Philology, Codicology, Critical Edition

Against the opinion (false, to my mind) that Lachmannian textual criticism consists only in outdated technicalities, other voices, much more authoritative, but perhaps unheeded and certainly less mainstream, support the contrary view. Among the numerous aspects of this debate, by no means secondary is the constitution of digital text and apparatus in cases of complex recensio: between the extremes of a Lachmannian selective apparatus, and of a Bédier-style “democratic” one, the rules for a comprehensive digital apparatus remain to be created, and the enormous technical problems of tagging cannot and must not obscure the quintessentially scientific ones of the critical approach. With a series of operational reflections on two case studies (Cicero and Seneca the Philosopher), I try to trace a pathway that, while keeping a proper distance from any antiscientific, anticritical, antilachmannian, descriptive and genetic drift, makes it possible to find, if one exists, a principium individuationis of the digital edition, with repercussions backwards, so to speak, on the choice of variants in the apparatus as traditionally printed.

The difference between error and variance in trouvère melody is notoriously difficult to determine with precision.  Musical errors cannot be identified unless the grammar and style of the repertoire is already known. However, without knowing what is error and what is idiom, it is impossible to describe style and grammar with certainty. A vicious circle potentially arises in which unusual melodic shapes are called errors and errors are considered valid musical choices. The only solution is an enriched understanding of melodic change and of transmission. It may not be possible, or indeed relevant, to identify a ‘correct’ reading of any given song. It is possible, however, to outline some of the crucial connections between melodic variance and musical notation. My paper builds a new method for comparing musical variants by a close analysis of notation in the maligned manuscript F-Pn fr. 24406 (Trouvère siglum V). The article considers the two music notators from this source in order to show their skills and incompetences as readers of music and of text. These scribes have usually been disregarded in editions, dismissed as musically ‘unreliable.’  Re-examination shows that the notators’ competences has been underestimated. Erasures and additions reveal their attention to their own over-sights and show that they worked with ambiguous exemplars. Many errors are more akin to re-spellings, translations from one notational system to another. To this end, my work focuses on the aspect of musical notation most easily related to textual philology: the syllabification of the melody. Reconsidering these scribes shows: a) that they are musically competent, though unreliable when parsing text; b) that textual confusion leads them into patterns of errors and corrections that ultimately shape the musical contours; and c) that these errors and corrections are more creative than those terms imply. I coin the word glissement de texte to describe these intentional errors, controlled slips of the pen.

My purpose in the article is to describe the range of attitudes and techniques used in the process of notating trouvère song. These variant attitudes shine through most clearly in cases of self-correction and adjustments to the music in response to the exemplar made by the copyists. In the field of medieval literature, such habits of correction and adaptation have been studied, particularly in the case of verse narrative. Music scribes have yet to receive such attention. This study of monophonic song reveals a particularly rich diversity of scribal approaches. The medieval practice of contrafaction, setting multiple texts to the same melody, provides a wealth of evidence for study of this kind. In such cases scribes reveal how they prioritize the consistency of a melodic shape against the requirements of fitting music to text. Certain scribes take care to regularize the verses they copy according to an over-arching concept of the piece, matching the music to the text and to the verse-form (and attempting to reconcile these two when they are in conflict). Others base inventive readings on their own (or their exemplars’) mistakes. An easily corrected discrepancy, such as a split ligature or a skipped or repeated note, could result in a revised picture of the entire melody later in the piece. The scribe’s entire conception of the piece thus appears to be shaped by the real-time process of copying. My study is a defense of this supposed failure to correct.

Certain supposed  errors persist across melodic families, seemingly arising independently in what philologists have identified as different branches of the stemma. The determination that one reading is standardized and another divergent can only be made once a standard form for a given piece has been established. When this formal categorization already depends on the sources themselves, the reasoning becomes circular. Even when grammatical study proves these variants to be errors, resistance to erasure cannot be explained as negligence, as some scribes would take the trouble to extend melodic gestures or cut and paste fragments in order to bring text and music back into line with each other. The examples in this article are chosen in order to identify genuine disagreements about form as well as differing approaches to representing it on parchment. This examination brings us closer on the path from differences in how scribes wrote the music to how they heard it as well.

