The one problem with the bracket notation is that it can only be used for add/omit readings. Where two readings are equally good, but one substitutes for the other, there is no way to indicate the degree of uncertainty expressed by the brackets. This has caused some editors (e.g. Bover) to avoid the use of brackets; these editors simply print the text they think best.
The third course, and probably the best in terms of treating all variants equally, is to do as Westcott and Hort did and have noteworthy marginal readings. But this policy has not been adopted by modern editors.
Enter Hamlet
HAMLET:
To be, or not to be -- that is the
question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to
S
U
F
F
E
R
The codex was in fact what moderns think of as a book -- a series of leaves folded and bound together, usually within covers. Codices could be made of parchment or papyrus (or, of course, paper, once it became available). Whichever writing material was used, a series of sheets would be gathered and folded over, meaning that each sheet yielded four pages. These gatherings of leaves are normally referred to as quires.
Many of the earliest codices consisted of only a single quire of many pages. Examples of single-quire codices include P5 (probably), P46, and P75. Single-quire codices, however, are inconvenient in many ways: They do not fold flat, they often break at the spine, and the outside edges of the page are not even. Still more troublesome is the fact that the scribe had to estimate, before the copying process began, how many leaves would be needed. If the estimate was inaccurate, the codex would be left with blank pages at the end, or -- even worse -- a few extra pages which would have to be somehow attached to the back of the document. As a result, it became normal to assemble books by placing smaller quires back to back. This can be seen as early as P66, which uses quires of from four to eight sheets (16 to 32 pages). Quires of four sheets (16 pages) eventually became relatively standard, although there are many exceptions (B, for example, uses five-sheet quires).
It is sometimes stated that the Christians invented the codex. This is of course not true; the word itself is old (Latin caudex properly refers to a tree trunk, hence to anything made of wood, and hence came specifically to mean a set of waxed tablets hinged together. E. Maunde Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography, p. 51, notes that Ulpian in the third century makes reference to literary codices). Indeed, we have quite a few examples of pagan literature on codices in the early centuries of the Christian Era; David Diringer (The Book Before Printing, p. 162) surveyed known manuscripts from Oxyrhynchus (as of half a century ago), noting that of 151 pagan documents known to him from the third to sixth centuries, fully 39 were codices. And Jerome mentioned a number of pagan codices in his possession (Thompson, p. 53). It has been suggested that, prior to the church's adoption of the form, the scroll was for literary works intended to be read while the codex was for reference works. But the church does seem to have been responsible for the popularity of the codex format (e.g. in Diringer's example, of 82 Christian documents, 67 were codices), and scrolls seem to have remained the preferred format for pagan literary works after codices were adopted for most other purposes. There is even an instance (in the Stockholm Codex Aureus) of an illustration in which Matthew the Evangelist is shown holding a scroll and an angel carrying a codex; this is thought to mean that Matthew is holding the Law of the Old Testament but is being handed a codex which will represent the New.
We should also note that a sort of proto-codex existed in the form of the orihon.
We observe that the codex has both advantages and disadvantages for literature, especially when dealing with papyrus codices. It requires less material (which may be why the Christians adopted it), and it's easier to find things in a codex. But it's rather harder to write (since one must write against the grain on a papyrus, or on the rough side of a piece of vellum), and one also has to estimate the length of the finished work more precisely. The latter disadvantages probably explain why the Christians were the first to use the codex extensively: They needed a lot of books, and didn't have much money; pagans didn't need so many books, so they felt the disadvantages of the codex more, and the advantages less.
Codices have another advantage, though it wasn't realized at the time: They survive abuse better. Being flat, there are no air pockets to collapse, and they protect their contents better. At Herculaneum, thousands of scrolls were discovered, rolled up and damaged by the conditions that buried them. Centuries of efforts to open and read them accomplished little except to ruin the documents involved. Had the documents been stored in codex form, their outer leaves would have been destroyed but the inner would likely have been in much more usable shape.
The sections of codices were usually numbered. But unlike modern books, it was not individual pages that were numbered, but whole quires. This suggests, to me at least, that the primary purpose was not to make it easier to find things in the volumes but rather to tell the binder the order of the quires. It was not until about the fourteenth century that actual page numbering became common, and even then, it was tied to quire numbering (e.g. the first page would not be "1" but "A.i" and the seventeenth, which would be the first of the second quire in a typical book, would not be "17" but "B.i").
It is worth noting that the Complutensian was not the first attempt at a polyglot. It appears that the great printer Aldus Manutius set up samples for some sort of an edition, and in 1516, a Pentaglott Psalter was published in Genoa with texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and Arabic. (Why start with a psalter? Don't ask me.) But Ximenes deserves credit for both attempting the first New Testament, and the first full Greek Bible, and the first polyglot with the New Testament. Cisneros started the project in 1502; some say it was in celebration of the birth of the heir to the Habsburg dynasty, the future Emperor Charles V.
The place of the printing was Alcalá (Complutum). The Old Testament was to include Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, with Aramaic (the Targum of Onkelos) as a footnote to the Pentateuch; the New Testament was given in Greek and Latin, with additional scholarly tools. The editors were an interesting and distinguished group -- Ælius Antonius of Lebrixa, Demetrius Ducas of Crete, Ferdinandus Pincianus, Diego Lopez de Zuñiga (Stunica, the fellow who eventually had the controversy with Erasmus over 1 John 5:7-8), Alfonsus de Zamora, Paulus Coronellus, and Johannes de Vergera (the last three converted Jews, and Ducas presumably the descendent of Byzantine Christians, so they represent a wide range of viewpoints. It is interesting to note that different modern texts give different lists of editors -- not just spelling the names differently but adding or omitting various people; I've included every name I've found).
The planning for the volume began in 1502, though it took almost a dozen years for printing to begin. There were six volumes, and the whole thing is estimated to have cost 50,000 ducats -- a large fraction of the revenues of the entire diocese of Alcalá.
The printer was Arnald William de Brocario. It is reported that 600 copies were printed, of which three were on vellum, the rest on paper. Almost a hundred of them still survive. Volume V, containing the New Testament, was finished early in 1514 (it is worth noting that Paul precedes the Acts in this volume). Volume VI, with a lexicon, index, and other aids, was completed in 1515, and the other four volumes, containing the Old Testament (with, of course, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books) came off the press in 1517. Ximenes unfortunately died late in that year. Papal approval was much delayed (some have said the Pope wouldn't approve the book until borrowed manuscripts were returned, or that the death of Ximenes caused problems, but we don't really don't know the reason); the imprimatur came in 1520, and the volumes were finally made available to the public apparently in 1522.
The appearance of the Greek New Testament has sparked much discussion. (Interestingly, the Greek of the Septuagint is in a more normal Greek style, and uses a font similar to those produced by Aldus Manutius for his Greek books.) It is sometimes said that nothing like the font used for the New Testament has ever been seen. This is exaggerated. What is unusual is not the font but the orthography. There are no rough or smooth breathings, and the accents are peculiar. (Make you wonder if Demetrias Ducas spoke an odd dialect or something. Scrivener, to be sure, denies this, pointing out that Ducas composed some Greek verse which was perfectly well-written and pointed, so he could write "proper" Greek.) The font itself is not particularly unusual. Metzger-Text, p. 85, says the "type used in the New Testament volume is modelled after the style of the handwriting in manuscripts of about the eleventh or twelfth century, and is very bold and elegant." Bold and elegant is certainly is -- but also much simplified from hand-written models. It is very much closer to an earlier Greek typeface, used by Sweynheym and Pannartz in 1465 to print Lactantius. There are differences, to be sure (the delta in the Polyglot is more uncial, while the Lactantius is like a minuscule delta; the Lactantius uses only one form of the letter sigma, the Lactantius uses an uncial gamma and a very strange beta). But the feeling of the two is very similar; the Complutensian is simply a much more refined version of the same style.
