Reading the Popes: The Liber pontificalis and Its Editors
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/692789
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeReading the Popes: The Liber pontificalis and Its EditorsCarmela Vircillo FranklinCarmela Vircillo FranklinCarmela Vircillo Franklin is Professor of Classics at Columbia University, New York (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMedieval texts are "living texts," and the role of the philologist is to coax them into telling us their stories. Creating an edition is not so much about establishing the "original text," which classicists desire, or the "best manuscript text," as the French philologist Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) thought we medievalists should settle for, but about understanding and appreciating the metamorphoses a text has undergone. We ask not only what emendations were made to a text during its scribal reception, but also what the variations reveal about contemporary political, religious, and intellectual concerns. Changes are thus not mere corruptions—instead they yield distinct sources to be read and examined. Such work expands the role of the editor to that of an interpreter, whose edition shares contemporary scholarly preoccupations, a far cry from the image of the editor as a drudge deciphering scripts and creating stemmata. The Liber pontificalis and its rich editorial history both in manuscript and print culture illustrate this point, and today I will concentrate on an important portion of that history—the seventeenth and eighteenth century.The Liber pontificalis—the papal chronicle which begins with Saint Peter and stops, incomplete, in the middle of the "Life of Stephen V" in 885, is an exemplary text for a medieval philologist in search of an editorial project. Its characteristics present all of the challenges of a long and diverse reception: the work is anonymous, yet highly authoritative, the major source for the history of the Church of Rome and its liturgy, laws, and customs; it is deeply conservative in the format of its chronicle narrative, yet it was constantly changed, a variable text which was updated, and even revised, at every new pontificate; it was written in Rome, in the heart of papal bureaucracy, yet so appropriated into different historical, geographical, and political contexts as to give rise to a variety of redactions that have gained labels, if not titles: "the Lombard redaction," created in Lucca in the ninth century, or "the Frankish redaction," circulating in Gaul during the eighth and ninth centuries; or "the Saint-Gilles redaction," composed in Provence in the 1130s.1As a result of its extraordinary variability, the Liber pontificalis survives in more than one hundred manuscripts, and its edition has not been undertaken by the faint-hearted. The most recent editors are the French priest Louis Duchesne (1843–1922), who, to my mind, is the greatest editor ever of a medieval Latin text; his philologically innovative edition of the Liber pontificalis (1886–92)2 can be expanded or improved, but never replaced, in the words of another significant, and rival, editor of the Liber pontificalis, the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen, who published only a portion of the text for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1898.3The editio princeps—the first printed edition—of the Liber pontificalis was brought out in Mainz in 1602, by the printer Johannes Albinus. Its editor, though anonymous, was the Jesuit Iohannes Busaeus of Nijmegen (Jean Buys; 1547–1611).4 It is not a good edition from any point of view. First, Busaeus based his text on a late sixteenth-century copy of the eleventh-century Vatican manuscript Vaticanus latinus 3764, provided by Alessandro Ranaldi, then vice prefect of the Vatican Library.5 Busaeus, on occasion, adds variant readings in the margin of his edition. He does not take these from other manuscripts, however, but from printed books that had cited the text, an example of the nonlinear relationship between manuscripts and print even as late as the seventeenth century. Secondly, it is an exceptionally polemical edition, produced as part of the Catholic scholarly arsenal against Protestant challenges to papal privilege. Finally, this first printed edition of the Liber pontificalis canonized the incorrect ascription of authorship to Anastasius Bibliothecarius (810–878), the librarian and archivist of the Roman Church under Popes Nicholas I and Hadrian II.6In the early eighteenth century, two new and competing editions of the Liber pontificalis were printed, both in Rome.7 One was by Giovanni Vignoli (1667–1733), vice prefect (1712–30) of the Vatican Library. Dedicated to Benedict XIII, the first of its three volumes came out in 1724. The other two volumes appeared after Vignoli's death in 1733.8 Despite its philological claims, it made no progress over the edition of 1602.9 Both Busaeus's and Vignoli's editions follow the philological practice of early printed Latin