Tag Archives: manuscripts

This week I have been mostly looking at manuscripts (in north Italy).

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It’s just a coincidence that this is the second week in a row that I’ve been looking at manuscripts. And that makes for quite a treat, even if all of the pages and words become overwhelming after a time. It’s certainly an unbelievable privilege to be able to travel to lovely places, and especially to sit in the ancient Ambrosian Library in Milan and turn the pages of an immense, heavy, unspeakably beautifully decorated volume of saints’ lives. But I couldn’t take any photos of that, and I’m more academically excited by the manuscript that was my primary reason for going to Italy, which is held in the bishop’s archives in Novara, a small city about an hour west of Milan by train. So that’s what the rest of this blog is about: Novara, Archivio Storicio Diocesiano, MS P. 2 (s. xii, Novara?).

Outside view of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan).
Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan)

There are a number of unique things about the way the story of Christopher is told in this volume. Probably as a result, it’s catalogued in quite a confusing way, which is why I really wanted to see it. I can confirm – against all of the lists I’ve seen – that it’s actually part of the BHL 1771 line of the text (which comes from southern Germany). But this interests pretty much no-one apart from me, and is merely a technical distinction. That sort of classification is not why I look at manuscripts.

 

What’s really interesting (I think) is how the story is retold here. The single biggest difference is that the story of two very powerful women, which is at the heart of the usual Christopher narrative, is cut down quite heavily, and their importance minimised. I’ll probably blog about them separately at a later date; here, this is just an example of the revisions taking place. The (many) speeches and prayers are also consistently lengthened in this copy, often with increased orthodoxy compared with some of the oddities of the older and more common variant.

 

Once you’re looking at a unique text, one of the questions to ask is how long before this particular copy of the text the version was produced. Is it just random chance that this single copy has survived, or might this be the manuscript in which the story was first revised in this way? In other words, was the scribe just copying out something in front of him, of interest to me (because I haven’t seen it elsewhere), but not especially so to him (because he had to copy out Christopher’s story, and this was the version he had). Or was he a revising scribe, acting as author at the same time as copying – or at least in the company of an authorial figure?

 

I need to do more work on this, and I’ve seen six manuscripts in the last two weeks, so I’ve got a lot of notes to sort out. But there are indications that this copy might be by the ‘author’ of this version. The most straightforward evidence is an erased letter t, shown in the picture here.

Erased 't' from folio 109v of Novara, Arch. Stor. Dioc., P. 2.
Erased ‘t’ from folio 109v of Novara, Arch. Stor. Dioc., P. 2.

In this bit of text, some soldiers tell their king to get stuffed; they’ve had enough of doing what he says, because he’s a psycho, and they’re going to become Christians. He offers them gold and silver to change their minds (which is a bit Game of Thrones). In the standard telling, they say ‘screw your gold and silver’ (“aurum et argentum tuum sit in perditione”). In this version, they say “screw gold and silver”, missing out the tuum (your) in the Latin. But the scribe started to write the tuum, getting as far as the t, then realised his mistake – or changed his mind – and deleted it instead. His soldiers reject all worldly wealth, not just the money connected with the evil kind; a change in line with many of the other revisions that can be seen in this copy.

That’s not conclusive, but (along with the other stuff) suggests that, as he read and copied out this story, he was thinking about it, changing it, retelling it in a new way. This twelfth-century manuscript is a living piece of storytelling; an individual’s reaction to the story I’m engaging with each day I work on this project. That I disagree with his reading maybe only makes it more exciting to see what he’s done with it. It’s been a great couple of manuscript weeks, but being sat in the archives of the bishop’s palace on Wednesday and seeing that scratched out t was the best moment of them.

What’s this all about?

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What do I do all day?

My research is into the use and adaptation of the story of saint Christopher in early medieval western Europe. By ‘early medieval’ I mean from about 600 until about 1200 AD; by ‘western Europe’, I mean an area more or less equivalent to the western half of the Roman Empire, stretching (very roughly) from Sicily in the south to England in the north; from Portugal in the east to Germany in the west.

In this period, Christopher hadn’t yet become a giant man who searches for a powerful ruler to follow and ends up trying to carry the Christ child across a river before being martyred for his faith. (I think that story originated in southern Germany in the thirteenth century and became super popular shortly thereafter.) He was an individual from a tribe of cannibalistic dog-headed people who comes to know God and goes on to convert a city while being tortured and martyred. (The violence remains, though the dog-head got lost.)

The giant, beast-headed Christopher grips onto the walls of the city while people stare in horror.
Saint Christopher, on Stuttgart, Württembergischen Lb, cod hist 415, fol. 50r.

Although in many ways it’s a pretty standard sort of saint’s life I think this is an interesting story for two big reasons. First, he had a dog’s head. Come on, that’s pretty interesting: a monster as a hero; a non-human teaching people how to live; an outsider bringing disturbing but ultimately positive transformation. Second, he wasn’t from anywhere identifiable to people in western Europe and had no relics (things that could be connected with his physical existence) anywhere in the west; unlike many saints, he didn’t have a local centre promoting his legend and making sure it was popular. Many – perhaps most – saints and their relics were essentially used as a form of tourist attraction; the equivalent of a minor town promoting some object they’ve found that Churchill once touched. That Christopher had none of that suggests (to me) that where his story was read and adapted, it was because people found him and his story of intrinsic value.

Most of my work, then, involves looking at different copies of the legend from my period. There’s over a hundred of them (that I’ve identified so far) in various places across Europe. When I find them, I read them, copy them out, and compare them with other versions. I’m interested in what’s been changed – deliberately or accidentally – and what difference it makes to the story. I’m also interested in what sort of collections the story is put into, and whether that makes any difference to its ideas or impact. In the end, I hope to be able to produce editions of the various versions – perhaps a digital edition of all of them if I can. And to build a database showing the contents of manuscripts containing saints’ lives, so I and others can ask similar questions about other saints. And to produce a study of different uses of the same story in different places and different times.

This is not going to change the world. In many ways, it’s exactly the sort of thing that Robert Halfon MP thinks is a waste of time. I get that (though I don’t understand why he doesn’t apply the same criteria to other things in life). But I still think it’s both exciting and worthwhile. Partly because stories are, fundamentally, what we’re made out of, and both the base story of Christopher and the story of the development of his legend are pretty good ones. Partly because holding a thousand-year-old piece of goat skin and seeing how it’s been touched, scratched, and marked allows me to connect with other humans who lived unimaginably different lives, and attempt to share that connection with my students and readers. But also because, done well, this project should form a tiny, tiny part of building towards a deeper understanding of how communities use stories to shape and think about themselves and their world.