The archetype ofBeowulf

Abstract

It is a cardinal tenet of classical textual criticism that medieval scribes were most prone to error when copying from an unfamiliar system of script. Accordingly a good deal of attention has been given by classical scholars to what happens to a text when it is copied from one system of script to another, and to the characteristic sorts of error which such copying involves. The great French textual critic, Alphonse Dain, even coined a Greek term,metacharakterismos(μεταχαρακτηρισμός), to describe the scribal process of copying, character by character, from one script to anodier. (The Latin equivalent would betranslitteratio, which might be rendered ‘transliteration’ in English.) Dain was thinking principally of the transliteration of Greek uncial manuscripts into minuscule script; but the process is also known to have taken place in the transmissional histories of Latin texts, when works of classical literature in (say) rustic capital script were transliterated into the various regional minuscules. By observing patterns of repeated error, Latin textual critics have often been able to demonstrate that the archetype of such-and-such a text must have been written in a particular system of script. The first attempt at such a demonstration was apparently that by the humanist scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), who in hisCastigationes in Catullum(1577) showed that the archetype of all surviving manuscripts of Catullus was written in what he calledLangobardicae litterae, what we should describe as a form of pre-Caroline minuscule.