texts. One manuscript, selected because of the legibility of script rather than the quality of the text, was chosen as the source of the printed work, following early printers' preference for a manuscript that was easy to read and to set. Both of these early editions are ultimately based on the Vatican manuscript Vaticanus latinus 3764, written in a beautifully clear Roman version of Carolingian minuscule, and with standardized Latinity. The only lasting achievement of Vignoli's edition is that it gave the papal chronicle its modern name and removed Anastasius Bibliothecarius as the author, relying on arguments made from content and style.10 It would take the scientific methods of its other eighteenth-century editor, Francesco Bianchini, wholly to refute this error. And it is to that edition that we now turn.In contrast to the Vignoli edition, that by Francesco Bianchini is an extraordinary monument of antiquarian scholarship in an age of science, to borrow Anthony Grafton's characterization of the period 1450 to 1800.11 Bianchini's scholarly method can be situated within trends identified among mid-seventeenth century scholars of antiquity, and also, although less acknowledged, among the antiquarians who studied the Middle Ages and nonclassical civilizations, like the Etruscans, Egyptians, and those of Asia and Africa. Having rediscovered the importance of source criticism, these scholars saw the physical remains of antiquity as "genuine witnesses," and they stressed an empirical, observational practice to their scholarship. Their approach paralleled the observational methodology used in contemporary natural philosophy and mathematics. Many of them were both scholars and scientists. Isaac Newton (1623–1747), most famously, applied to problems of biblical chronology and scriptural interpretation methodological rules which were analogous to those he employed in his Principia mathematica. Francesco Bianchini was also a multitalented mathematician and scientist.12 Like the better-known projects produced by the Bollandists, the Maurists, and the Rerum Italicarum scriptores of Ludovico Muratori, Bianchini's edition applies the scientific methodology of direct observation and the historian's appreciation of material evidence to the text of the Liber pontificalis. And, like these other well-known works, Bianchini's edition should be appreciated as part of the burgeoning and critical study of the Middle Ages and its sources in the antiquarian world of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.13Francesco Bianchini and his Liber pontificalisBorn in Verona in 1662, Bianchini14 was educated at the Jesuit collegium of Bologna,15 where he first learned Galilean science, and then in 1680 at the University of Padova, where he studied mathematics and astronomy.16 His early Jesuit education also provided instruction in drawing, in which he acquired great skill, and which would be useful for his studies of mathematics and science, and also for the documentation of archaeological and historical data, as we shall see.17 The son of a modest family, Bianchini moved to Rome in search of advancement. He joined the household of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, later Pope Alexander VIII, for whose library he prepared a still important catalog of manuscripts.18 Bianchini had been aiming for a position at the Vatican Library, but when Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Albani became pope as Clement XI in 1700 and offered him the post of vice prefect, Bianchini preferred the more exalted position of cameriere d'onore of the new pope.19In Rome, Bianchini maintained the scientific interests he had begun to pursue in his native Verona. He became member of the Accademia Fisico-matematica, a scholarly association founded by Cardinal Giovanni Giustino Ciampini (d. 1698), one of Rome's leading natural philosophers, which, despite the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, managed to conduct experiments and observe the stars.20 When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) came to Rome in 1689 to lobby the Holy Office to lift the prohibition on heliocentrism and to embrace the more moderate elements of the "new science," he was welcomed at the Accademia Fisico-matematica, which met at the palazzo of Queen Christina of Sweden, a patron of the arts and of science and a collector of manuscripts.21 The Catholic Bianchini, who had been named secretary for the reform of the calendar, and the Lutheran Leibnitz corresponded on calendric and astronomical measurements until Leibnitz's death in 1716.22 These same circles introduced Newton's Opticks in a Latin translation into Rome, and during 1707–8 attempted the first replications of Newton's optical experiments at the Quirinal, under the patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, Pope Clement's nephew. The highlights of Bianchini's trip to France and England in 1713 as papal envoy23 were his visit to the Greenwich Observatory and his long conversations with Isaac Newton