Manuscript Fragments Research Articles

Paul et Virginie, présentation, notes et variantes par Jean-Michel Racault, nouvelle édition mise à jour by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Reviewed by: Paul et Virginie, présentation, notes et variantes par Jean-Michel Racault, nouvelle édition mise à jour by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre Vladimir Kapor Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, présentation, notes et variantes par Jean-Michel Racault, nouvelle édition mise à jour ( Paris: Librairie Générale Française, Livre de Poche « Classiques », 2019). Pp. 480. €5.20 paper. To students of Paul et Virginie, Jean-Michel Racault's "Livre de Poche" edition (1999) of the text needs little introduction. When it appeared in 1999, it garnered praise from some of the leading authorities on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Yves Bénot hailed it as "un modèle du genre" [a model of its kind],1 while Malcolm Cook praised its "sound, scholarly approach to the novel," offering "excellent value for a modest cost."2 In Réal Ouellet's view, one of the edition's principal merits is to have removed Paul et Virginie from the pedestal of a timeless, self-contained classic anchored in scholarly tradition, by situating it in the context of its time and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's entire opus.3 The chosen editorial approach formed part of a broader trend in recent scholarship which has sought to re-evaluate and rehabilitate Bernardin de Saint-Pierre as a thinker. It was spearheaded by Racault himself, along with Colas Duflo, who boldly claimed in 1996 that "une analyse de Paul et Virginie qui ne s'appuie pas sur les Études de la Nature est aussi incomplete et aveugle qu'une analyse des rapports humains dans Huis Clos qui ignorerait tout de la troisième partie d'Être et néant" [an analysis of Paul et Virginie that does not draw on the Études de la Nature is as incomplete and blind as an analysis of human relationship in Sartre's No Exit that ignores the third part of Being and Nothingness entirely].4 The mere parallel between Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Jean-Paul Sartre was a testament to the eighteenth-century author's fast-changing reputation: from a one-hit-wonder and Rousseau's faithful disciple, to a prolific author and an original thinker in his own right. Racault's 1999 "Livre de Poche" edition, which has imposed itself as the most authoritative affordable edition of Paul et Virginie and one of the most frequently cited ones over the past two decades, has played no small part in this repositioning. In 2019, "Livre de Poche" brought out a new, updated version of it, in what appears to be a significantly expanded 476-page volume of the same format (the text of the 1999 edition was 348 pages long). The added length is mainly due to an increased line spacing used throughout and the reorganization of the volume's critical apparatus. The glossary of lesser-known terms that followed the critical introduction in the 1999 edition (60–74)5 has found its place after the main text and the appendices (annexes) in the new one (361–80); the "chronologie synoptique" that originally followed it (75–86), is now wedged between the lengthy 1806 Préambule and the appendices (315–31), whilst the two series of footnotes running through the main text—textual variants and scholarly annotations—have been merged into one and reproduced as end-notes situated at the very end of the volume (399–476). These features of the new layout all combine to effectively foreground the main text (81–232) and enhance its legibility. There are no revisions to the choice of textual variants and only one slight amendment to the glossary, in the entry "créole" (368). The first of the excerpts from published and unpublished works by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre reproduced in the "appendices" (annexes) of the 1999 edition—the multiple drafts of the tableau of Paul and Virginia enveloped in Virginia's "swelling petticoat"—has been replaced with Racault's transcription of a manuscript fragment "Géographie. Air, vents et tempêtes" [Geography. Air, winds and storms] (333–37), which served as a blueprint for the two descriptions [End Page 745] of the hurricane found in the novel and the reflections on the benevolence of nature that...

Collections, Compilations, and Convolutes of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Fragments in North America before ca. 1900

Using evidence drawn from S. de Ricci and W. J. Wilson’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, American auction records, private library catalogues, public exhibition catalogues, and manuscript fragments surviving in American institutional libraries, this article documents nineteenth-century collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments in North America before ca. 1900. Surprisingly few fragments can be identified, and most of the private collections of them have disappeared. The manuscript constituents are found in multiple private libraries, two universities (New York University and Cornell University), and one Learned Society (Massachusetts Historical Society). The fragment collections reflect the collecting genres documented in England in the same period, including albums of discrete fragments, grangerized books, and individual miniatures or “cuttings” (sometimes framed). A distinction is drawn between undecorated text fragments and illuminated ones, explained by aesthetic and scholarly collecting motivations. An interest in text fragments, often from binding waste, can be documented from the 1880s.