The interesting question is why the compositors changed fonts; why, after using such a beautiful Greek face for the New Testament, did they shift to the ugly Aldine fonts for the Old? The Aldine fonts were immensely complicated (see the article on Books and Bookmaking); was it merely that they hadn't managed to cut such a font in time? Were there complaints about the modern-looking fonts? (And if so, why, given that no one except the publishers had seen the books?) Was it something about the source manuscripts? (This seems unlikely, but since the manuscripts are unknown, it's perhaps possible.) Did the publisher bring in new typesetters who could set the more elaborate Aldine faces and keep track of the accents? My guess is the latter, but it is unlikely that we will ever now.
As mentioned, the manuscripts underlying the Complutensian Polyglot have never been identified, though there is no doubt that the text is largely Byzantine. (Scrivener, p. 180, says that there are 2780 differences from the Elzevir text -- 1046 in the Gospels, 578 in Paul, 542 in Acts and the Catholic Epistles, 614 in the Apocalypse -- which about the same as the number of differences between Elzevir and the true Majority Text. And Scrivener says there are only about 50 typographical errors.) The editors did thank the Pope for use of manuscripts, but there are chronological problems with this; it is likely that, if the Vatican supplied Greek manuscripts, they were used only for LXX, not the NT. (Several scholars say explicitly that two Vatican manuscripts were used for LXX, perhaps those numbered 108 and 248.) Stunica makes explicit reference to one Greek manuscript in the New Testament, but this manuscript (Tischendorf/Scrivener 52a) is lost.
Scrivener notes some interesting and unusual readings of the polyglot's Greek text (e.g. Luke 1:64 αυτον διηρθρωθη και ελαλει with 251 and a handful of other manuscripts; Luke 2:22), and observes that some have seen similarities to 4e, 42, 51. There seems to have been no real attempt to follow up these hints, probably because the Polyglot had no real influence on later printed editions. I strongly suspect that, if anyone really cared, we could identify most of these manuscripts now, simply because we have much more complete catalogs of variants.
It may be that relatively little attention was devoted to the Greek text by the editors. That the Latin was considered more important than the Greek is obvious from the handling of 1 John 5:7-8 (and even more from the comment on the Old Testament that they had placed the Latin in the middle column, between Hebrew and Greek, like Jesus between the two thieves), but Scrivener denies that the Greek was systematically conformed to the Latin -- he believes (Plain Introduction, fourth edition, volume II, p. 177) that the crack about the two thieves was an indication that the editors though the Greek and Hebrew corrupted, and so trusted the Latin more.
The Greek text of the New Testament isn't the only peculiar attribute of the Polyglot. The Hebrew of the Old Testament is not pointed according to the usual method; rather, it appears to conform to the Babylonian pointing. Manuscripts of this type are now few; it is likely that the Polyglot used some now-lost sources (unless, as with the Greek, the editors simply adopted their own pointing system). This would seem to imply that the Complutensian is more significant for Old than New Testament criticism.
In fullest form, the Alexandrians used six symbols:
| Symbol | Name | Purpose |
| - | Obelus | Oldest and most basic (and occasionally shown in other forms); indicates a spurious line. (Used by Origen in the Hexapla to indicate a section found in the Hebrew but not the Greek. For this purpose, of course, it had sometimes to be inserted into the text, rather than the margin, since the LXX, unlike Homer, was prose rather than poetry.) |
 | Diple | Indicates a noteworthy point (whether an unusual word or an important point of content). Often used in conjunction with scholia. |
 | periestigmene (dotted diple) | Largely specific to Homer; indicates a difference between editions |
 | Asteriskos | A line repeated (incorrectly) in another context (the location of the repetition was marked with the asterisk plus obelus). (Used by Origen to note a place where the Greek and Hebrew were not properly parallel.) |
| - | Asterisk plus obelus | Indicates the repetition of a passage which correctly belongs elsewhere (the other use, where the passage is "correct," is also marked, but only with the asterisk) |
 | Antistigma | Indicates lines which have been disordered |
often of secular than biblical documents. A drollery, in this context, was a fantastic creature, often drawn in the margins of a manuscript. At right: Two drolleries from a French manuscript, perhaps intended to be a duck-billed elephant and a bird-horse chimera. We might note that not all drolleries are strange creatures set in margins. In the Lindisfarne Gospels, for instance, letters may become drolleries. The first two letters of Jerome's preface to the Gospels are P and L (from "plures"). The P is a snake with the head of a dog (I think) but the tongue of a serpent; the L is perhaps intended to be a snake with a bird's head. There are many other instances of these snakes-with-bird-heads. These might not always be called drolleries (they might be regarded as illuminations), but the resulting creatures are generally quite improbable. And they may well be the ancestors of true drolleries; in the Lindisfarne Gospels, although there is much decoration of letters, we see no letters containing miniature pictures. This is thought to have begun about a half a century later (i.e. around 750), and it was in these miniatures that drolleries became commonplace.
Many mistakes in copying arise when a scribe misreads the exemplar. Handwriting being what it is, chances are that, on occasion, almost everything has been read as something else. But some errors are much more likely than others. In Greek uncials, for example, the shown at right were frequently and easily confused: In Greek minuscule hands, with many different styles and vast numbers of ligatures, there were many more combinations which might be confused occasionally. Some of the most common confusions, however, include
β κ μ
μ ν
ευ
It will be noted that errors which could occur in uncials are more important for the history of the text, as these errors could have arisen early in the history of copying.
Similar confusions could, of course, occur in other languages. The list for Coptic, for instance, closely resembled the Greek list, as Coptic letters were based on the Greek. Latin had its own list. In uncials, the primary problems were:
I L T
F P R
C E O G U
EU COG
(the list for inscriptional capitals is somewhat different, as E, for example, was straight in capitals but curved in uncials. Since, however, there are no known copies of the New Testament inscribed on stone tablets, this is of little concern.)
Easily confused letters in Latin minuscule script include
a u
o e
cl d
n u
s f
c t
In addition, almost any combination of letters with many vertical strokes (such as i l m n t) could cause confusion. Particular scripts might add additional confusions; Beneventan script, for instance, used an odd form of the letter t which closely resembles the letter a!
Also, it's worth remembering that the above lists are based on book hands. In the days when almost all copying was done by trained copyists, one could expect nearly everything to be written in such hands. But as literacy became widespread, this tended to break down. Casual writers could produce almost anything. A book on English letterforms, for instance, gives samples of sixteenth century writing which show forms of the letter a which look like b, n, u, and w; many writers made c resemble t; d and e could both look like a theta (!), and so forth.
A final reminder concerns numbers. In Greek as in most modern languages, a number could be written as a numeral or spelled out (e.g. in Rev. 13:18, the "number of the beast" could be εξακοσιοι εξηκοντα εξ or ΧΞΣ'. It will be evident that this can produce different confusions. (Though this class of error is perhaps more likely in Latin, with its repeated I and X symbols, than Greek.)
This is one of the arguments often cited by those who favor the Byzantine or the Majority Text. It is, however, simply invalid. Hence the term Fallacy of Number.
To be clear, a fallacy is something which does not follow logically. For example, it's easy to prove that 1=2 if you allow division by zero. But you can't divide by zero. The proof is false because it relies on impermissible methods.
