Google Penance: Medieval Punctuation Edition

Edit: Thanks to the commenters who pointed out that both I and my google-using fellow idjut had mispelled the term in question. Information on the Tironean note can be found here.

It’s been some time since I did a Google Penance post, but today someone came here searching for information on the Tyronean Note, a symbol used like an ampersand, to represent ‘and’. I did some googling myself, and there is- unsurprisingly- no information out there on this handy little sign. (My google ranking for ‘Tyronean note’ is higher than it is for ‘Naked Philologist’…)

I do not know much about it, but here is what I do know:

* The Tyronean Note, represented as ‘7′, is used in Anglo-Saxon texts to represent ‘and’. The ampersand (”&”) is also in use in Anglo-Saxon England- Wikipedia cites an example from Byrtferth’s letters. It wouldn’t surprise me if one were in use for Latin texts and the other for Anglo-Saxon, but I have no evidence for this, and I suspect it would change over the course of the period anyway.

* The Tyronean Note looks just like a 7, except that- as in some old ladies’ handwriting- it has a descender instead of an ascender. (That is, if you were in kindergarten, you’d start your 7 at the line which marks the top of your small letter ‘m’, and you would carry it down to the line which marks the bottom of your ‘y’.)

* In modern editions of Anglo-Saxon texts, either a number seven is used, or the word ‘and/ond’ is written out. Sometimes an ampersand [&] is used in place of a 7, but that doesn’t seem to be the standard practice.

* I was once told that the Note had classical origins, but unfortunately, I cannot tell you what they were or where they came from. Nor, sadly, do I know how long the Note was in use for.

The only other thing I know is that I like the Tyronean Note very much, and I now use it in my own notetaking. I’ve never been able to draw &, and used to use + instead. 7 requires one less lift of the pen, and I am a lazy person. Plus, it makes me feel extra nerdy.

Can anyone else contribute some exciting information about the Tyronean Note for the edification of the internet?

Who Needs a System of Sigla: Redux

I now know the answer to the question ‘who needs a system of sigla?’

A: Piers Ploughman scholars. Lawrence, who cares (possibly too much…¹) about manuscript sigla, told us on tuesday that there around fifty MSS of Piers. And a single MS could have several sigla, refering to the texts within (so, for example, an MS with both C and B recensions in it will have two conventional sigla- one for the C and one for the B text.) This is all very confusing, but, on the other hand, with so many MSS, if you tried reffering to them by manuscript short title, your word count would disappear quicker than you could say ‘verbose’.

On the other hand: Piers Ploughman scholars have sets of conventional sigla! I am very jealous.

~

1. Just kidding, Lawrence. One can never care too much about persnickety details, I say.

Who needs a system of sigla?

Does anyone actually find alphabetic sigla for manuscripts helpful, in a book? I’ve been sitting here trying to sort out Wormald’s system of sigla (for which the directory, for some reason, is on page 167, rather than sensibly at the beginning or end of the book), and listing manuscripts mentioned in other books which I may also have to add, and it occurs to me that the whole enterprise is more confusing than helpful.

There’s no central directory- so my manuscript, Cotton Nero A.i, is variously ‘G’, ‘I’ and ‘Y’, just in the books I have around me on the floor at the moment. A sensible option might be to refer to everything by it’s Ker catalogue number, but then what do you do with new books, or relevant books not in Anglo-Saxon? Individual sets of siglum, relevant to the topic at hand, are the only really tenable option. For it all to make sense, though, you have to presume that the reader is reading your whole book- and that’s an unrealistically optimistic outlook. Fact is, people pick up books and flick through them looking for the bits they need: unless your work is really relevant to them they’re not going to read the whole thing, and searching around for lists of siglum is a downright nuisance.

Me, even when I am reading a whole book, I get the alphabetical sigla horribly mixed up. Are we talking about MS G part i, or MS GI? Which one was MS O again? Personally, I’d be quite happy if books were routinely identified by a short form of their MS title. It’s hard to get confused about what ‘CCCC 201′ means, and personally I’d find it easier to remember the difference between ‘CCCC 201′ and CCCC 265′ than MS C and D. Perhaps it’s that the longer string of numbers turns on my pattern-retention reflex, which is actually pretty good.¹

Does anyone else feel this way?

Of course, the CCCCs are a fairly simple example. If only we could call them 4C201… My manuscript, BL Cotton Nero A.i(B) is rather more problematic, though. I can’t call it Nero- there’s another legal text, Cotton Nero E.i, which I may have to refer to. I can’t call it Nero A.i, because I have to refer to the first part of the composite, Cotton Nero A.i(A). So that leaves me with Nero A.i(B), which is rather lengthy and perhaps contains too many different types of information to read smoothly (as opposed to the CCCCs, which contain only two pieces of information even though the shorthand is hardly short).

