Manuscript Witnesses Research Articles

Hnatenko, Ljudmyla Anatolijivna (ed.) Psaltyr. Pereklad novoju ukrajins'koju literaturnoju movoju P. S. Moračevs'koho. by Hnatenko, Ljudmyla Anatolijivna and Vasyl' Vasyl'ovyč Nimčuk (review)

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 3, 2016 Reviews Hnatenko, Ljudmyla Anatolijivna (ed.). Psaltyr. Pereklad novoju ukrajins’koju literaturnoju movoju P. S. Moračevs’koho. Introduction by Hnatenko, Ljudmyla Anatolijivna and Vasyl’ Vasyl’ovyč Nimčuk. Pamjatky ukrajins’koji movy XIX st., Serija kanoničnoji literatury. Nacional’na Biblioteka Ukrajiny im. V. I Vernads’koho, Instytut ukrajins’koji movy NAN Ukrajiny, Kyiv, 2015. 196 pp. Notes. Price unknown. Vernacular scriptural translations have curiously enough slipped the agenda of Ukrainian studies. The present edition of a nineteenth-century translation of the Psalter in new (vernacular-based) standard Ukrainian, which was prepared by Ljudmyla Hnatenko and Vasyl’ Nimčuk, however, makes up for the need for a textual study of biblical translations in standard Ukrainian and its dialects. The book under review is the first critical edition of the Psalter translated in 1865 into new standard Ukrainian by Pylyp Semenovyč Moračevs’kyj (1806– 1879). A prominent cultural figure in Russian-ruled Ukraine, he also translated the New Testament whose text, as the authors of the introduction inform us, is being currently prepared for publication at the Institute of the Ukrainian Language of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The book opens with an introduction dealing with translations of the Psalter that antedated the appearance of Moračevs’kyj’s work. The edition is supplied with comments (pp. 175–196) explaining emendations introduced by the translator in one of the manuscript witnesses as well as general and specific differences between a protograph held at the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on the one hand, and another manuscript witness together with one of its copies held at the Institute of Manuscripts at the V. I. Vernads’kyj National Library of Ukraine, on the other. The list of specific differences contains 700 grammatical and lexical parallel forms and expressions which can be used by historians of standard Ukrainian and its regional varieties. The introduction begins with a brief discussion of the translations of selected psalms into vernacular Ukrainian made by Moračevs’kyj’s predecessors, namely Taras Ševčenko in 1845 and Myxajlo Maksymovyč in 1859. By juxtaposing their paraphrases, Hnatenko and Nimčuk, however, fail to notice a cardinal difference between the two translators’ strategies. Thus the language of Ševčenko is replete with numerous bookish and Church Slavonic elements such as myro dobrovonnje ‘odorous ointment’ and omety ‘skirts’, while Maksymovyč’s paraphrases are characterized by exquisite vocabulary yet excessive emulation of folkloric means. Besides, Hnatenko’s and Nimčuk’s survey of the ‘Ukrainian psalmody’ looks incomplete without mentioning Petro Hulak-Artemovs’kyj (1790–1865). A fabulist, scholar and translator of classical literature, he paraphrased Psalms 91, 123, 133, 139 and 140 in the years SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 510 1857 and 1858 (first published in 1908). Strikingly enough, Church Slavonicisms are hardly used by Hulak-Artemovs’kyj who is known for producing the best Alexandrine verse in Ukrainian poetry. He resorts, instead, to vernacular devices as his chief technique in designing the high style of new standard Ukrainian,anapproachwhichwastakenonseveralyearslaterbyMoračevs’kyj. The authors of the introduction also describe the career and works of Moračevs’kyjwho,inadditiontohisbiblicaltranslations,authoredanumberof poemsbothinRussianandUkrainian.AseriesofpatrioticUkrainian-language verses, compiled in the burlesque mode of kotljarevščyna, were published in a collection, not mentioned incidentally by Hnatenko and Nimčuk, with the characteristic title Do čumaka, abo vojna janhlo-xrancuzo-turec’ka u 1853 y 54 rokax (To the Čumak, or the English-French-Turkish War in the Years 1853 and 1854). Hnatenko and Nimčuk omit the fact that Moračevs’kyj as a writer proved an incidental phenomenon in Ukrainian literature and therefore his literary output hardly warrants discussion in greater detail. He is primarily famous for a keen interest in Ukrainian, first in the compilation of Slovar’ malorossijskaho jazўka po poltavskomu narečiju (Dictionary of the Little Russian Language Based on the Poltava Dialect), and his biblical translations. Thus, in 1902, after a thorough inventory in the manuscript division of the Library of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, Vsevolod Izmailovič Sreznevskij gave a description of three manuscripts authored by Moračevs’kyj, which are the following: 1...