L’Archivio Generale Arcivescovile di Bologna e i frammenti manoscritti di Mons. Luigi Breventani

Luigi Breventani was the director of the Archiepiscopal Archives of Bologna between XIX and XX century. His personal archive includes fragments of medieval manuscripts, a collection that can be considered a reflection of his interest on manuscript sources. This article wants to analyze the relationship between Breventani’s palaeographic interest and his unpublished group of fragments

Ink as a Functional Marker in the Study of the Syriac and Christian Sogdian Manuscript Fragments in the Turfan Collection (Berlin) and in the Krotkov Collection (St. Petersburg)

The Syriac and Christian Sogdian manuscript fragments in the Turfan Collection (Berlin) and in the Krotkov Collection (St. Petersburg) were written in black ink and, much less frequently, in brown ink. The use of red ink is very limited and not yet studied in detail. By linking the analysis of all the elements that are due or related to the scribal discourse in Christian Medieval Central Asia with a well‑established codicological tradition, this contribution is meant to outline the purposes of the use of different ink in the Syriac and Christian Sogdian manuscript fragments discovered in the early 20th century in Xinjiang (China). A broader perspective that takes into account other Eastern Christian manuscript traditions is also included.

The excavation of a Buddhist temple complex of the Qocho Uyghur kingdom in the middle of the west zone of the Tuyoq caves in Shanshan County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region

Abstract In 2016, remains of a ground-level Buddhist temple complex were found in the middle of the west zone of the Tuyoq caves in Shanshan (Piqan) County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. This Buddhist temple complex consisted of the Buddha hall, dorms for monks, and storage facilities. In the Buddha hall, many murals of bodhisattvas, devas, and donors were found, and artifacts such as household utensils made of clay, wooden architectural components, textiles, and manuscript fragments were unearthed. The date of this Buddhist temple complex was the Qocho Uyghurs kingdom from the latter half of the tenth century to the latter half of the fourteenth century; the excavation is very important for understanding the distribution of the construction centers and the iconographical composition of the Buddhist cave temples and monasteries in the Qocho Uyghurs kingdom period.

The Story of Shunzi in Old Uyghur

ABSTRACTThis paper identifies three manuscript fragments from Turfan as an Old Uyghur version of the story of Shunzi 舜子, a medieval Chinese narrative about Emperor Shun acting as a filial son. In China, the story was part of the lore of filial sons (xiaozi 孝子), popular throughout most of the dynastic period. Early versions of the Chinese story survive in Japan and Dunhuang, and these display obvious parallels with the Uyghur text. While this allows a positive identification of the content of the three Turfan fragments, the differences reveal that none of the known Chinese versions could have served as the source text for the translation. The Old Uyghur version, therefore, represents an otherwise unattested version of the story, which may have developed among the Uyghurs.

The Valréas Book of Hours: Avignon, BM, ms. 1903

Acquired by the Musée Calvet in Avignon in 1893 from a convent in Valréas in the Énclave des papes, this little fragmentary manuscript has never been subject to any thorough study, although it was part of the exhibition Manuscrit à peintures in 1955, along with the Bellevillle Breviary and the treasures of the duc de Berry. In the 1970s, 40 leaves out of 52 were stolen, and the major part thus hidden from the public eye. Recently, these leaves have been rediscovered and restituted, and are hereby introduced to the academic discourse. With codicological and comparative stylistic methods, the manuscript’s opulent decoration is analysed, and its art historical position is established in relation to contemporary currents in gothic book illumination. No less than nine different artists can be distinguished, and identified, one of which executed a secondary portion around 1370, whereas the other eight artists were active in the first third of the fourteenth century. Every artist reoccurs in a number of other manuscripts, independently or in collaboration with each other in different constellations. They were all among the most renowned Parisian illuminators of their time, including the Papeleu master a.k.a. Richard de Verdun, Jean Pucelle, and Anciau de Sens. Moreover, through a reconstruction of its historical context with proposed royal commissioners, a clearer picture emerges of this particular book of hours as a conscious manifestation of artistic patronage. Iconographic giottoesque features also offers an incentive to reconsider the sources for the introduction of Italian trecento influence in French gothic book illumination. This manuscript contributes to the understanding of collaborative practises between workshops and individual artists under early Valois patronage, and provides an important addition to the corpus of gothic book illumination.