Why is counting numbers of manuscripts invalid? Because it only works if all manuscripts are copied and destroyed at the same rate. If simply counting numbers were sufficient, then the Latin Vulgate would be the original New Testament -- there are more Latin than Greek New Testaments in existence.
We can in fact demonstrate that there are cases where the majority is not the original. Almost all our manuscripts of Euclid are of Theon's recension. It says in the manuscripts that they're rewritten! But they are still the majority. Similarly, the majority of manuscripts of Terence are from an edition by Calliopius -- which shows clear evidence of either bad editing or a bad manuscript base. They are still the majority; it was only luck that preserved any text not from this edition.
There are lots of ways in which an un-original text can become common. It might look more authoritative for some reason. A particularly strong church figure might promulgate it. It might come from a region where persecutions against Christians were few, so manuscripts weren't destroyed. It might be the local text of a region where the Christian population is particularly large. Most of these have been urged as arguments for and against the Byzantine text. We do not, at present, know which of them are true -- if any. We do know that they are sufficient to disallow us from counting manuscripts to determine which text is original.
The fallacy is sometimes called the "Democratic Fallacy." The Democratic Fallacy is that, just because people believe something, it's true. For most of history, the majority of people believed that the sun moved around the earth -- which is, simply, false. The fact that lots of people believed it doesn't make it true. A more recent example, which shows the fallacy even more clearly, is the American war in Iraq. In 2003, most Americans believed it was right. In 2007, most believed it wrong. Was the war right? Wrong? People will probably disagree for as long as it is remembered. What is certain is, if it was right in 2003, it was right in 2007; if it was wrong in 2007, it was wrong in 2003. In one year or the other, the majority was wrong.
Note that the fallacy of number is merely a fallacy. That is, number has absolutely no bearing on what was the original text. The Byzantine text may be original. Most think not, but the fact that the advocates of the Byzantine text cite numbers should not be held against it (except in the indirect sense that, since the Byzantine advocates cite numbers, they imply that they are sorely lacking in valid arguments. To me, the fact that they even cite numerical preponderance is proof of desperation -- they want the Byzantine text, for whatever reason, and so grasp at straws. But this is no more evidence of the falseness of the Byzantine text than is numerical preponderance evidence for it).
But I must emphasize: The Fallacy of Number is a fallacy. It is an argument that should be retired, forever. Most arguments in textual criticism are about data or interpretations. This one is not. It is purely about mathematical logic. There is a right answer -- and the right answer is that counting noses doesn't work.
For more mathematics on this point, see the article on Fallacies in general.
Hort's use of the genealogical method led him to the theory of "Neutral," Alexandrian, "Syrian" (Byzantine), and "Western" texts which formed the basis of the Westcott-Hort edition. This textual theory has been modified in some instances, with the result that the "genealogical method" is now rather in dispute. This is rather unfair; although Hort's results cannot stand, and his description of his method is too theoretical (and was not, in fact, the entire basis of his text), the principle of grouping and editing by text-types has by no means been disproved. See, e.g., the section on The Use of Text-Types in the article on Text-Types.
Like homoioteleuton errors, homoioarcton errors can produce nonsense, but can also be sensible (and therefore perhaps difficult to tell from other sorts of errors).
Homoioarcton is noted in the Nestle-Aland apparatus with the notation h.a., but observation shows that this notation is not used nearly as often as it might be (e.g. none of the omissions in Luke 3 are noted as possible homoioarcton errors). Students are therefore advised to note this possibility in examining variants.
Original reads "Pete went to the store. When he reached the store he bought bread and milk." The scribe, skipping from the first instance of "store" to the second, would write "Pete went to the store he bought bread and milk."
Homoioteleuton errors can occur almost anywhere, and are often easily detected as they produce nonsense. There are, however, exceptions, as e.g. in 1 John 2:23, where the Majority text has skipped τον πατερα εχει...τον πατερα εχει, leaving a text which is incomplete but perfectly sensible.
Homoioteleuton is symbolized in the Nestle apparatus by the symbol h.t. (which indicates either that a manuscript has a homoioteleuton error or that a variant is or might be caused by homoioteleuton). Others such as Merk use a "leap" symbol,
, similar to a sideways parenthesis or a musical slur. Exactly how common are h.t. errors? This is complicated. Examining the NT auf Papyrus apparatus of Philippians shows that the 17 papyri and uncials cited there display a total of 12 clear h.t. and h.a. errors. This is if anything a low rate of such errors -- and there are at least four other errors not directly attributable to h.t. which may result from skipping lines. And skipping lines can be far more common than the above statistics would indicate. Thomas C. Knott and David C. Fowler's edition of the A text of Piers Plowman includes a table of omitted lines. Their text is 2418 lines long. The manuscripts they cite have (apart from defects and long stretches omitted presumably for other reasons) a total of 606 lines omitted. That's out of an average of about fifteen manuscripts for each portion of the text. Thus, the manuscripts average out to omitting about one line in sixty. This rate is naturally higher than in the NT tradition, because these manuscripts aren't as familiar to scribes and aren't as heavily corrected and used. But it's an indication of the potential of haplographic errors.
We might add that different languages are subject to h.t. errors in different degrees. Latin, in which very many words in a sentence will end with the same combination of letters, is said to be unusually subject to h.t. errors. Greek also has many words ending in the same letters, but not quite as many, so it's a little less likely to happen. Uninflected languages, or those in which (say) adjectives and nouns inflect differently, will be less subject still. The extreme would be an ideographic language, where there are no letters to repeat. But it should be noted that this is merely a measure of the opportunity for homoioteleuton. I would not be surprised to find that a higher fraction of these "opportunities" are "converted" into errors in languages wherre repeat endings are rarer, simply because scribes will be less alert for them. If there is any research on the point, however, I am unaware of it.
It is somewhat ironic to note that it was probably cheaper to cover pages of manuscripts with gold leaf than to write them in gold ink. Gold is so malleable a metal that it is said that the amount of metal in a ducat can be pounded into more than a hundred sheets of gold leaf. Thus pages could be gold-plated relatively cheaply. (This might explain why -- amazingly to me -- we find illuminated manuscripts to which the gold has been applied but which were never finished. One of the most elaborate Bibles ever begun, the Winchester (Vulgate) codex, has drawings with the gold inlaid but to which the ink and paint were never applied.) But the golden ink used in purple manuscripts used ground gold, and it was hard to grind it very finely. So there had to be a lot of gold in the golden ink. And it still did not (from what I can tell based on manuscripts which are, to be sure, old and faded) look as bright and shiny as gold leaf.
A common form of illumination was illustrations. Very many copies of the gospels will have drawings of the four Evangelists, or of their symbols. Biblical and non-Biblical manuscripts alike may show a courtier presenting the book to a patron. Or -- they may illustrate Biblical stories. This may be historically the most important, because these manuscripts could then be used to guide those who could not read the Bible (or, indeed, might not even know the language in which it was written). It is likely that certain missionaries will have used the pictures to clarify what they were expounding: They would read the passage and show the picture. We do not know how common this was, but considering how many "illustrated Bibles" are still being printed in a time when most people can read, it makes sense that it was common in the past also. I note that one of the manuscripts St. Augustine took with him to Canterbury -- Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. 1 -- has a series of illustrations which are thought to have been used to illustrate the gospel story to the non-Latin-reading Anglo-Saxons.