Des notes marginales sur le schisme des Trois Chapitres dans le plus vieux manuscrit du De baptismo contra donatistas

The manuscript El Escorial, Monasterio de San Lorenzo, Camarin de las Reliquias, vitrina 25 (CLA XI 1628-1629) is the oldest manuscript witness of Augustine’s De baptismo contra donatistas: it was long believed to be an autograph of Augustine himself. It contains a corpus of several hundreds marginalia, also to be found in its apograph, ms. Oxford, Bodleian Library, laud. misc. 130: they have not been studied until now. A special feature of these notes, this article shows, is that they make direct reference to their writing context. They accuse anonymous bishops of having anathemized “Fathers” dead in the peace of the Church. These notes must be framed, this article argues, in the context of the Three Chapters Schism (540s-570s). Even if meaningful parallels with Facundus’ Contra Mocianum and the Epistula in defensione III capitulorum can be drawn, one should be careful and refrain from assigning these notes, which bear witness of a local conflict arisen on the occasion of the Three Chapter schism, to a particular author or circle.

An Ancient Anthology of Quotations from Augustine's Homiletic Works

The subject of the present article is an ascetic anthology that was compiled in the first half of the ninth century at the latest and consists of fragments extracted from saint Augustine’s Tractatus in euangelium Iohannis, his Enarrationes in psalmos, and the early medieval collection of mainly Augustinian sermons De uerbis Domini et Apostoli. In spite of the exegetical interest of its sources, the anthology’s fragments mainly have a moralizing focus, which explains why it was attributed the title Ex sermonibus sancti Augustini episcopi sententiae eximiae de confessione et poenitentia atque peccatorum indulgentia in one of the branches of its manuscript transmission. The present article offers (1) a discussion of the position of the anthology’s sources within the direct transmission of Augustine’ works ; (2) a list (with bibliography) of its manuscript witnesses (mainly of German and Swiss origin, although there are some isolated French and Spanish witnesses) ; (3) an analysis of their stemmatical relationships (based on a study of both the manuscripts’ general composition and their textual variants) ; and (4) a critical edition of the part of the anthology that was extracted from De uerbis Domini et Apostoli. The article also sheds light on the nature of the version of the Quinquaginta homiliae (a sermon collection of Arlesian origin that was mainly composed of Augustinian sermons) that was joined with the anthology in the archetype of the latter’s transmission.

Paul's Collection through the Saints: Romans 15:31 in Papyrus 46

This article explores the possibility that a significant but little-known singular reading in P⁴⁶ may hold existential priority over the rest of the extant tradition. At Rom 15:31 in P⁴⁶, Paul prays that his “ministry for Jerusalem” (the so-called collection) might be “acceptable through the saints (διὰ τῶν ἁγίων).” The rest of the manuscript and Patristic witnesses preserve the more typically Pauline τοῖς ἁγίοις. This singular reading has never been included in the apparatus of the hand-editions of the Novum Testamentum Graece and thus has been unknown to commentators on Romans since the publication of P⁴⁶ in the 1930s. We argue, based on the habits of the scribe of P⁴⁶, that its singular witness of διὰ τῶν ἁγίων was also the reading of its exemplar and that this earliest preserved reading is more likely than not the earlier of the two possible readings. We then offer several ways of understanding Rom 15:31 in light of its priority, one of which rewrites our understanding of Paul's relationship with the city of Jerusalem as a whole. It understands the saints in Jerusalem as the agents through which the collection, broadened in scope toward the end of Paul's journey to include all of the poor in Jerusalem, including those who have not believed in Jesus, would be administered.