I could call it Nero B, as opposed to Nero A, and specify that any other Nero manuscripts will be reffered to by their full shelf/number/part designations. Or I could use a siglum- in which case, I’d have to use sigla for the whole lot. Or I could teach MS Word to autocomplete Nero A.i(B) and save me the bother of typing it out every time…

What do you think, people?
Which would be the least odious form to read?

~

1. Which is why I never forget a randomly generated pin number. Don’t ask me why I can’t remember my own mobile phone number, though.

Happy Fact on a Sunday

Wulfstan was a puntuation nerd. According to Neil Ker’s article ‘The Handwriting of the Archbishop Wulfstan’, in MSS which were not produced under his direction, where Wulfstan’s handwriting is present in the margins, the punctuation has been edited in places to match the dominant scheme of punctuation in Wulfstanian MSS. You can’t tell for sure, but it is to be assumed that Wulfstan did it himself.

Wulfstan was a punctuation nerd. And, on a more practical note, this is a good indication that the punctuation in Wulfstanian MSS is a scheme designed for reading aloud- why else would it be important to synchronise older texts which you were also using with your personal scheme of punctuation?

I am also a punctuation nerd. This makes me feel that I have some kind of affinity with our favourite grouchy Archbishop. I own a teapot mat decorated with ampersands. Sadly, it was not available with Tyronean Notes on it, otherwise I could fondly imagine that that Archbishop Wulfstan would have appreciated it too.

Thinkin’ about the Thesis: What do YOU want in a manuscript description?

As I was ranting in my LJ last night about the nightmare of creating a table format Manuscript Description, Brandon started me thinking about the possibility of broader problems with the manuscript-describing conventions in Anglo-Saxon studies.

I’ve found three main problems with the descriptions of my manuscript (London, B.L., Cotton Nero A.i- part B):

* Firstly, none of the comprehensive descriptions (Wormald’s Making of English Law, Ker’s Catalogue, Loyn’s facsimile introduction) are written at the level I want them. You more or less have to know what’s in the manuscript before you can understand the descriptions. Loyn’s introduction, being the most comprehensive, has been the most useful to me, but even he assumes the reader knows what he’s talking about. In the early stages of research (not having much idea of Anglo-Saxon legal history or of manuscript studies), what I really wanted was a description which told me in a few sentences for each entry what sort of text it was (law, homily, Institutes of Polity, other tract), whether or not it was by Wulfstan, and what general topics it dealt with. I can find all these things out, that’s what God invented research for, but it struck me as odd that none of the descriptions provided that.

* Secondly, all the descriptions are presented as lists, meaning that you can only really use them by reading through in the order in which the texts appear in the MS. What I wanted, when I was first starting my enquiries, was the ability to scan quickly through and isolate all the homilies, or all the laws, or all the chapters of the Institutes.

* Thirdly, except for Wormald’s table in The Making of English Law (p. 200-201), they don’t note quire divisions within the list. If you’re sitting there with Wormald’s book, or his article Archbishop Wulfstan and the Holiness of Society, and trying to figure out which texts were in the MS at which point in its life, this is most frustrating. Wormald’s table was obviously designed for this purpose, breaking the MS into five sections, but the list of contents is in such a shorthand form that again, unless you knew the works of Wulfstan well, you’d find yourself unable to isolate any themes or patterns to the groupings of texts.

Accordingly, I’m making myself a table which will do all of these things at once. If Micrsoft Word doesn’t drive me insane in the process, I will end up with a lovely guide which should be of great use throughout the rest of the year.
Brandon suggested to me, in response to the Livejournal rant about the difficulties of making tables, that I’m not the only one frustrated by Ker and co, and that although invaluable, his methods may be getting a little out of date. Brandon has heard word of a paper given somewhere by Elaine Treharne talking about the need for a new approach to manuscript descriptions, so I guess I’m not the only one frustrated.

Which brings me to the Questions of the Day:

For the Anglo-Saxonists:
* What, if any, do you think are the weaknesses of Ker’s Catalogue?
* Which scholar do you feel presents the most easy-to-read manuscript description format?
* Can anyone give me references to (recent-ish) articles or books in which the principles of manuscript description are discussed? Has there been “scholarly debate”, as they say, about the need to update our approach?