The prologue to Pompeius’ Commentum artis Donati is missing in Heinrich Keil’s edition (in the fifth volume of his Grammatici Latini, 1868) and only partially restored by Louis Holtz (“Revue de philologie” 97, 1971, 48-83) on the basis of two manuscripts. This paper aims to present a complete re-edition of the prologue, based on the collation of one additional witness as well as on a thorough reconsideration of the manuscript tradition of the Commentum in its entirety.
Alongside an examination of the main textual problems of the prologue, I will also analyse the important contribution offered by the indirect tradition, namely Julian of Toledo, the so-called Anonymus ad Cuimnanum, the Ars Ambrosiana, Sedulius Scottus’ commentary on Donatus and the anonymous commentary on the Ars Minor in the ms. Barcellona, Arxiu de la Corona d'Aragó, Diversos y Collecciones, Ripoll 46.

Antitesi rivolta a un ortodosso da parte di un eretico che sostiene le dottrine del pneumatomaco Macedonio (Introduzione, testo greco e traduzione italiana, commento). Excerpta ex Dissertatione ad Doctoratum in Theologia et Scientiis Patristicis consequendum. Romae 2019

The study of the Avadānaśataka was placed upon a firm philological
foundation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but more manuscripts have since become available, prompting questions about the history of this Buddhist narrative collection. The present article mainly considers what new light one such manuscript, Nepal German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP) MS E-1554/24, may shed upon this history and other issues related to the study of this work. It argues that evidence remains inconclusive for establishing the hypothesis that NGMPP E-1554/24 is the direct source for Cambridge University Library (CUL) MS Add 1611, the primary witness for the principal modern edition of the work, but the essay also engages a series of broader questions about how we use manuscripts, what questions those manuscripts can answer, and how scholars interested in Buddhist narrative literature could best spend their time. It calls for scholars to direct efforts toward making works of Buddhist narrative literature like the Avadānaśataka and the Kalpadrumāvadānamālā more widely accessible, and establishing the intertextual relationships between them and other works of Buddhist narrative literature. This will require a compete new translation of the former, an edition and translation of the latter, and indeed a reconceptualization of the task at hand.

Keywords : Critical philology, Buddhist narrative literature, Sanskrit
manuscript studies, Avadānaśataka, Kalpadrumāvadānamālā

The traditional output of philological work aiming at the constitutio textus is the print critical edition with apparatus footnotes showing select variant readings. The digital scholarly edition, instead, is not constrained by the space limits of the printed page, so it can encode and visualize synoptically many versions of a text, as found in different textual witnesses. This opportunity has often been exploited by New Philology editions, in which textual versions are juxtaposed without any attempt to reconstruct an "original" text. However, the digital critical edition can constitute a "third way" between constitutio textus and New Philology: the digital editor can provide different versions of a text from individual witnesses and add a further version, the editor's own textus constitutus, thus putting Giorgio Pasquali's "critica del testo" in the framework of the "storia della tradizione".

Sull'Uomo Vitruviano. Resoconto divulgativo di un saggio pubblicato nel catalogo della mostra leonardiana di Venezia, Gallerie dell'Accademia, inauguratasi il 16 aprile 2019 («F.P. Di Teodoro, “Vetruvio architecto mecte nella sua op(er)a d'architectura che lle misure dell'omo”: filologia del testo e inciampi vitruviani nel foglio 228 di Venezia).

The manuscript Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R 61 sup. belong to the first unit of the S. Maria Incoronata Augustinian Library in Milan. Its bookbinding is made up of bare boards covered by half-skin and guard-leafs of reused parchments. On these parchments are scarcely legible the texts of twenty imbreviaturaewritten in Cremona for Giovannibuono de Giroldis from April to June 1260. These imbreviaturae belong to a little group of survival notarial registers of XIIIth century and they record a crucial period in the history of the Church and the city of Cremona.

Beiträge der Greifswalder Tagung »Verzettelt, verschoben, verworfen« (2014), welche die Problemlage, die sich im Rahmen der Rekonstruktion der Textgenese von Wolfgang Koeppens Jugend ergeben hat, im weiteren Zusammenhang der Literatur der Moderne erörtern und Perspektiven einiger Grundfragen der Editionsphilologie aufzeigen.

The article proposes 65 alternative readings in respect to DJD or to the other editions of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In many cases these new readings are “only” alternatives in orthography, in some cases they correct printing errors in the editions, some are substantial changes of the published text, sometimes my obserbation is only that the published text is problematic without being able to propose a better reading. Most of the new readings are based on material evidence, i.e. on the examination of the published photographs. For some readings, especially for some reconstructions, grammatical reasons are given.