The Travels of a Fifteenth-Century Demonological Manuscript: The University of Alberta’s Copy of Jean Taincture’s Invectives contre la secte de vauderie

Among the most consequential holdings of the University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections is a manuscript copy of Jean Taincture’s Invectives contre la secte de vauderie, the French translation (ca. 1460) of a Latin treatise against witchcraft. This article, part of a larger project, examines (1) the significance of Taincture’s text in its historical context; (2) the relationship between this codex and other manuscript witnesses; and (3) some evidence concerning the book’s ownership and travels.

Barhebraeus’ Metrical Grammar and Ms. BML Or. 298: Codicological and Linguistic Remarks

This contribution deals with different issues connected with Barhebraeus’Metrical Grammar, its manuscript tradition and its linguistic content.The fi rst two sections of the paper aim at giving a general overview ofthe text and of its manuscript witnesses. They contain some codicologicaland text-critical observations, offering an overview of the main featuresof ms. Or. 298 of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana of Florence, whichpreserves the oldest dated copy of Barhebraeus’ Metrical Grammar. Thelast section analyses from the linguistic point of view two particular paragraphsof the Grammar, in which Barhebraeus gives his own interpretationof a phenomenon that some modern linguists call coreferential dative. The aim of this section is to show how the study of native Syriac grammars cancontribute not only to the understanding of ancient linguistic thinking, butalso of features of the Syriac language usually overlooked.ritafarina@gmail.com

Gilte Legende, Vol. III ed. by Richard Hamer

Reviewed by: Gilte Legende, Vol. III ed. by Richard Hamer Alexandra Barratt Hamer, Richard, ed., with Vida Russell, Gilte Legende, Vol. III (Early English Text Society, O.S. 339), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012; hardback; pp. 550; 2 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9780199668175. The Gilte Legende is a ME translation, with some interesting additions, of Jean de Vignay’s French version of the huge, and hugely popular, Latin collection of saints’ lives, the Legenda Aurea (c. 1265). According to the colophon in one manuscript, it was made in 1438 by ‘a sinful wretch’ (p. 2). Richard Hamer, with the assistance of Vida Russell, published an edition of the text itself in two volumes that appeared in 2006 and 2007, with no editorial matter at all except for minimal notes in the first on editorial procedures. As so often with EETS editions of very lengthy texts, the most interesting material – a substantial introduction, notes, and glossary – appears last (if it appears at all). A poor marketing strategy, perhaps. The Introduction describes in detail the eight complete manuscript witnesses (plus a surprisingly large number of fragments), tabulates which vitae occur in which manuscripts, and discusses the manuscript affiliations. It goes on to consider the various chapters that have been added to the French source or appear in modified form (particularly, lives of Malchus, Alban, John the Baptist, and Catherine of Alexandria). This is of especial interest as it may relate to the identity of the translator, more so than the brief discussion of the language, which is simply ‘typical of the south midlands, and the region around London’ (p. 46). The final sections of the Introduction contain a description of the translation’s characteristics, and some intriguing speculation about the translator’s identity. Hamer considers it likely that the translation was made by a woman, and cautiously suggests Dame Eleanor Hull, who already has a track record as a translator: this hypothesis is ‘presented as a possibility, but in view of the lack of solid evidence, no more’ (p. 56). The bulk of the volume is made up of very extensive notes. These ‘consist largely of a record of changes to the text from its French and Latin sources’ (p. 65) and are therefore vital to any assessment of the text as translation. Finally, the thorough glossary (sixty-five double-column pages) reminds us that the EETS remains true to its original raison-d’être to be a lexicological resource. [End Page 186] Alexandra Barratt University of W aikato Copyright © 2016 Alexandra Barratt

The Statutes of the Earliest General Chapters of Benedictine Abbots (1131–early 1140s)

Using a hitherto-ignored version of the so-called Statutes of the first general chapter of Benedictine abbots of 1131, this paper argues that the three manuscript witnesses of that text reflect different stages in a cumulative process of legislation taking place presumably between 1131 and c. 1135 (with additions up to the early 1140s). It also attempts a reconstruction of the complex relationship between the Statutes and contemporary legislative documents from the Cistercian, Premonstratensian, and especially Cluniac movements. Appended is an edition of the Statutes as documented in Douai, Bibliothèque Marcelline-Desbordes Valmore, 540, folios 69r-v, with comparative notes on the previously edited version in BnF, MS Latins, 2677, folios 83v-84r, and the retrievable fragments of a lost copy from Mont-Saint-Quentin.