Nor should we consider all illumination frivolous. Almost all manuscripts contain at least a minimal level of illumination, in the form of paragraph markings, with (typically) large initial letters. These are more likely to be decorated in Latin manuscripts than in Greek, but in either case, they serve a significant purpose, in that they help find section headings. These large initials have been compared to headlines in a newspaper: they make it easier to locate an decide what you are looking for. Ancient books could hardly be indexed; the pagination would differ from copy to copy. They could have a Table of Contents, but even this would rarely have page numbers. The only way to find things was with markings in the text, and the illuminations could supply these. (To this compare another common form of illumination in modern Bibles: the printing the words of Jesus in red. This isn't very reliable, given that in some places -- notably John -- we aren't entirely sure whether Jesus or the author is doing the talking. On the other hand, I rather like it, because it can make it easier to find passages.)
Illumination could be especially important in commentary manuscripts, where, to begin with, text had to be distinguished from commentary, and where the sheer size of the volume often made finding a passage more difficult. It is not unusual to find text and commentary in different ink colours (usually red and black), but additional aids to finding could only help.
Incidentally, it appears that illustrated manuscripts may sometimes display a very early sort of "mass production." In certain Latin manuscripts, instead of the illustration being done directly in the codex, slips of parchment were pasted in with illustrations. This would seem to imply that an artist was drawing images in large quantities on separate parchment, which was then cut up and distributed across several manuscripts (or, at least, several pages of the same manuscript). Presumably this was easier for the illustrator than always having to work on individual manucripts. It may also have made it possible to work somewhat more cheaply: the illustrations could be done on higher-quality vellum -- or, perhaps, on vellum that had only one side suitable for use. And, of course, it might be a way to use up scraps of vellum too small to be used for a complete book. Plus, if the illustrator did all his painting at the same time, there would be less paint (which could be quite valuable if it used a rare color like lapis lazuli or kermes) lost to drying and waste.
The complexity of the illustration process is probably the main motivation, though; it might take four or even more workers to complete the illustration. First the drawing would be sketched out with a stylus. For a geometric form such as an illuminated letter, this might involve tools such as compass and straight edge. Then the lines would be inked over (since the initial markings would be difficult to see and, if drawn with a lead plummet, would not easily take paint). In manuscripts with gold foil, this would be applied third, because the foil would have to be rubbed down and burnished, and this might damage paint had it been laid down. Then the paint would be applied to finish the drawing. (The third and fourth steps could be reversed if the gold leaf was applied on gesso rather than directly to the manuscript, since the gesso raised the level of the parchment. There seems to be no data on which technique was more common.)
In some manuscripts, we actually find instructions from the original designers to those who came later. Some of these are simply what we might call "paint-by-number" instructions: the individual sections of the drawing will be marked "blue," "green," "crimson." (Such instructions of course are covered over when the painting is done -- but there are manuscripts where the painting was never finished, or where the writing is visible for other reasons). Other manuscripts contain marginal instructions, perhaps in the far margin where it might be expected they would be cut off once the manuscript is trimmed.
It is likely that, toward the end of the manuscript era when professional copyists replaced monks as scribes, that the master copyist drew the outlines and the apprentices filled them in. (Christopher de Hamel, Medieval Craftsmen: Scribes and Illuminators, p. 61, actually shows something like this, as Master Hildebertus works at his desk and young Everwinus paints a flourish while sitting on a stool.) Not all painters were mindless servants, however; the painter changed the original sketcher's plan.
Some English manuscripts, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, hint at even more complex arrangements. The design might first be sketched out on a wax tablet. Then the page intended to be illustrated would be ruled, and holes pricked to guide the artist. (I wonder if perhaps there may not have been special templates prepared to aid in the creation of standard illustrations. But there is no evidence for this.) Then a stylus would be used to rough out the illustration, and the rest would follow.
Illuminated manuscripts had the interesting side effect of allowing the painters more luxurious clothing. At least one illustrator recommended that illuminators wear silk clothing to prevent loose threads from getting into the paint. (Of course, he also recommending not moving the head to prevent getting dandruff into the paint, and it's hard to imagine how that could be kept up for very long.)
An expert can sometimes use illuminations to date a manuscript. Painting styles varied quite a bit over time. For example, in the fourteenth century, it was common to paint a wall with a sort of square pattern like a mosaic of tiles. This form does not seem to have been used before this time, and to have been rare thereafter, so it can be used as a date check.
In considering most manuscript illuminations, there is one thing that doesn't get much attention: The large majority of them were made before the invention of oil paint. These earlier paints were almost more like modern pancake makeup than modern paints. This tended to mean that the colors were somewhat more drab (there was no way to make a glossy surface), and that colors did not mix as freely. If you see an illuminated manuscript, odds are that the style will look somewhat un-modern. It's not that the illuminators were bad artists (a few were, to be sure, but most were not). They simply were working in a different medium.
Manuscript illumination began very early, but the art did not reach its height until toward the end of the manuscript period. There is a tendency to dismiss these manuscripts because the underlying text is Byzantine. It is perhaps important to note that the value of a manuscript is not necessarily solely that of its text -- once in a while, a manuscript's illuminations may include important historical or theological data.
Note also that, though it is not unknown for both a manuscript's text and its illustrations to be copied, the values of the copies may vary. If we have both the parent and child text, the child text has very little value indeed. But the illustrations, which were prepared separately, will almost always undergo some modifications. If so, the differences between exemplar and offspring may have some interest. At least in theory. I know of no cases where this has been demonstrated in practice.
Illustrators, like scribes, have a particular style, and just as scribes can be shown to have written multiple manuscripts, illustrators can be shown to have illuminated multiple manuscripts. Like scribes, the illustrators are usually (though not always) anonymous. Therefore it is common to refer to them by a title -- e.g. the "Bedford Master" is so called because he created the Bedford Book of Hours and other works associated with the Duke of Bedford, English regent of France in the period after the death of the conquering King Henry V in 1422. An artist responsible for a Latin copy of the Revelation and a book of sayings of philosophers is the Apocalypse Master. And so forth. Often a "Master" will be so-called because he inspires imitators (this is said to have been true of the Bedford Master; Mary Stuart's Book of Hours, compiled more than a century after the life of Bedford, is said to imitate the Bedford Master's style).
There is at least one substantial disadvantage of illuminated manuscripts (apart from the fact that they use up a lot of time and writing material). This is that the artwork often occupies the entire margin; a common pattern is to fill the page with wreathes and vines and flowers. These are often very beautiful -- but they leave no room to write in corrections!
An imitation is a written work deliberately done in the style of an earlier work. A typical example in English is the "Thou shalt not" stricture: The King James Bible uses this formulation for the Ten Commandments, so moderns may say anything from "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican" to "Thou shalt not be the first to start a war." These are, of course, trivial examples, but the King James Bible has inspired many non-trivial examples, e.g. the Book of Mormon, which is in a pseudo-Biblical English which is in fact neither Jacobean nor English; similarly, Spenser's Fairie Queen is intended to imitate Chaucer but -- because Chaucerian English was long dead -- instead imitates gobbledigook.
Another example may be familiar to some English readers: Lancelot C. L. Brenton's translation of the Septuagint. This is a more modern equivalent of the Spenser/Chaucer situation: Brenton's translation is in pseudo-King James English, much influenced by the KJV. If one has the Hebrew, the Greek, and Brenton, one can at times retrovert to the KJV text. Brenton's translation is in fact less competent than it could be (as well as irritating to read) because it's so much a KJV imitation.
An imitation is not quite the same as an allusion, though the resemblance is obvious; Spenser, e.g., had spent so much effort reading Chaucer that he took on some of his speech patterns without actually understanding Chaucerian grammar. Extremely careful and cautious use of such references might enable us to occasionally see a hint as to how a damaged passage evolved.