For all and sundry:
* What do you want in a manuscript description? What makes a description easy to use? What sort of features do you look for first? What features do you want to group together or to compare? (Do you want to be able to quickly scan the the orthography section and locate common features of all the scribes? Is it important to be able to quickly compare notes concerning the wear & tear on different sections? Which of these would be MOST important to your work?)
* If you prepare descriptions for your own reference, what sort of format do you use?

Adventures In Middle English: Serendipitous Practical Codicology

So, Lolo is off jet-setting around being a bigwig medievalist, and accordingly our Gawain class was cancelled this week. And next week, I believe. In the absence of serious Middle English content, let me tell you about the serendipitous lesson in practical codicology which befell our class last week.

Our topic was ‘Manuscript and Editorial History’, and is responsible for the previous post on this page. While I was considering the falliability of Papa Tolkien, my classmates were considering the vexed question of the Four Fitts, as opposed to the Nine Decorated Initials. Which did the author intend? The scribe? Why are we reffering to the sections as ‘fitts’ anyway? Is there a hierachy of sections, and is it related to the size of initials?

Classmate D, being a conscientious student, borrowed out the antiquated Early English Text Society facsimile, and went in search of these nine decorated initials. She turned up to class most perplexed- only eight initials were to be found. Someone suggested that maybe she hadn’t looked through the whole text- but no, f. 124b , where she ended, is clearly the end of the poem. By reference to the line numbers in the articles, and the marginal folio numbers in the TGD edition, each initial was hunted down again. Until suddenly, they weren’t there. Kids, this is what we pay tuition for: Lolo, being the smart cookie in the room, noticed that f. 117 was, in our fascimile, promptly followed by 124, which was in turn followed by the shiny blank leaf signifying the end of the book.

Published in 1923, the facsimile in question is one of those lovely old string-bound books, which still have recognisable quiring structures. The absence of what we calculated to be three sheets was cause for some consternation- there was evidence of repair on the blank leaf, but no evidence for torn or missing pages. The general concensus was that either the final quire had fallen apart, and only two leaves been replaced, or our copy of the facsimile was simply defective and had never HAD those three leaves. The book was passed around and examined as an example of the sort of fate which has often befallen medieval manuscripts.

When I got a chance to scrutinise the repair job closely, it didn’t seem that any pages were actually missing. The quire seemed to be tightly bound, each page had a counterpart on the other half of the folio. And here I decided to do what none of us had done yet: turn over the blank leaf, and examine the blank pages at the end of old books which balance out the final quire. And lo and behold, rather than blank pages, there were the missing folios, all messed up and out of order. The last quire had fallen apart, and had been repaired by a non-medievalist librarian who obviously didn’t know quite what was going on with this manuscript business. To make his or her job harder, whoever had gone through the MS in the 16th and numbered the pages did a bodgy job- a couple of leaves had no numbers marked on them and there seemed to be two f. 120s.

Lesson for the day: it’s very easy for someone who doesn’t read the script and doesn’t speak the relevant language to accidentally mess up manuscript repair. It’s easy to think of medieval or early modern fudging around with manuscripts as poor workmanship- people just didn’t know how to treat books back then! But all it shows is that the book hasn’t always been treated by specialists with our priorities in mind. We handle our Rare Books, even facsimiles, with great reverence, but it’s worth remembering occaisionally that modern scholars aren’t infalliable: witness the fate of a facsimile not kept in Rare Book reserve.

A similar principle applies to scribal error. We can gripe and whinge and emend the errors of foolish scribes, but it’s really an easy mistake. Lolo’s method of pointing this out was a sort of paelographical Chinese Whispers- he passed to Classmate D a short note explaining that he was sorry about the death of Heath Ledger in Januay 2008. Student D recopied it and passed it on, and by the time it passed through five students and back to Lolo, the spelling of his name had changed and Heath Ledger died in 2003. The Bocera doesn’t need an illustration so complicated in Anglo-Saxon class (just as well, it wouldn’t really work with just me): in copying out an AElfrician sermon by hand last week, I managed to drop a whole line, and accordingly produced a rather odd translation. It’s all too common, the Bocera stopped to impress upon me, for modern scholars to take scribal error as evidence of stupidity or laziness on the part of the scribe, when all it takes is a simple eye-skip from one similar word to another.¹ I wonder if it’s something we find harder to understand or be tolerant of today, because we do so little by hand? You can’t misread Times New Roman, and it’s mighty hard to skip lines when you copy and paste…

~

1. And I bet you make more and more scribal errors when you’re tired. Or drunk. Stop, Revive, Scribe! Don’t Drink and Scribe, people!