in London in January and February of that year.24Bianchini thus moved between the world of libraries and book learning and that of the small but active scientific world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Rome, centered in the academies, whose elusive goal was to bring harmony between Catholic teaching and experimental science.25 He was known as Rome's leading astronomer—the comet of 1685, which he had observed, is named after him; and, as an archaeologist, he was the first to make important discoveries on the Palatine.26 He was also an inventor and an engineer. Under Pope Clement, he devised the transportation of the newly excavated Antonine Column to Piazza Montecitorio. And in 1702, he built the astronomical meridian at the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the former baths of Caracalla, which was the best and most complex meridian ever built up to then and served as an ambitious model for later ones. He was a member of the royal societies of London and Paris. 27 As a scholar, Bianchini applied a similar scientific approach to historical and philological studies, based on increased critical inquiry of the literary sources and buttressed by archaeological and material observation.28 In addition, Bianchini's strong emphasis on rectifying chronological inconsistencies in sources led him to draw evidence from astronomical information, such as eclipses and related phenomena.Always known as a scientist, Bianchini has attracted scholarly attention in recent decades precisely for his combination of mathematical and scientific interests with antiquarian ones in producing L'istoria universale provata con monumenti e figurata con simboli degli antichi (Rome: Antonio De' Rossi, 1697).29 The title speaks to the method he employs in this work: it is a universal history "proved by monuments" from distant antiquity, and illustrated with symbolic images—generally pastiches designed by the author to serve as memory aids for the large themes of the work; the recurrence of historical patterns, for example, or the interconnections among cultures. The forty-two images in L'istoria, one for every chapter and drawn by Bianchini himself,30 were on an equal footing with the text. They were not, in Bianchini's own words, "frivolous ornament" but an instrument of analysis. In this project, Bianchini is credited by modern scholars for opening up "a new and original route into the past—that of comparative iconography."31Bianchini's edition of the Liber pontificalis, contrary to L'istoria universale, has received absolutely no attention from scholars of the Enlightenment, perhaps because it is all in Latin, or perhaps because of its unexciting subject matter. It receives no mention in any of the recent scholarship on Bianchini.32 Yet, like L'istoria universale, it also is an example of how the methodologies of the natural sciences and the stress on observation and empiricism were adapted to the editions of texts and to their commentaries. Bianchini is the first editor of the Liber pontificalis—and perhaps of any medieval text—who so clearly applies to literary manuscripts the methodology developed for charters by the Maurist Jean Mabillon. This is a novel application, for neither classicists nor biblical scholars, in contrast to medievalists, had available abundant original written documents contemporary to their sources. The age of the manuscript becomes crucial in Bianchini's estimation. Previous editors of the papal chronicle had been less interested in the age of manuscripts than in their readability, correctness of language, and completeness, as we saw for Busaeus's and Vignoli's editions. And, as in L'istoria universale, Bianchini here also fully exploits the technology of printing to add a variety of images as instruments of independent analysis and meaning, and not just as adornment of the text.The election of the scholarly Giovanni Francesco Albani as Pope Clement XI in 1700 provided the opportunity for a history of the church which could, like Bianchini's universal history, also be "provata" and "illustrata" through the witness of material evidence.33 Albani—who is best remembered for his 1713 anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus, reasserting papal primacy—wanted to "document" early Christian history following contemporary scientific standards.34 He restored San Clemente's upper church, which was thought to be the Constantinian basilica; he supported generously the excavations of early Christian and classical sites and began a program aimed at the preservation of Roman antiquities, which included Bianchini's ambitious plans for Rome's first museum.35 During Clement's pontificate, the Vatican Library was enlarged with manuscripts obtained from the Ottoman Empire, and primarily patristic works in Syriac and Coptic which affirmed pontifical supremacy in church affairs and upheld the pretensions of the Latin rite. Historical scholarship could play a role in validating pontifical claims to primacy against the challenges of secular