Such a method is probably not needed for the Greek New Testament; the materials available to us are too slight. But I can imagine it coming up with regard to one of the more obscure versions, such as the Gothic or the Palestinian Syriac or perhaps even the Sahidic Coptic.
The adjective lacunose may refer to a manuscript with many lacunae.
In textual criticism, "lemma" usually is used to describe the text of a running commentary or commentary manuscript. So, for example, we might cite Origenlem and Origencomm, with the lemma being the reading found in the biblical text of the manuscript and the commentary being found in the margin.
Since the biblical text seems more liable to correction than the commentary, the value of a lemma is usually less than the reading(s) in the margin. Thus certain editions will only cite a lemma where the commentary is missing or unclear.
It should perhaps be added that the Alands, in their work on the United Bible Societies Edition, do not appear to have followed this method, as the UBS text is overwhelmingly Alexandrian. A text proceeding purely from local-genealogical work (i.e. from internal criteria only) would without doubt be more eclectic. This leads to the suspicion that the Alands have not correctly described their method, which instead consists of using "local genealogy" as assisted by the history of the text (so, e.g., a reading found only in a late text-type cannot be earlier than one found in an early text-type, no matter how original it may appear on internal grounds). This is, in the author's opinion, the best and most proper form of criticism -- but it requires a truly accurate history of the text, something which the Alands (on the evidence) had not achieved -- or at least had not enunciated in a way usable by other scholars. Which, if one wishes to follow the rules of scientific work, is the same thing.
Direct evidence for the theory of local texts is largely lacking; except for the Egyptian papyri, we generally cannot correlate texts with the place of origin of manuscripts. There is some evidence of local texts on a lower level; we tend to find, e.g., that if a particular scribe copies several manuscripts, they tend to be of a single type. (Consider the work of Theodore of Hagiopetros, who is almost single-handedly responsible for Wisse's Kx Cluster 74, or George Hermonymos, who game us manuscripts of Kx Cluster 17). There is also evidence from non-Biblical manuscripts; in works such as Piers Plowman, we find significant correlation between the place a manuscript was copied and the text it contains. (The vast majority of manuscripts of the "C" recension are found in the general area of Gloucester and the southwest; the "B" recension is common around London; the "A" recension is scattered but has several representatives near Cambridge.)
With the discovery of the papyri and the realization that not all manuscripts from Egypt have Alexandrian texts, the theory of local texts has lost some of its favour. We also find that not all the texts at large ancient repositories (Athos, Sinai) are of the same type. The truth is, however, that even in Egypt a single text (the Alexandrian) is dominant. At the very least, we could expect local texts to flourish in isolated areas, and also to find particular sorts of texts associated with particular localities. There was much commerce in the ancient world, and so not all manuscripts in an area will automatically have the local text -- but this does not invalidate the theory; it merely means that we must investigate manuscripts to see if they belong with their local type.
Still, caution must be used in assessing the value of local texts. If two local texts are indeed independent, then their common readings do have extra value. But the texts must indeed be independent! If, as some have charged, the "Cæsarean" and/or Byzantine texts are the result of editorial conflation of the Alexandrian and "Western" texts, they have no value as diverse witnesses. In addition, we must be alert to the possibility that one local text is derived from another. If, e.g., the texts at Athos are ultimately derived from Constantinople (a real possibility), then the local text of Athos has no independent significance.
As far at the quotations itself are concerned, it should be kept in mind that most scribes knew them in their own language. Thus copies of the Greek Bible tended to use the Septuagint text, and scribes would tend to conform passages to the Septuagint if by some chance they differed. This phenomenon doubtless occured also in the other versions (e.g. a Vulgate quotation might be assimilated to the Vulgate Old Testament), though this is not normally a matter of great concern for textual critics.
An orihon was essentially an ordinary scroll folded as a codex. That is, a papyrus scroll was prepared, written in columns in the ordinary manner. Once finished, however, it was not rolled but folded in a concertina fold, with one or two columns per fold. That is, if we started with a scroll looking like this (where each symbol _ represents a column of print), the process would look like this:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ <-- initial flat layout
/\/\/\/\ <-- partially folded
|| || || || <-- fully folded
_\/_ <-- after end is bound
Thus you ended up with something which, to all intents and purposes, was an ordinary book, openable to any page. In some cases, the backs of the inner folds were pasted together and the whole inner margin bound with thongs to make it even more book-line. In terms of reader convenience, the orihon came close to being the equal of the codex (its only drawback was that it was rather bulkier). But, of course, it required more material than a codex. And it wasn't a particularly suitable form for vellum books.
There were other advantages to the form. Gluing the pages together was not an absolute necessity, and if this step was not taken, it meant that the orihon could be flattened. This produced, in effect, a scroll -- but one which did not have to be unrolled and rerolled to find a particular passage. It was much more convenient for finding pasages. And, folded, it was typically smaller than a scroll and less subject to damage. If one were forced to use a cheap paper which could be written on only one side, an orihon was a very useful form.
I don't know of any surviving Biblical orihon, but it is possible that one of the handful of surviving papyrus fragments we regard as being from scrolls might in fact be from an orihon. (I have this strange, completely unscientific feeling that P12 is such. But I have absolutely no evidence for that proposition.)
The term "paleography" was coined by Dom Bernard de Montfaucon, who in 1708 published the Paleographia graeca -- not actually the first book on dating manuscripts, but the first one to develop the tools of the discipline; soon after, Scipione Maffei discovered many old documents in Verona, and on this basis developed Latin paleography and added greatly to the knowledge of the field.
Palaeography uses many tools to make its judgements (far too many to be covered here!); of these, shapes of the letters is perhaps the most important (for examples of the evolution of uncial letterforms, see the article on and examples of Uncial Script). However, a paleographer will also examine the way the manuscript is prepared -- paper, writing instrument, other materials used. The manner in which the manuscript is bound is also important, although the possibility of rebinding must always be allowed; a binding can set a latest possible date, but not an earliest. A binding can also give a hint as to the origin of the manuscript, or at least where it was when bound: Oak was a common wood for binding in England and France, while Italian books often use beech or pine and were rather lighter. Pasteboard (sheets of paper or parchment glued together) seems to have been more common in southern Europe than northern. It was common in both north and south to cover the binding boards in leather, but to decorate the leather with patterns (usually made by stamping them with a hot metal stamp) was much more usual in southern Europe, and was done mostly after 1400 C.E.
For an example of how these factors are used, consider the following: Although we have both papyrus and parchment manuscripts from early dates, a manuscript on paper must be fairly late. And a manuscript on papyrus is almost certainly pre-tenth century.
Over the years, writing implements also evolved; a document written with a reed is likely to be earlier than one written with a quill or metal pen. Ink can sometimes be used for dating, and it can also help us localize the area where a manuscript was written -- an ink based on oak galls is more likely to be used in an area where oaks are available, you probably won't see gum arabic on a manuscript written in the far north, etc. Even the way the lines are ruled can be significant. Some scriptoria preferred to use a sharp stylus (which, I suspect, is harder on the material but makes for better line), others blunt. Again, some scriptoria apparently preferred to prick both inner and outer margins; others folded the leaves and pricked all the way through. I have read that this is a strong indicator of origin in Latin manuscripts; I do not know if it is useful for Greek. But these are the sorts of things paleographers can seek to learn from.