A New Witness for Erasmus’ Letter 1887 in the Antwerp University Library

With the intention of dissuading an unidentified monk from leaving his monastery, Desiderius Erasmus in October 1527 wrote a letter about the blessings of the monastic condition. This letter was last published as Ep. 1887 in volume 7 of P.S. Allen’s edition of Erasmus’ collected letters. The Antwerp University Library, in its Special Collections, contains a hitherto overlooked manuscript witness for this letter, which helps in establishing the relationships among all extant witnesses and allows for a reconstruction of Erasmus’ original letter.

Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts ed. by Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (review)

SUSANNA FEIN AND MICHAEL JOHNSTON, eds., Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts. Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, New York: York Medieval Press, 2014. Pp. 325. isbn: 978-1-90315-351-2. $99.A glance at the title of this volume might bring one to question what advantage might be gained from a collection so intensely focused on a single Yorkshire scribe who produced only two books, given that London has already been established to be the dominant culture of late medieval England's professional book trade. Yet it is in Thornton's very idiosyncrasy and his failure to 'fit any of the larger patterns in which most historians of English book production have been interested' (2), Michael Johnston argues, that his two books-Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91 and London, British Library MS Add. 31,042-matter.Robert Thornton and His Books is the first book in over twenty-five years to focus exclusively on Robert Thornton (c.1397-c.1465), the amateur scribe and compiler whose extraordinary books-the second-most substantial collection of Middle English romances-preserve an extraordinary quantity of literature which may well otherwise have been lost to oblivion, including the Alliterative Morte Arthure. This long-overdue collection brings together for the first time a fully realized account of Thornton's activity and its relationship to fifteenth-century English book production, Yorkshire social and literary networks, and lay vernacular devotional and reading habits.This volume serves the dual purpose of acting as a rallying point for current scholars and as a staging ground for future scholarly work by marrying the interests of codicological and paleographical analysis with literary criticism. Its first three articles address the manuscripts' physical characteristics. Susanna Fein's contribution offers a comprehensive account of the contents of Thornton's manuscripts that includes the location of scribal signatures, references to other manuscript witnesses, and the citation of scholarly editions. George Keiser follows this with an extended and lively review of Thornton scholarship, peppered throughout with new insights into his milieu, life, scribal practice, and texts. In addition to its comprehensive catalogue of the manuscripts' structure and decoration, Joel Fredell's article situates Thornton's books in their fifteenth-century Yorkshire context, using the decorative features of the manuscripts to complicate our assumptions that Thornton's copying and compilation processes may be reduced to matters of convenience, and arguing that Thornton 'imposed his own organization' on them (120).No collection discussing Thornton would be complete without mentioning its most famous text, the Alliterative Morte Arthure. This volume performs admirably on these grounds. In their provocative reassessment of the language of the Morte, Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre argue persuasively for the need to produce a new edition-one that incorporates the evidence from both the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English and from Malory, who 'had access to a text of the poem that was at some points more accurate and more complete than Thornton's' (141). …

The Ruthven manuscript of Gavin Douglas's Eneados and a new manuscript witness of Julius Caesar Scaliger's Epidorpides

AbstractThis article takes as its focus a set of Latin verses (copied in a late sixteenth‐ or early seventeenth‐century Scots hand) on fol. 1v of the so‐called Ruthven manuscript (Edinburgh, University Library, MS Dc.1.43) of Gavin Douglas's Eneados. These were not recorded in the seminal Scottish Text Society edition of the poem by Coldwell and have not, to the best of my knowledge, been previously discussed elsewhere. They can, however, now be identified as extracts from Books 3 (‘mane accinge’) and 2 (‘humiles nobilitat virtus’ and ‘te cura nunc’) of Julius Caesar Scaliger's Epidorpides (first published posthumously in 1573 in Geneva as De sapientia et beatitudine libri octo, quos Epidorpides inscripsit and again in 1574 as part of Poemata in duos partes divisa (Heidelberg)). In this article, I transcribe and identify the verses, document those connections between the elder and younger Scaliger and three Scottish writers (Buchanan, Melville and Rollock) that might account for the appearance of the verses in the Ruthven manuscript, and consider what correspondences one might draw between the three extracts from Scaliger's Epidorpides on fol. 1v of the Ruthven manuscript and the subsequent translation of Virgil's Aeneid by Gavin Douglas.

