from Medieval Academy News

The Probatoria Project
by Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano

Poitiers, 1 July 2002

Greetings to the Medieval Academy from Poitiers, the latest stop of the Probatoria Project. In the Bi-bliothèque municipale of Bordeaux last week, we examined all the pre-1400 Latin text manuscripts, about 200 books in all, and (in addition to a few less certain provenances) we discovered that three of these belonged in 1369 to the library that was housed high in the Angel’s Tower of the papal palace at Avignon. Pending further investigation, we can surmise that those three were acquired for the monastery of Sauve-Majeur by Abbot Raymond, who was much in the Curia in the 1370s. By a small but definite increment, the Bordeaux manuscripts have become more valuable for cultural history; their conservateur is gratified; and we the searchers have made the very pleasant acquaintance of some scores more of manuscripts, each one unique. The Probatoria Project is as much fun as one can have in a reading room, and we take this opportunity to explain it.

Anyone familiar with Leonard Boyle’s paleography seminar in the Pontifical Institute, Toronto, will not be surprised to hear that the Probatoria Project began there. It was there that your reporters learned to read all the common medieval Latin hands and how to puzzle out the weird ones, while we adopted Father Boyle’s working principle that there is something wonderful to discover in any medieval manuscript source if one digs energetically enough. He started this project thirty years ago by assigning, for a report in his seminar in diplomatic, a photocopy of a register folio from the Vatican Archives where was written the inventory of the books which had belonged to Guigo da San Germano, bishop of Cassino, at his death in 1341.

Let’s take the seventh item as typical: “Item Codicem cum glosa antiqua qui incipit in secundo folio in textu et eundem.” It was not surprising that Guigo, a lawyer trained at Bologna, owned a copy of the Codex of Justinian with the pre-ordinary gloss written in its margins; but what could one make of the rest of the item? It seemed to be saying that “et eundem” was the phrase in the text of the Codex which happened to occur at the beginning of folio 2 (i.e., page 3) of Guigo’s particular copy of this standard work. A curious datum, but one which was recorded for each of Guigo’s fifty-seven books as they were checked in to the Treasury at Avignon. It is the “identifying phrase,” the dictio probatoria, as John Whitefield called it when he catalogued the books of Dover Priory (the German term is Kennwort, the French is incipit repère).

We were to discover as we went along that the practice of recording probatoriae began in the Sorbonne at the very end of the thirteenth century, and that it was always intended to identify one copy of a work as against all other copies by recording that scrap of the work’s text which happened to fall at the beginning of the second folio in that particular copy by the accidents of manual production and variable page-size. The purpose was to foil a fellow who might wish to return a worse copy than the one borrowed. This clever manner of banding one’s own pigeons spread outward from Paris and then from Avignon, reaching England after a century.

One byproduct of the eventual Toronto doctoral dissertation was a stack of slips with a few hundred probatoriae from old inventories, put in alphabetical order on the chance that one or other of these might trace a book through an interesting journey. One fine day a slip from Anneliese Maier’s edition of the catalogue of books remaining in the papal palace at Avignon in 1411 fell by its probatoria “probabiliter ignorare” right behind one from the inventory of Boniface VIII’s library in safekeeping in Perugia in 1311. The book in question was that pope’s own code of Canon Law, the Liber Sextus. And Maier had noted that the 1411 item had survived as MS 7 of the Vatican Fondo Borghese, which she had catalogued. Bingo, as we used to exclaim in those days. If the probatoria could discover the best extant witness to such an important text, one could expect more profit from a full collection of such data, taken both from old inventories and from existing manuscripts; and some perceptive modern cataloguers were indeed providing “secundo-folios.” But the drudgery of manual collection and sorting was bound to cost more time than a working junior academic could give it. Then came the 80-column IBM card, the user-tolerant database system, and at last the capacious personal computer to change the balance and make the Probatoria Project an ongoing reality whose gains outweigh its labors.