and religious thought and could bolster the temporal power of the pope, whose states were diminished by the alienation of the important Duchies of Parma and Piacenza and the territory of Comacchio at the end of the Wars of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Bianchini's edition of the Liber pontificalis, dedicated to the pontiff who financed its research and lavish printing, can also be seen as part of Pope Clement's larger scholarly agenda.36The project was planned in five volumes "in folio" although only three were published during Bianchini's lifetime, coming out in 1718, 1723, and 1728; the fourth was brought out by his nephew Giuseppe Bianchini in 1735. The fifth was never executed.37It is an enormous work, whose contributions to the study of the Liber pontificalis were appreciated by Louis Duchesne and Theodor Mommsen.38 It includes not only the text of the Liber pontificalis proper, but also numerous related works, some of them published here for the first time.39 The enormous commentary consists of notes to the text and of several prefaces and appendices that treat particularly thorny problems, such as the chronology and succession of the early popes.40 Its learned thoroughness marks the significance the papal chronicle held for Bianchini and his intended audience, most especially the pope, as the most authoritative history documenting the apostolic succession of the bishops of Rome from Christ through Peter.In Bianchini's hands, the Liber pontificalis is interpreted as supporting claims of papal power.41 At the same time, Bianchini's "scientific" approach includes the use of evidence, such as the chronological data derived from the eclipses (Fig. 1), countering literary sources, whose expressed opinions, mistakes, and willful deceit could make them untrustworthy. In his most important contribution to the history of the Liber pontificalis's reception, Bianchini applies the new, eighteenth-century practices of observation and demonstration by making large use of material evidence—inscriptions, epitaphs, archeological and monumental objects, and manuscripts, reproducing many in print as independent historical evidence. Bianchini brought even Galilean observation to his edition of the Liber pontificalis; he evaluates the text's chronological information, for example, through the evidence of natural phenomena observed through machines and instruments, and adds both the results of his computations and the resulting diagrams, as he does in an image illustrating his discussion of the regression of the vernal equinox and its significance in explaining the inconsistencies in the dating of eclipses in ancient sources, which affect the dating of the papacy of Pope Sylvester I (314–35).42Fig. 1. The observation of eclipses from different locales. Bianchini, 2:287. C 4237.18 F. Widener Library Special Collections, Harvard University.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAt times, Bianchini exploits the iconographic meaning of an image to develop the historical narrative and link it to the present. For example, in reference to the report that Pope Urban I (230) required altar vessels to be made from silver,43 Bianchini adds an engraving of several silver vessels (Fig. 2) drawn both from his own collection and from that of Cardinal Alessandro Albani.44 The function of this image is similar to that of the "symbolic" images he used in L'istoria universale. It is constructed by Bianchini as a means to analyze and explicate the significance of Pope Urban's expressed concern with the material of altar vessels by interpreting the figures represented in low relief on the "amulae duae argenteae"—the two Eucharistic vessels engraved now in his book. He notes that the image of Christ changing the water into wine at the marriage at Cana portrayed on the larger flask "indicates, according to John Chrysostom and Cyril, the power Christ gave to the priests of the new law to change wine into blood,"45 a not-so-subtle reference to the Catholic definition of the Eucharistic sacrifice, whose historical truth Bianchini discusses at great length in his commentary. He opines that the image of the dove on the second amula might indicate it to be a receptacle for the Chrism. Thus he ties the image of the Holy Spirit as the Dove to the role of the Chrism as the means by which the gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to the priest at the sacrament of ordination. He notes too that the apostles are depicted on the urn, representing the Lord who had given them and their successors the power of conveying these gifts to the faithful, represented by the sheep on both amulae. The significance of the sacraments symbolically represented on these vessels explains Urban's insistence that the objects which convey them be fabricated in precious silver.46 Making a final point, Bianchini explains why "in our days" glass cruets are used, even though there is a large abundance of silver vessels: it is easier to see which contains water and which contains wine so that the acolyte will not confuse which he ought to hand over to the celebrant—a banal observation but one which links the silver amulae of Pope Urban I and the Liber pontificalis to the contemporary practice of the church. The image and Bianchini's exegesis make their own, independent contribution to the narrative of Urban's life and the development of the church's rituals. The discussion of these flasks speaks also to Bianchini's interest in emblems and symbols so widely used in L'istoria universale, and to contemporary attempts to develop a scientific iconography.47Fig. 2. Silver altar vessels. Bianchini, 2: facing p. 179. C 4237.18 F. Widener Library Special Collections, Harvard University.