Medieval Latin Palaeography Online: A Teaching Bibliography (The Electronic Boyle)
ISSUES: Eectronic Palaeography was prompted by the necessity of making available on the web a bibliographical introduction to medieval Latin palaeography (where 'Latin' includes translations of Greek texts) to students of medieval and Byzantine studies ('Latin' includes Latin translations of Greek texts) with little or no specialized training in palaeography. It responds to a need expressed by Leonard Boyle as early as 1984: "To give beginners as wide a view as possible of the background one has to have in order to do justice to any piece of old writing", justice being defined as, "to make [a text] communicate as completely as possible" (Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., Medieval Latin Palaeography, Toronto 1984, p. xiv, xv). Bibliography are, by nature, unfinished business, because new publications make updates an ever present need. That need is, if anything, even stronger now than in 1984, because often the study of auxiliary disciplines such as palaeography, codicology, diplomatics, editing of texts, has not kept pace with the expansion of medieval and Byzantine studies. The transmission of manuscripts is often the only reliable evidence on the literary culture of a given period or society, hence the necessity of placing works on manuscript studies within easy reach of interested scholars.
METHODS: A brief history of the project will illustrate the methods used. In 1999 the Besso Foundation (Rome) made possible an Italian edition of Boyle's Medieval Latin Palaeography. Fabio Troncarelli updated the work with some additional 1,200 bibliographical entries (the fruit of his own research) covering the period 1982-1998. Leonard Boyle edited the volume, published in 1999 with the title Paleografia latina medievale. Because of space limitations, about half of Troncarelli's entries could not be included in the 1999 edition. In 2000 "Electronic Palaeography" was born as a link on the homepage of the website of the Societas internationalis pro Vivario, to make the entries omitted from the 1999 edition available to interested scholars. Not intended as a comprehensive bibliography, "Electronic Palaeography" is a teaching tool and a means of making new works readily available to anyone interested.
STATUS OF THE PROJECT: We are currently organizing the original entries and expanding the project - slowly, because this is a volunteer effort. Since "Electronic Palaeography" is the continuation of Boyle's Medieval Latin Palaeography, the original format has been maintained: all entries are subdivided in the seven categories devised by Boyle, turned into seven different links. Organization entails assigning entries to the appropriate category and crossreferencing the new entries to related ones (if any) in the printed editions. Proofreadung and some stylistic changes are necessary when transferring a text from Italian to English. Expansion of the project includes linking individual entries to websites of related interest, a new emphasis on Latin translations from the Greek, a brief summary of new entries, and the selection of keywords for search engines: manuscripts, their repositories, authors and titles, scriptoria. Though, as I write this, only the first of the seven links is presentable, "Electronic Palaeography" may be moved to an independent website in the future. Meanwhile, it receives referrals from such URLs as Bibliographien.mediaevum.de, english.uiuc.edu/Wright/mssbib.htm, vl-ghw.uni-muenchen.de, etc.
Luciana Cuppo Csaki