We began our active collaboration in 1995 with a thorough proofreading of the database of pre-modern library inventories, a resource which now contains 36,000 records. Then we arranged to spend a part of each year gathering the probatoriae of existing collections. One campaign in France gave us the municipal libraries of Avignon, Montpellier, Toulouse (a gem of preservation), Rodez, Albi, and Mende. In Italy another summer we rejoiced in Cesena (the treasure chamber of the bibliophile Malatesta Novello), Perugia, Montecassino (a miracle of survival), and the Nazionali of Naples (only a small sample) and Rome. One academic leave, and Father Boyle’s blessing as he left the office of Prefect of the Vatican Library, permitted us to complete a survey of the two most promising fondi, the Vaticani latini and the Borghesiani, and our provenance findings there are soon to appear as a Studi e Testi volume (the Codex iuris civilis mentioned earlier is now Vatican Borghese MS 244).

A sabbatical leave allowed us to visit Cambridge University and Colleges, and to find there a surprising fifty provenances unknown to M. R. James and to N. R. Ker. The next term, in Scotland, we found a precious few. Last summer it was Florence (for the Medicea-Laurenziana), the beautifully repaired Sacro Convento of Assisi, and the hidden treasure in the castle of the Conti Guidi at Poppi, where Dante in exile once lamented that there is no harder hike than up and down somebody else’s stairs. Next summer we hope to make our survey of Oxford Colleges and the Bodleian.

A complete account of the probatoria data-type is published in Scriptorium 53 (1999), 124–145. Because of the peculiar requirements of this project, we may have handled, opened, and taken readings in more medieval Latin manuscript books than anyone else alive, and we know how to appreciate our great luck. We get a rare sense of reliving a long-past moment when we realize not just when and where our 600-year-old colleague opened the same book, but what that clerk was looking for and why.

The cities with good numbers of medieval manuscripts are among the most interesting in Europe, and occasionally the reading rooms where we work are strikingly beautiful spaces (e.g., Trinity College, Cambridge) or have grand views (e.g., Naples). Once they have understood our aim, each manuscript librarian has been all kindness and consideration; we have even been granted extra hours when we had not enough days in a city. The Malatestiana of Cesena, a chained library, is a national monument, never wired for electric light, and the second day of our visit was rainy and dark. Two librarians accompanied us for hours, one carrying the inventory and the other a work-light on a long cable, both eager to show us their favorite pages and bindings as we worked down the twenty-nine plutei sinistri.

Surprises keep coming. There is the Chrysostom of Boniface VIII now owned by the U.S. Library of Congress. There are manuscripts which Guglielmo Libri, under cover of his official cataloguing duties, stole from French libraries in the 1820s; dissected and rebound, they were sold to Lord Ashburnham and finally repatriated, some to Italy by mistake. Libri’s sometime accomplice Barrois marketed a precious heirloom of the Dukes of Burgundy (whose old catalogues he had edited) which is now in the Newberry Library, Chicago. Aberdeen has a patristic manuscript, copied in a lovely humanist hand for Leonardo Mansueti, the Dominican master-general, at Perugia. There are the four liturgical books written in haste in Montpellier for the merchant bishop of Lisbon, Thibaud de Castillon, when he finally decided to go and live in his diocese. In large letters for his aged eyes, these are peppered with little pastel grotesques, some of them mitred. Only their probatoriae permit us to see the link between that merchant-prince-bishop and his satyrical scribes.

If you would like to have our database searched for the provenance of Latin pre-1500 codices of interest to you, we will be happy to do it and report to you. Just send the complete “pathname” of the codex: city-library-fonds-classmark-serial number; a short title, and the first words of the second folio and of the second column (or second page, if it is a single column per page); take these readings from the fore-matter (table of contents, preface) and from the text proper, and from a gloss if there is one. Say where! Any of these locations might have been read for probatoria by a medieval clerk. Chances of a match are slimmer if the book is German or Iberian in origin, a service psalter or book of hours, or if the text is in verses; but we will deal with those too. Send your request to Daniel Williman, Binghamton University (danielw@binghamton.edu); or Karen Corsano, Channing Laboratory, Boston (karen.corsano@channing.harvard.edu).