Word forms as well as letter forms must be examined, as well as the shape of the page and the arrangement of the columns, plus any marginalia or artwork or even unrelated scribbles. (To give an example from Latin manuscripts: There are several books from France in the early period of the Holy Roman Empire which contain pictures of elephants. Many of the pictures are inaccurate -- the one in Paris, National Library MS. Latin 1 (folio 328v) looks like a sausage with a lion's legs and no real head; just a round spot that has two tusks stuck in it. The trunk comes out of the forehead! Another manuscript from the period has an accurate drawing of an elephant's head. It is known that an elephant was kept on display at Charlemagne's court for a time. Presumably the scribe who drew the accurate elephant saw it -- and hence had to be alive at the time. We can't say much about the other scribe, but obviously he was not at Charlemagne's court while the elephant was there.
Care must be taken with the results of paleography, however. It is not an exact science, and all its judgments are approximate (so, e.g., the enthusiasm about the early date of P52 should be treated with a certain amount of caution; it is simply not possible to date a manuscript to the fifteen or so year span some have proposed for P52). Book hands are more datable than casual hands (an advantage, obviously, to Biblical scholars) -- but most scribes will stick with a particular style as long as they live, meaning that even if we can accurately date a style to 125 C.E. (the typical date for P52), that scribe could still have been working forty or fifty years later. And the general trend in writing styles was toward more compact scripts, meaning that a scribe who knew he was short of parchment might seem more recent than a contemporary scribe with a big budget for writing material! Housman writes, wisely, that "...even when palaeography is kept in her proper place, as handmaid, and not allowed to give herself the airs of mistress, she is apt to be overworked." It is perfectly possible for old handwriting styles to be preserved long after new ones have evolved. Sometimes this is the result of isolation -- but sometimes it is the result of peculiar needs. (An example of this is Old English hands. Old English used three letters not in the Roman alphabet -- eth (ð), thorn (þ), and yogh (
). This led to preservation of an older script for Old English documents even as new ones evolved for Latin (we see instances, even from the same scribe, of Old English documents written in an insular hand even as Latin works are copied in a Caroline minuscule). We see something rather analogous in the case of Codex Bezae, where the Greek and Latin hands have been conformed to each other (this is the chief reason why Bezae is so difficult to date). It should also be noted that paleography does not concern itself solely with manuscript dating, although this seems to get all the "press" in most English-language volumes on TC. Paleographers concern themselves also with the place of the writing, the scribe, etc. (E. Maunde Thompson, for instance, was perhaps the most famous of all students of classical paleography -- and he was called upon to examine the manuscript of the play "Sir Thomas More" to see if a particular scene was indeed in Shakespeare's own hand.) These other considerations can be very important: Consider the implications, e.g., if Tischendorf had been right and the same scribe had worked on B and ℵ, or if it could be proved that one of those manuscripts had been written in an unexpected place (e.g. Rome).
From Greek roots meaning "again-scraped." A palimpsest was a manuscript which was re-used. Presumably the original writing was no longer valued and/or easily read, and a scribe decided that the expensive parchment could be better used for something else Note the reference to "parchment." Some of our early references seem to imply that papyri were re-scraped, but palimpsest papyri are almost unknown. To be sure, if someone did re-wash a papyrus, it probably would go to pieces quickly, so it would not survive. But chances are that papyrus was not often re-used.
Whatever the explanation, almost all palimpsest are parchment. In most instances the parchment would be washed and/or scraped and resurfaced, then overwritten, although there are instances of manuscripts which were overwritten without being cleaned. (As inks evolved, they became harder to erase, so some documents reportedly were actually written between the lines of the old manuscripts -- quite possible, given the size difference between literary uncials and late minuscules.) The most thorough method of cleansing is said to be scraping (with a knife or pumice), followed by soaking with cheese, milk, and lime.
The under-writing of palimpsests is, of course, often difficult to read, although modern tools such as ultraviolet photography help somewhat, particularly when two different formulations of ink have been used which produce different degrees of flourescence. (Earlier chemical reagents often damaged manuscripts without doing much to improve their legibility.) But almost all palimpsests are illegible at certain points (and, ironically, the remnants of the under-writing can sometimes make the upper writing equally unreadable).
Among the more important New Testament palimpsests are C (sometimes listed as the first palimpsest "discovered"), Pe, Papr, Q, and 048 (the latter a double palimpsest -- it was overwritten twice). It should be noted that none of these documents is intact (Papr is about 90% complete, which is about as high a fraction as one can reasonably expect); since the erased leaves were simply raw material, they would end up being used out of order, and some leaves would generally be used for other purposes.
Classical palimpsests are, if anything, even more common, since Christians had a tendency to erase these works to use for religious works. I know of no comprehensive catalog, but just for comparison, Harold W. Johnston at the end of the nineteenth century listed all classical Latin documents of the sixth century and earlier. He counted 24 such documents -- and 14 of them palimpsests. The illustration above right is typical of the form: The image is of (Johnston's facsimile of) Codex Palimpsestus Vaticanus 5757, the Schedae Vaticanae. The under-writing is a fourth or fifth century Latin uncial copy of Cicero's De Re Publica (I.xvii.26), once at Bobbio, now in the Vatican; the upper writing is of the eighth century. Note how clearly visible both still are.
This sort of vandalism is particularly regrettable when we have no intact copies of a particular work (though it might be argued that the documents might not have survived at all were it not for the palimpsests); much of the work of Archimedes, e.g., survives only in a single tenth century manuscript that was over-written for church use in the thirteenth century.
We might also note, in passing, that palimpsests often were not neatly rewritten one atop the other. It was quite typical to see the parchment -- which would be much worn at the seam where the quire was folded -- cut in half, and then re-folded. This would usually cause the upper writing to be at right angles to the lower. This is the case, e.g. with Codex Z, shown at right in exaggerated colour. This was by no means accidental -- it is thought that this was a deliberate response to the problem of the under-writing showing through. If the under-writing ran in the same direction as the upper writing, the two might easily be confused. By cutting down the folios, it was possible to have the upper writing at right angles to the lower, making it much harder to mistake something in the under-writing for part of the content of the upper writing
Although they are technically polyglots, scholars almost universally ignore such things as Latin/English versions. The interesting polyglots -- the books we tend to mean when referring to a polyglot -- are the Bibles which print a Greek New Testament in parallel with at least one other ancient version.
The most famous of these is, of course, the very first printed Greek New Testament, the Complutensian Polyglot.
Because the Complutensian Polyglot was rather a flop, and had an uninteresting text anyway, moderns tend to ignore the other early polyglots. Certainly they had little direct textual interest. They did, however, have great historical interest -- because the editing of such volumes forced the compilers to actually compare the Greek text with the ancient versions. It is often said that it was the arrival of the Codex Alexandrinus in England which sparked the first real study of the text. This is at best partially true; it was the compiling of the polyglots which kept textual criticism alive in the first century and a half after the first books were printed.
There were quite a few noteworthy polyglots after the Complutensian (which included only Greek and Latin in the New Testament, and Greek, Latin, and Hebrew in the Old). Indeed, though it doesn't get much attention, Erasmus's first Textus Receptus had a Latin as well as a Greek text.
Plantin's Antwerp (or Royal Spanish) Polyglot of 1571-1573 (published 1580) featured a Syriac text, though it was printed in unpointed Hebrew letters due to lack of a Syriac font (Scrivener, Plain Introduction volume 2, p. 9, though Kenyon says the first Syriac printing was in the Paris polyglot, and was made "on the basis of a very inferior manuscript." This may, to be sure, be a reference to the Old Testament only). Interestingly, Scrivener, p. 181, says that Plantin's Greek text seems to have been based on the Complutensian Polyglot, not the Textus Receptus. This makes it almost unique among early Greek editions. (Could the fact that it was begun under Spanish patronage be significant?)
