals, locations or events that can be traced, but we do not normally have a comprehensive list of works produced by a community and its members. Reiner’s list shows an exceptionally rich and varied literary culture, encompassing music, religion, poetry and sciences, for which otherwise very little evidence survives.
Yet Reiner wrote not a literary history, but a religious treatise. That makes the third part – about the antiphons to be sung during Advent – integral to the overall purpose of the original text. But, as it contained no ‘historically relevant’ observations, it was not deemed worthy of inclusion in the MGH edition (nor were several of Reiner's saints’ lives). In the process, the meaning of the text has been fundamentally changed. What was an effort to highlight the religious excellence of Reiner’s community, designed to inspire both awe and efforts to emulate it, has been reduced to a mere list of titles and topics.
None of this diminishes the debt we owe to the early MGH. Waitz, Hampe & Co. did create the foundations on which our modern understanding of the medieval past rests. It is largely because of their efforts that we can now complain that they did not always do a perfect job, and that we can attempt to improve upon their efforts. Indeed, while many of us lack the technical skills of a Waitz (I certainly do), he and his peers also developed the basic standard for training budding medievalists. At Aberystwyth, for example, postgraduates still have to take a year-long course in medieval palaeography (the study of medieval handwriting), while at the University of Vienna, the Institute of Austrian Historical research (which apparently is different from Swiss, German, Italian etc. historical research) remains exemplary in the training it provides in palaeography, numismatics (the study of coins), and diplomatics (the study of charter designs, language and production).
There remains a certain snobbery among medievalists that treasures editorial projects because (if done well) their usefulness will not easily be superseded. That is sometimes seen as in contrast to, as someone recently argued on social media, a tendency to follow new fads. There are some problems with the latter take. Hampe and Waitz were not averse to engaging in the ‘fads’ of their day. Waitz’ history of Schleswig-Holstein used the past to argue that Holstein could not be Danish, but must in fact be German. It earned him a rebuke from the Danish court. His constitutional history is a treasure trove of edited sources to back up conclusions that have long since been superseded, and that were based on premises that have been shown to be false. Hampe, in turn, wrote popular histories that propagated a strictly national and nationalist understanding of high medieval European history. They have aged very badly indeed.
More importantly, what some people call fads – and trends and fashions, often short-lived, certainly exist as much in academia as they do elsewhere – others call new perspectives. Most of us would, for instance, propose a fuller understanding of medieval sources as part of a distinctive cultural environment – as I suggested in relation to Reiner’s Libellus. Saints’ lives have been recognised as an important source for our understanding of religious mentalities. Women have been established as important cultural agents, despite their relative absence from many of the written sources. Constitutional history no longer postulates fundamental, unchanging written rules, but sees politics as a complex interplay of ideas, practices, norms, contingencies, networks, geography and individuals. And so on. That findings get overturned only means that our understanding of the past is being refined. That is no different from Waitz correcting the transcriptions of his predecessors, from Pertz and his peers seeking to move beyond the practices of Bouquet and Muratori, and so on. Each were William of Conches’ metaphorical dwarves who could look just a little bit further because they stood on the shoulders of giants.