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointA most spectacular example of the evocative power of an image is afforded by the illustration of the corpse of Pope Leo the Great (440–61), reproduced on the cover of this issue of Speculum. Bianchini himself had observed the body in April 1714 during its final translation to the tomb under his new altar in Saint Peter's Basilica. Leo was the first pope to be buried at Saint Peter, in the portico. His body's first translation, under Sergius I (687–701), is chronicled in the Liber pontificalis.48 In his commentary, Bianchini charts the movements of Leo's body from this first translation to the present.49 Bianchini discusses the inscription that recorded the translation at the end of the seventh century, and which survives only as copied in a manuscript. A second translation, to safeguard the relics during the building of the new basilica, was carried out in 1607 under Paul V, when the body was placed temporarily under the altar of Santa Maria di Colonna until the sculptor Alessandro Algardi (1598–1654) could complete the altar over Pope Leo's new tomb.50 The third and final translation of Leo's body to his magnificent tomb took place on the second and eleventh of April 1714, nearly half a century after Algardi's altar had been finished. The translation testifies to Pope Clement's interest in the cult of popes and of their relics, and the church's response to Protestant and Catholic scholars who were questioning the authenticity of relics. The care with which this translation was documented by Bianchini is also an example of Bianchini's interest in observation and documentation and of his own involvement in the debate over relics.51Bianchini adds a detailed eyewitness account of the translation of the relics of Leo I in his commentary on the pope's "Life." Present at the opening of the tomb on the second of April, Bianchini was so close to the actual body that he could "make a drawing of the bones remaining in their place and of the vestments by which they were covered."52 He returns to make a comparison of his drawing with the body on 11 April, when Pope Clement descended to venerate the relics as they lay in waiting in the Chapel of Saint Nicholas. The accuracy of Bianchini's drawing was further confirmed by Michelangelo De Paulis, the pope's chief physician, who called out the name, state of conservation, and location of each single bone, as some of them had shifted during the translations. In his commentary to the "Life of Leo I," Bianchini adds an engraving of this drawing, with a brief caption, which includes the measurements of the body. Bianchini also includes a detailed description of the vestments and of their state of conservation. As the image shows, they are threadbare, but still envelop the pope's body in their striking and colored folds. Bianchini analyzes the vestments in detail, using their technical names, considering them historically, and linking them to those in current use. He notes, for example, that the head was covered with a "veil" as if a "cucullum," and he states the belief that it is from such a covering that the mitre originates;53 he notes the priestly chasuble, the phano, and the pallium; and a voluminous red garment, almost transparent because of its age, reaching down to the feet, arranged in long folds, "as is the custom for the bishops' cappa today"; he remarks that the opening for the arms and for the head in the vestments must have been adorned by still-visible gold filaments. All these details, carefully recorded in his drawing and then engraved and printed, are the result of his own observation, as he stood close to the body.54What is most striking about Bianchini's depiction of this event is the emphasis on observation and accurate documentation (his attention to the materiality of the relics and of the vestments) to record that they are both historically authentic. Indeed, he faults the report of the previous translation of Pope Leo—that of 1607—for including a generic picture of a pope's body rather than one executed from actual observation. Not only does Bianchini's verbal description of Leo's remains and the history of their translations over the centuries have value for authenticating the relics resting under Algardi's great marble altarpiece, more than twelve centuries after his