Manuscript Witness to Power and Politics at Central European Episcopal Centers

Medieval institutions have frequently been considered either in terms of physi- cal edifice or, in the discipline of musicology, in terms of a so-called, often ill- defined, but nevertheless taken as self-evident, music liturgical “repertories.” This contribution discusses a more elusive, yet authentic, relationship between spiritual-social-physical cathedral institutions and the manuscripts produced by these institutions, concentrating on, and comparing, episcopal centers in central France and central Europe.

Traveling Companions: Narrative Diffusion of <em>Floire et Blancheflor</em> in Medieval Miscellany, 1325–1400

All models are wrong, but some are useful.-George BoxThere are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.-Mark TwainIntroductionIdentifying how a narrative travels from one place and time to another, and hence from one culture or community to another, remains a persistent problem in both folklore studies and literary history. Often, the movement of narratives must be triangulated and approximated from the surviving evidence. For the medieval period, such evidence is often scant and difffijicult to evaluate-of the narratives that survive in written material at all, many of those survive in only a handful of manuscripts. This article contends that when the manuscript corpus of a medieval narrative is found largely in a specifijic type of manuscript-the vernacular anthology or miscellany-one can use the increased context provided by the anthology to trace the geographic and temporal difffusion of a narrative across literary communities and to see what companion narratives travel with a given story. Using the foundational European tale of Floire and Blancheflor, I explore what a narrative's traveling companions across its surviving corpus can tell us about the narrative cultures through which it traveled.Floire and Blancheflor fijirst appears in the written record as the twelfth-century Old French romance Floire et Blancheflor. It possesses a moderate number of manuscript witnesses, but so many or so few as to render it an outlier among surviving Old French narratives. Further, the manuscript witnesses appear across a wide swath of geographic and linguistic areas, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Ultimately, I suggest four iterations of traveling companions for the tale: (1) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Mainete; (2) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Claris and Laris; (3) Floire and Blancheflor, Amadas and Ydoine, and Partonopeus of Blois, and (4) Floire and Blancheflor, Blancandin and Orgeuilleuse d'Amour, and Partonopeus of Blois. Viewing Floire and Blancheflor as fundamentally tied to these sets of stories in a given narrative community changes our understanding of the narrative's reception in its time.With the rapidly increasing commercialization of manuscript production over the thirteenth century, bespoke vernacular manuscripts were increasingly available to the wealthy, secular public. While some of these codices contained only a single text, many were what are now referred to as vernacular literary anthologies. It now appears that a great deal of the so-called miscellany manuscripts are, in fact, organized according to principles ranging from rudimentary groupings of thematically related texts to an elaborate overall design (Huot 11). Who, exactly, was doing that organizing is open to question; however, it would have necessitated a complex interaction between bookseller, scribe, and patron. As the written trace of a complex narrative culture, manuscripts were assembled not casually but deliberately, as a result of someone's decision that it should exist, as a result of common or group decision that it should be made in this fashion and another (Rouse and Rouse 3). This intentionality does discount the possibility that such seemingly random collections of texts simply existed for the sake of convenience, or so that the reader would have more than one story at hand. However, when patterns of association between individual narratives crop up repeatedly across multiple such manuscripts, we can make begin to hypothesize about the potential thematic, cultural, or historic connections between them.New Codicology1 values the codex as an object of inquiry rather than the corpus, treating each codex as a living artifact rich with multiple sites of meaning (material, textual, and historical). In this scenario, each book is an idiosyncratic individual, capable of being parsed only when confronted as a whole. …

Peter Plaoul’s Lecture Commentary on the Sentences: A Canonical Ordered List of Lectures

The Sentences commentary of Peter Plaoul, first delivered as a series of lectures at Paris in the academic year of 1392/93, is a unique text and an important historical witness. However, the surviving organization of the text in its manuscript witnesses makes any comparative analysis of the text extremely difficult. The purpose of this essay is to present and justify a canonical numbered list of lectures that can function as a map for each manuscript witness. Such an independent list, which does not exactly reflect the lecture divisions of any one manuscript, will make it possible to refer to identical sections throughout all witnesses, despite their varied organization.