Early Judeo-Arabic Birth Narratives in the Polemical Story “Life of Jesus” (Toledot Yeshu)

AbstractThis is a first-time presentation of the initial section of the Toledot Yeshu (TY) narrative describing the birth and early life of Jesus in Judeo-Arabic, a text with important implications for current research on TY. First, the origin of the birth narrative has been debated in recent scholarship on the Hebrew versions of TY. The existence of this lengthy Judeo-Arabic birth narrative, preserved in two manuscripts belonging to the Russian National Library, as well as the identification of other, earlier Judeo-Arabic manuscript fragments that include the TY birth narrative, demonstrates that the birth narrative formed part of TY significantly earlier than has been previously suggested. Second, the narrative preserved in the Russian manuscripts also demonstrates the relevance of the Judeo-Arabic versions of TY for the understanding of the development of this protean work. Examination of their textual tradition reveals interesting connections with particular Hebrew versions of TY from Europe and can shed light on the question of how the work moved between East and West. Finally, this Judeo-Arabic version of TY is significant in its demonstration of a clever adaptation to its linguistic and cultural surroundings. It incorporates a lengthy introduction—the only one currently known in all of the TY literature—which is a literary tour de force employing contemporaneous Arabic style together with a well-known rabbinic dictum, thereby situating Toledot Yeshu simultaneously in its Islamicate milieu and in Jewish textual and even ritual tradition. The discussion concludes with a transcription and translation of the birth narrative as preserved in these two Russian manuscripts.

The Invention of the “Eminent Monk”: Understanding the Biographical Craft of the Gaoseng zhuan through the Mingseng zhuan

Abstract This study investigates the compilation process of Huijiao’s (497-554) Gaoseng zhuan by utilizing the manuscript fragments of Baochang’s (ca. 466–?) Mingseng zhuan. I first question the long-standing assumption that the Mingseng zhuan was the “base text” of the Gaoseng zhuan, and propose to redefine the relationship between the two monastic biography collections more loosely by using the notion of “narrative community.” I then suggest that, despite the possible absence of a direct textual relation between the two collections, due to the Mingseng zhuan being more representative of the Buddhist narrative community of early medieval China, the comparison of the two collections is nonetheless germane to understanding the compilation process of the Gaoseng zhuan. Lastly, by comparing the lists of contents of the two collections I identify and analyze distinctive patterns in Huijiao’s selection and organization of monastic biographies that helped him perfect the idealized abstraction of the “eminent monk.”

Manuscript Fragments of Early Tosafot in Perpignan

Abstract Fragments of a Hebrew manuscript in thirteenth-century Sephardic script were recently discovered in the binding of a fourteenth-century notarial manual in Perpignan. These fragments are identified here as originating in a copy of Tosafot redacted by a disciple of Isaac ben Samuel of Dampierre. It is suggested that the redactor was Samson ben Abraham of Sens. This find is doubly significant—for the study of Tosafot, and for the intellectual history of medieval Perpignan Jewry.

Different Editions of Guo Bi's Diary and Its Manuscript Fragments

Different Editions of Guo Bi's Diary and Its Manuscript Fragments

On Westphalian Woodworms and Rhenish Missionaries: The Soest Conductus Fragments and Their Afterlife

Abstract Examining the Soest conductus fragments, of which five single leaves have so far been rediscovered, this article analyses the different layers of use and reuse that can be deduced. First, a detailed account of the circumstances under which these manuscript fragments travelled with (or without) their respective host volumes is given. The music manuscript must have been discarded by the fifteenth century, as a bookbinder from the Dominican convent of Soest in Westphalia reused various leaves of it in a series of autographs written by Jacob of Soest, who died in 1438. After the dissolution of the convent’s library in the course of nineteenth-century secularization, further contexts of reuse and dismemberment pertaining to the fragments can be demonstrated. Secondly, the remnants of the original music manuscript are analysed. The use of the two-part conductus O crux ave spes unica (H4) as the opening piece of a fascicle can be connected to the dedication of the Soest Dominican house to the Holy Cross. In comparison to other fragmentary sources that made their way to the German-speaking area, as well as the long-known codices F, W1, and W2, the Soest music manuscript seems closest to W2. While, however, these two codices show significant parallels in terms of mise-en-page and copying process, the choice of repertory might have deliberately differed. This points to production in the same workshop, but for different commissioners.