The Paris Polyglot of 1629-1645, edited in ten volumes by de Jay, was among the first printed editions of the Peshitta Syriac in actual Syriac type, and the first to make that version widely available in the west. It also contained the first printed editions of the books not included in the Peshitta. The two volumes containing this Syriac text were apparently printed in 1630 and 1633 (Metzer-Early Versions, p. 54). It also included an Arabic version -- not the first in print, but one independent of all earlier Arabic versions, according to the sources cited in Scrivener, p. 163. Students of the Old Testament will be interested to note that it also seems to have been the first printed edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch.
The London Polyglot of 1654-1657, edited by Brian Walton, had a Syriac text which was rather a corrupted version of the preceding, with passages such as the Pericope de adultera added. Walton's polyglot also made the century-old Rome text of the Ethiopic version more widely available (Metzer-Text, p. 84), and even included a Persian version of the gospels and some Old Latin fragments. Perhaps of greatest significance for critics, it featured a much-expanded critical apparatus, including for the first time the readings of the Codex Alexandrinus. Although earlier editions had recorded some variants, Metzer-Text, p. 106, calls this the "first systematic collection of variant readings."
The Adams revision of Kenyon's Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts prints reproductions of two facing pages of Exodus in the London Polyglot. I find myself thinking this may have been the most complicated instance of typesetting attempted in the day of hand-set type. It will tell you how complicated the whole thing is that it takes 310 pages just to get to chapter 20 of Exodus! Each pair of facing pages has twelve different sections of type. In the upper left corner of the left-hand page we have the Hebrew, with a Latin interlinear. To its immediate right, in a very narrow column, is the Vulgate. To its right is the LXX text; to the right of that, on the inner margin, is a literal Latin translation of the LXX. At the bottom of the page is the Syriac text, with Latin translation. On the right-hand page, we find the Targum of Onkelos in the left inner margin, with a Latin translation to its right. The third column at the top of the page is the Samaritan Pentateuch, with Latin translation; at the bottom of the page is an Arabic version, with Latin translation. The sketch below gives a general idea of the page layout:
LEFT PAGE HEAD with BOOK, CHAPTER, and PAGE RIGHT PAGE HEAD with BOOK, CHAPTER, and PAGE +---------------+-------+----------+------+ +----------+-------+---------------+-------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | TARGUM | Latin | SAMARITAN | Latin | | HEBREW |VULGATE| LXX |Latin | | of | trans | | trans | | with | | | trans| | Onkelos | of | | of | | interlinear | | | of | | |Targum | | Samar | | Latin | | | LXX | | | | | | | translation | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +---------------+-------+----+-----+------+ +----------+-------+---------+-----+-------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | SYRIAC | Latin | | ARABIC | Latin | | | trans of | | | trans of | | | Syriac | | | Arabic | | | | | | | | | | | | | +----------------------------+------------+ +----------------------------+-------------+
Note: One will occasionally see the usage "primary version" applied to the versions of greatest significance for TC. (Under this definition, the Latin is still a primary version, but the Gothic becomes secondary.) Such usage is to be discouraged as it can cause confusion.
It should be noted that these four are not the only purple manuscripts in existence. 565 is not an uncial, but it is probably the most famous (and most important) purple manuscript. There are a handful of manuscripts with some purple pages, plus there are purple manuscripts of the versions -- the Old Latins a, b, e, f and j of the gospels, among others. There are also the Vulgate codices em, per, reg, theod, plus the Gothic Codex Argenteus. There is also a purple Greek psalter in Zurich, and Latin psalters in Paris and the Bodleian, and at least two Latin lectionaries.
In later years, purple parchment was sometimes used for important civil documents such as imperial charters -- logical, in a way, since they would be easy to find and impressive once found.
Interestingly, there are also partly purple pages. Tamara Voronova and Andrei Sterligov, Western European Illuminated Manuscripts, 8th to 16th centuries, Sirrocco, 2006, p. 31, shows photos of a Latin manuscript (no proper catalog number given, unfortunately) in which patches have been stained purple and written upon. It is quite impressive, visually, but must have been tricky to execute. There are also instances of manuscripts with some purple and some un-coloured pages; there is no agreed-upon explanation for this, except in cases where the purple material was reserved for particularly important material (say, the first page of a gospel).
Many of the purple manuscripts are in a rather poor state of repair; gold ink was often hard on parchment -- observe the state of the manuscript at right (Codex j of the Old Latin; colours exaggerated).
It seems certain that Christians did not invent the purple manuscript, though it's not certain exactly who did. But Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Phaedon, 1997, p. 48, says that Suetonius mentions a poem by Nero written in letters of gold (the reference seems to be to The Twelve Caesars, Nero, section 10, and the reference to me appears to refer to gold-plated inscriptions, not a manuscript, but I am not certain of that); de Hamel also reports a purple Homer in the possession of the Emperor Maximinus (died 238). The first mention of Christian purple manuscripts seems to come from Jerome, who condemns them in his preface to the Book of Job (although one wonders how much of this was due to their expense and how much due to one of the first mentions of a purple manuscript being in the possession of a very pagan emperor).
Not all Christians felt this way. According to Heinrich Fichtenau's The Carolingian Empire (p. 51 in the English translation by Peter Munz), in Charlemagne's time, great stress was laid on the importance of Jesus in the trinity -- so much so that it approached an informal monophysitism. In this context, according to Godeschalc who wrote at least one purple manuscript in this period, "the golden letters signified the splendour of heaven and of eternal life."
There is at least one instance of a manuscript which takes the whole business a step farther: Instead of dying the pages purple, whole pages might by gilded. Thin as the gold was, this must have been immensely expensive, and few instances survive, but there is at least one case where these gilt pages seem to have been used for the Eusebian tables. One wonders who was the intended recipient of that Bible!
We do find a handful of manuscripts written with gold ink on un-stained parchment, although this seems to be rare. (The combination was not particularly easy to read, and the gold ink doubtless cost more than the purple dye, so if a patron was paying for the gold, it made sense to go for the purple, too.) There seem to be no instances of silver lettering on plain parchment; silver simply didn't show up against such a light background.
It has been suggested that the very features that make purple manuscripts so beautiful and elaborate also makes them more subject to error. I have seen no data on this, but it strikes me as quite likely.
Volumes fall into two basic types: Single-quire codices and multi-quire codices. Multi-quire codices have the quires set next to each other, with the last page of one quite adjacent to the first page of the next, with relatively small numbers of sheets per quire (usually four sheets, or sixteen pages, though other numbers are known), arranged so that sheets of similar type face each other (for papyri, e.g., vertical strips facing vertical strips and horizontals facing horizontals; for uncials, flesh side facing flesh and hair facing hair). Multiple-quire codices were easier to assemble (since one didn't need to guess how many leaves one would need), and generally more attractive, but required binding, meaning that at least some codices (such as P46 and P75) were single-quire codices: One huge gathering of dozens of sheets folded over. This has its conveniences for critics: We don't have the outermost leaves of either P46 or P75, but we know the overall length of both manuscripts, because we can locate the center leaf and calculate from there. (This is possible even if we have only a single leaf of a single-quire codex, as long as page numbers can be found on both sides.) And knowing the overall length, we can at least estimate the extent of the contents (it is by this means, e.g., that we calculate that P46 can never have contained the Pastoral Epistles). Of course this is also possible with multi-quire codices, but only in the special case where we have quires before and after the lacuna. If a multi-quire codex simply ends (as is the case, e.g., with B), there is no way to estimate how many leaves are missing.