L’Homère de Pléthon

A short treatise on Homer by George Gemistus Pletho is here published for the first time : new information is given on the manuscript witnesses (especially the ms. Naples, Girolamini C. F. 2.11, partly copied by the learned John Dokeianos, who played a role in the production and preservation of several books of Pletho -the ones now in Venice are examined in some detail) as well as on the content of the text, which deals with Homer’s biography, with the allegorical reading of the gods in the Iliad, and with the need to athetise the most dangerous parts of the poem.

A New Identification of the Pauline Commentary in Manuscript Oxford Bodleian Library Laud. Misc. 106

From the later Middle Ages up until today, the manuscript Oxford Bodleian Library Laud. Misc. 106, written at Würzburg around 850, has been considered an important witness of Raban Maur’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans (ff . 1v-82v) and fi rst epistle to the Corinthians (ff . 82v-150v). The present article, however, shows that the manuscript’s ff . 1v-150v have transmitted the commentaries on Rom. and 1 Cor. of the 4th-century exegete Ambrosiaster. This new identification has two major consequences: (1) it enables us to offer a better interpretation of two items in the catalogue of the Cathedral library of Würzburg, written around 1000; (2) till further notice, we do not dispose of any manuscript witness for Raban Maur’s commentary on Rom. 1:1-8:17. For this part of the Carolingian scholar’s commentary we are thus to rely exclusively on the Colvener edition (1626/1627, reprinted in PL 111-112).

New Editorial Perspectives on Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci

The author summarizes the acquisitions on the current status of the manuscript and printed tradition of Fibonacci’s treatise and demonstrates the need of preparing a critical edition of the work. He points out that in the current state of the preparatory work of this edition it’s not possible to provide a genuine stemma codicum yet, but he proposes only some hypotheses about the reciprocal relationships of the manuscript witnesses. The paper ends with an essay of the critical edition in preparation, that is the dedicatory epistle to Michael Scotus and the prologue of the treatise: the critical text is equipped with an apparatus of variants and is provided with a new and original English translation.

Old Light on New Media: Medieval Practices in the Digital Age

This essay offers an insight into the way digital editions of medieval texts can be employed to replicate the medieval reading experience. Awareness of the characteristic features of medieval textuality, exemplified through select late medieval texts, can help in developing increasingly flexible editorial models, which are more consistent with medieval reading practices than current editions. Editions, transformed from single textual occurrences into fluid, communal, and unfolding processes, can uncover a complex notion of medieval hypertextuality by linking texts, images, and tunes. They can then even trace the reception of a given text. As readers are empowered to zoom in and out specific textual components, of manuscript witnesses, of families and printed editions, digital editions can present individual witnesses alongside editorial apparatuses and thus bridge the gap between the Old and the New Philology.

Axiomatic Wisdom: Boethius’ De hebdomadibus and the Liber de causis in Late-Medieval Albertism

By developing a reassesment of the repertoire of Albertist literature in light of new manuscript witnesses, the article intends to reconstruct the late-medieval Albertist model of metaphysics and to investigate the crucial reception of Boethius’ De hebdomadibus and of the Liber de causis in the academic teaching and disputes of the early fifteenth century. The article focuses on two anonymous commentaries on these treatises, which were both composed by the same Albertist master (most probably in Paris), and analyzes their significance within the Albertist school as well as their close relation to the works of Johannes de Nova Domo. In particular, the essay illustrates how the De hebdomadibus and the Liber de causis, which were adduced and commented on as canonical authorities, not only constituted central sources for Albertist doctrines, but also served as disciplinary models for the axiomatic exposition of first philosophy. The final section of the article provides a detailed account of the manuscript transmission of the two Albertist commentaries and traces the topography of their dissemination.

The Challenges of Editing Donne and Herbert

This article argues the case for single-author editions of the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. It draws on hands-on editorial experience: Richard Todd is Assistant Textual Editor to the multi-volume Donne Variorum project and Helen Wilcox has edited the recent Cambridge Herbert edition. These two case studies contrast dramatically in that Donne’s poetry in manuscript survives today in a terminal moraine of multiple nonholograph manuscript witnesses, whereas Herbert’s manuscript and print history appears on the surface considerably more straightforward. Yet both corpora, raising different and provocative issues concerning the textual culture of the period, are presented so as to argue strongly the case for the single-author edition in the world of poetic miscellany, scribal community, and creative interaction in both manuscript and print.