A New Manuscript Source for the Legend of Saint Clement in Denmark

Among the manuscript fragments in the Norwegian and Danish National Archives in Oslo and Copenhagen, six fragments have been identified from a large manuscript from about 1200 containing texts on St. Clement. These fragments constitute rare medieval witnesses to the work on St. Clement written by Leo of Ostia at the beginning of the twelfth century, transmitting parts of the first and third book: De origine beati Clementis (BHL 1851ab) and De translatione sancti Clementis (also known as Legenda italica) (BHL 2073). Although five fragments are found in Oslo and one in Copenhagen, the manuscript was probably dismembered in Copenhagen in the early seventeenth century, making a Danish medieval ownership more likely than a Norwegian one in this particular case. St. Clement played a significant role in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia, and the lack of surviving Latin texts on Clement has previously been puzzling to scholars. Not only do these fragments testify to the dissemination of Leo of Ostia’s work to the northernmost parts of Europe, they also in several cases offer a better transmission of the author’s texts than the manuscripts known up to now. A transcription of the transmitted texts is presented in an Appendix.

Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600 by Heather Bamford

Reviewed by: Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600 by Heather Bamford Nicole G. Corrigan Bamford, Heather. Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600. U of Toronto P, 2018. xi + 257 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0240-9. Heather Bamford's book examines fragments of medieval Spanish manuscripts, looking at their production and circulation in the Middle Ages, the sixteenth century, and the present day. Her objects of study are diverse—ranging from fragments of chivalric romances to Morisco literature—as she considers how and why these fragments were originally made and the impact that their fragmentation had on how they are studied today. The three main types of fragments that she addresses are physical fragments (manuscripts re-used as book bindings or covers), spiritual fragments (talismans and magical objects), and intellectual fragments (compilations). She aims to show that the creation of most fragments was intentional rather than accidental and to open up engagement with fragments in ways that go beyond questions of legibility. The first chapter, "Fragment and Fragmentary in the Iberian Epic," is the longest in the book, and it lays out her method for interpreting textual fragments, taking epics as her case study. All surviving medieval Spanish epics, she observes, are fragmentary, missing anywhere from a few to hundreds of lines; this condition is rather unusual for the corpus of epics in medieval Europe. Her main examples in this chapter are the Cantar de mío Cid, the Roncesvalles, and the Mocedades de Rodrigo, which she sees as existing on a continuum from fragmentary to fragment. This distinction is key to the chapter. "Fragmentary" implies a more complete text, for which it is easier to reconstruct what is missing, while "fragment" implies a text defined by what it lacks. Although both fragmentary texts and fragments tend to be the focus of reconstructive projects, Bamford notes that fragments less frequently feature as objects of literary study, something that she seeks to remedy in this book. The chapter broadly considers why fragments are made and how their status as a fragment impacts how they have been studied. She first addresses the historiography of fragments, pointing out that a great deal of scholarship around fragments has been dedicated to "restoring" them, or hypothesizing [End Page 159] about what is missing. In general, Bamford urges us to resist the temptation to restore a fragment, although she acknowledges it is difficult to do so. According to the author, "this piecing together of facts and conjecture of lost plot points, while interesting and successful in drawing some attention to the work, does not restore it to something that better resembles the whole" (31). This is one of her more thought-provoking contributions: the encouragement to find value in the fragment as a fragment, rather than to go searching for what could ultimately never be recovered. Bamford concludes the chapter by asking why fragments were created, both generally and in the specific case of the epic poems. While she pushes against the common desire to speculate over the original contents of a fragment, she does speculate over the intentions behind making a fragment, although her conclusions are often rooted in the material surface of the surviving text. She emphasizes that textual fragmentation was rarely a matter of censorship, but rather due to more practical reasons. Sometimes the scribes of a codex may not have had a complete model themselves; at other times, palimpsests were created simply because the text appeared to be out of date, was written in a rarely used language, or no longer seemed useful to the present user. Chapter Two, "From Bound to Metonym: Early Modern Disuse of Chivalric Fragments," looks at chivalric texts that were re-used as binding materials in the early modern era. The aim of this chapter is to call attention to how disuse of a manuscript in the early modern era (leading to its fragmentation and use in bindings) has led to its subsequent disuse in modern scholarship. She here applies the method she laid out in the first chapter: rather than searching for "missing symbolic codes" of fragments, she more productively engages with the fragmented texts and...