Another problem with single-quire codices is how big they are. A single quire, since each additional leaf makes it thicker and more unwieldy, can only contain so many leaves -- a few dozen at most. So to assemble a full Bible, or even a complete set of the Four Gospels or the Acts and Epistles, requires a multiple-quire codex.
Most fragments, of course, consist of only a single sheet (not even a complete leaf; it's quite common for the page to break at the fold, and only one half of the broken leaf to survive), making it impossible to tell whether they come from single-quire or multiple-quire codices.
For more on the significance of quires, see the entry on codices.
In classical criticism, the term is much more precise: it refers to two texts of the same work which are distinct as a result of editorial work. For instance, we have two different texts of Euclid's Elements, one edited by Theon ("Theon's Recension," found in the large majority of surviving manuscripts) and one believed to be closer to the original. Similarly, it is now believed that the two texts of Shakespeare's King Lear (Quarto and Folio) represent two distinct stage settings of the same play, and as such we find editions such as the Pelican Shakespeare actually printing both texts in parallel columns (and then a conflated version).
The differences between these two usages is somewhat unfortunate, since it is now generally agreed that the Byzantine text of the New Testament is not recensional in the proper sense (i.e. it was not edited, by Lucian or anyone else). But there are edited texts of the New Testament -- Marcion's, obviously, and also, in a way, the Diatessaron; in addition, the D text of Luke-Acts has unquestionably been edited at some points (e.g. the use of Matthew's genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3). Thus when one encounters the word "recension" in New Testament situations, one must always be careful to learn the precise sense in which the word is being used by a particular author.
But there are in fact two parts to Quentin's method. In the first stage, he tries to classify manuscripts. His goal, in essence, is to find three basic types -- in essence, to force a stemma with three branches, avoiding the Bédier Problem of two-branch stemma. (I find myself thinking that it's too bad Quentin didn't know anything about voting theory; he really should have looked at Condorcet cycles. But that's not really relevant to what he did.)
Having come up with his classification, the actual Rule of Iron was that two beats one -- that is, if you have three primary witnesses, and two have a single reading and the third has another, that the reading found in the two are original.
This is a little too strong -- there are circumstances in which an outside influence can cause two types of text to be independently corrupted. But the basic rule is sound. Quentin's failure lay not in his final idea but in the methods he used to determine his three witnesses, which were both confusing and (from what I can tell) confused.
Our descriptions of scriptorium differ, and it is likely that their nature changed over time -- depending, among other things, on whether manuscripts were copied individually or in bulk.
If the former, then the scriptorium was kept entirely silent; David Diringer (The Book Before Writing, p. 207ff.) reports that the scribes even evolved a series of hand gestures by which to communicate the volumes or materials they needed so that they could do their work without speaking. (Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Book: The Story of Printing & Bookmaking, p. 78, notes a fascinating example: The symbol for a pagan author was to scratch behind the ear, as a dog scratches.)
The policy was to make the scriptorium a large, open room with good natural light; artificial light was banned to prevent fires (McMurtrie, p. 77). The scriptorium was managed by the armarius, who supplied the tools required by the scribes: desks, pens, ink, parchment or papyrus, and the other tools used by the scribe: knife, awl (to prick the parchment for lining), stylus (to score the lines), ruler, pumice (to smooth the parchment), perhaps weights (to flatten pages) and sponges (to erase, though this was sometimes done with the knife). A scribe was typically expected to work about six hours a day.
None of this, of course, was possible when a manuscript was copied by dictation. There is little evidence of the procedure for this, but that manuscripts were copied by dication can hardly be denied; there are simply too many errors of hearing in certain manuscripts. (We should add, however, that some errors which appear to be errors of hearing may not be: Recall that most ancients read by sounding out the words before them. Thus they could sound out a word, turn to copy it, and mis-copy it because they mis-heard what they themselves had read!) But it is not at all unlikely that copying by dictation died with the Roman Empire in the west, and perhaps fell into decay in the east also; demand for manuscripts would have fallen both with the adoption of parchment (which lasted longer and reduced the need for replacement manuscripts) and with the decline of literacy. In these circumstances, individual copying of manuscripts would suffice, and copying by dictation might well have been eliminated.
No matter which method of copying was used, a manuscript generally was not finished once the text was copied. First it would be corrected. Then rubrics, illustrations, and illuminated letters would then be done by another scribe. How long this took, of course, depended on the level of effort devoted to these other tasks.
Many of these defects are modern, but many are old, as well. Today, if a book is damaged, we will likely just go out and buy another copy. When manuscripts were copied by hand and expensive, this was not a reasonable option. Far easier to copy off enough pages to fill the gap, and re-insert that into the binding. This is very common among the early uncials. B was supplemented by the minuscule 1957. But this is an unusual supplement, coming much later and in another style of writing. Usually we see supplements in the same sort of script. So Dea, for instance, has supplements in Matt. 3:7-16, Mark 16:15-20, John 18:14-20:13. If a critical apparatus notices this (not all do), the supplement will be marked with the superscript s or supp. So in John 19, for instance, the Nestle-Aland apparatus does not cite D but Ds. Other important manuscripts with supplements include Dp (in 1 Corinthians), W (in John), 565 (various places), 892 (in John), and 1241 (portions of Paul and the Catholics).
There are instances where it appears the supplement may have been copied from the original manuscript, in whole or in part (this could happen, e.g., if a portion of a page had been damaged by damp or torn). Usually, however, another exemplar had to be consulted. This can result in a change in text-type. Usually this will mean a shift toward the Byzantine text (892supp, for instance, is noticeably more Byzantine than 892 proper). But not always! In Paul, 1241's basic run of text is purely Byzantine, while the supplements are an Alexandrian/Byzantine mix.
Most supplements appear to be a response to accidental damage. But this is not always the case. Codex Vercellensis (a) of the Old Latin appears to have been deliberately supplemented: The ending of Mark is missing, cut away, and a portion restored. C. H. Turner calculated that the missing leaves could not have contained the "longer ending" 16:9-20. Thus the logical conclusion is that a was deliberately mutilated and a supplement added to supply this ending.
Initially, so little attention was paid to word breaks that even a a line break could occur in the middle of a word. But not, it appears, anywhere in the middle of a word. There were rules, although they seem strange to us: A break had to follow a vowel, or between the consonants of a double consonant, or following a liquid consonant in an instance of a liquid consonant followed by another consonant. If anyone knows the reason for this system, I have not seen it.
Latin manuscripts occasionally followed the Greek system of breaking words after a vowel, but by far the more normal method was to break a word at the end of a syllable -- the system we still tend to follow.
The hyphen as the mark for a continued word did not become common until the twelfth century.
Paragraph markings are known from an early date, but in early times usually consisted of a mark in the margin, such as a dash or >. There was initially no line break; the reader had to guess what place the symbol referred to. Later it became common to put some space (perhaps the width of three letters) between the last word of one paragraph and the first word of the next. In time, it became common to put a large or illuminated letter at the start of a paragraph -- although some manuscripts actually put the illuminated letter at the start of the line, not the first word of the new paragraph!
The lack of word division naturally implies a lack of punctuation. Various systems were tried over the years, mostly consisting of points, high, low, or middle. Commas and interrogative marks started to be seen around the end of the uncial era. Late manuscripts of course contain a fairly full punctuation, but in an early manuscript, an editor cannot assume anything -- any symbol might be used for any sort of meaning (comma, semicolon, period, paragraph), and it may or may not be used correctly, and it may or may not be used regularly.