death, but also the image itself does, which he drew, engraved, and printed as a faithful representation of what he saw. Bianchini's forensic description of the relics and of their translation, including both image and text, might even be read as the report of an archaeological finding.The complex relation Bianchini sees between text and object is also apparent in his use of manuscripts. Bianchini was not a critical philologist.55 We will have to wait until the late nineteenth century for a critical edition of the Liber pontificalis. But his interest in the Middle Ages and in material objects as trustworthy evidence and his experience with the Ottoboni and other storied manuscript collections in Italy made him keenly aware that manuscripts, especially if contemporary to their contents, could be valuable material witnesses.* * *In 1685–86, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), a towering figure in the learned world of late seventeenth-century Europe, undertook his Iter Italicum in search of manuscripts, books, and other objects for the library of his king Louis XIV.56 Mabillon's longest visits were to Rome.57 There he heard Bianchini talk when he attended a meeting of the Accademia Fisico-matematica.58 Through the relationship that developed after this encounter, Bianchini became well versed in Mabillon's approach. In his De re diplomatica of 1681, Mabillon introduced a comparative method for creating a taxonomy of scripts, part of his broader effort toward assessing the authenticity of charters. He argued that a document must be evaluated not simply by its contents and language—grammar, style, and allusions to contemporary events—but also by its physical characteristics: script, ink, seal, parchment. All these material features required empirical observation and necessitated comparison to the forms and styles of contemporary dated documents. Mabillon organized his scripts database chronologically, from the oldest capital scripts of antiquity to the fifteenth century, in fifteen plates of scripts. But his focus was on charters, to which he devoted fifty-three tables. In his use of manuscripts as proof objects, and especially in his appreciation of the manuscript as a datable object, Bianchini translated Mabillon's documentary methodology to the codex, perhaps the very first scholar to do so.59Bianchini's novel use of manuscripts as "autograph evidence" (by which he means contemporary evidence) for the veracity of the text of the papal chronicle is seen above all in his handling of an extraordinary manuscript of the Liber pontificalis, the Farnesianus. Now lost to us, the codex was written in uncial capitals in the eighth-ninth century, as we know only because Bianchini manufactured four images from its pages and included them in his Liber pontificalis.60 Uncial script was developed in late antiquity and used widely up to the Carolingian period, when it was generally restricted to use as a display script.61 In Italy, however, uncial capitals as a book hand are attested up to the early ninth century by a few surviving manuscripts.62 The disappearance of the Farnesianus, therefore, is a particularly grievous loss. Had it survived, the Farnesianus would be among the oldest manuscripts of the Liber pontificalis.The Farnesianus had been discovered at the Farnese palace in Rome by Lucas Holste (1596–1661), the German humanist and Catholic convert who served as head of the Vatican Library in the middle of the seventeenth century.63 It was already a fragment, missing the entire first and last sections, as well as several folios from the middle. Holste noted the characteristics of the script, which he described as "a manuscript, written in square or majuscule letters, older than which nothing more ancient can be written, of this kind."64 The term "uncial" was not yet used to differentiate uncial capitals from other capital scripts. Bianchini and other scholars had looked for the Farnesianus after this first sighting, but had been unable to find it at the Farnese library in Rome. Surmising that the manuscript might have been transported to the Farnese palace in Parma, or to their castle in nearby Colorno, where many books of the ducal library had been moved, Bianchini engaged a retainer of the duke, Marchese Maurizio de Sanctis, who indeed found the lost manuscript in the library of the ducal palace in Parma, hidden in a corner, as he informs Bianchini in a letter of 15 September 1719. Bianchini's description of the search for the manuscript in Rome and Parma and its discovery emphasizes the significance of the recovery of the lost manuscript, a humanistic topos: "The codex, long desired, and in vain sought by many, is found, preserved and restored to the republic of letters."65As soon as he learned of the discovery of the Farnesianus, Bianchini, who could not go up to view the manuscript, commissioned De Sanctis to have a facsimile made of one of its pages, a process documented in their correspondence.66 De Sanctis, as he writes two months lat
Referência(s)