‘Time is flying’: Lyrical And Historical Time in the Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

The quotation in the title of this essay is taken from a manuscript fragment composed by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley a few weeks before his death in July 1822. As a reflection on the calamities which time can unleash, this fragment might seem eerily prescient. But as this essay shows, Shelley’s fragment – together with his contemporary poem ‘The Triumph of Life’, left unfinished at his death – is only the latest instance of a sustained interrogation, in Shelley’s poetry, of the nature and implications of time. Shelley’s major political works often headline confidence in a linear, progressive interpretation of historical progress, with natural and social processes cooperating to produce meliorative change over long periods of time. Beneath this prima facie confidence, however, these same works often betray an anxiety that time might rather be an unbroken and unbreakable, catastrophic cycle of creation and destruction. My essay traces this tension in a selection of Shelley’s political and lyrical verse and links it to key contemporary debates in political theory and natural philosophy. Studying Shelley’s engagement with time sheds new light not only on Shelley’s thought but also on the ways in which Romantic poetry could embody this key facet of human experience.

Magic as Poetry, Poetry as Magic: A Fragment of Arabic Spells

This article provides an edition and translation of Landberg 35a, an Arabic manuscript fragment containing a collection of spells, held in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. These spells can also be found circulating in Arabic-language blogs and websites dedicated to the occult, and include love spells either addressing the full moon or using sand and incense, and methods of contacting a jar-dwelling spirit and a king of the jinn. Relying on Jonathan Culler's theory of apostrophe in poetry, this essay also explores the reasons that references to magic and to poetry in certain situations tend to cause embarrassment. This analysis results in a blurring of the definitions of modern and medieval as well as of poetry and magic, and highlights the power of language to affect the speaker, the listener, and the world.

Manuscript Fragments in the University and Provincial Library of Tyrol at Innsbruck

This article presents an overview of the current state of knowledge concerning detached and in situ fragments in the collection of the University and Provincial Library of Tyrol (ULB Tyrol). The detached fragments were removed in several different phases from manuscripts and printed volumes, and, at the turn of the twentienth century, were assembled in a separate collection, which now numbers 233 shelfmarks, some of which contain as many as 26 individual pieces. A current Austrian National Bank project is underway to publish images and descriptions on Fragmentarium. Among in situ fragments, only those in manuscript codices have been described, namely in the ten-volume ULB Tyrol manuscript catalogue, but they represent only part of the holdings of fragments. Nevertheless, these 390 fragments contained in some 302 manuscripts provide an overview of the range of material in the collection, and the promise held by the larger collection.

Manuscript Fragments in Greek Libraries

A case study on fragments in Greek manuscript collections was conducted at the Center for History and Palaeography of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation. The majority of the manuscripts for the study come from hard-to-reach monastic libraries and were microfilmed by the Center. The study focused on a selection of collections, including the library of the Monastery of Hozoviotissa (Amorgos Island, Cyclades), the Patriarchal library of Alexandria (Egypt), the library of the Monastery of Iviron (Mt. Athos), and a variety of collections from Cyprus. While research is ongoing, the current results show the potential contribution that fragments can make to the study of Medieval Greek manuscripts.

Berliner Handschriftenfragment der Vita Sancti Columbae Adamnani

A hitherto unknown fragment of an early eleventh-century manuscript of the Vita sancti Columbae Adamnani has been discovered in the Secret State Archives, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. Written in late-Carolingian minuscule (“schrägovaler Stil”), it contains chapters 37, 38, 40 and 41 of the second book of the Vita and reveals references to a different redaction of the text.

Classical Protagonists – Medieval Postures

The primary aim of my paper is to reveal the possible role of illustrations in the (re)interpretation of a text as seen in the example of an Ottonian image cycle illustrating a Late Antique adventure story. The work in question is the so-called Apollonius pictus (Budapest, National Széchényi Library, Cod. Lat. 4), a manuscript fragment consisting of three and a half large parchment leaves that contain the oldest known illustration cycle of the History of Apollonius, king of Tyre (Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri). The images (thirty-eight red line drawings) focus on the protagonists; with the exception of some ships, a few buildings and curtains, there is almost nothing that alludes to the mise-en-scène. In spite of their relative simplicity, the images effectively articulate the meaning of the story by means of the protagonists’ body language. Through the study of their postures and gestures in relation to the text and in the context of other early medieval visual narratives, I arrive at the conclusion that the images offer an alternative reading of the story. This reading gives the leading role to one of the female protagonists, Tarsia, and emphasizes special personality traits and life events that make her similar to saints. Analyzing the communicative function of the illustrations, I shed light on the Ottonian reception and use of classical narrative traditions from a specific perspective.