Codices Latini Antiquiores

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The Codices Latini Antiquiores (CLA) are a catalog of all known Latin manuscripts (books and scrolls) before the 9th century. Elias Avery Lowe initiated this project in 1929 and directed it himself from 1936.

Content and expenses

The catalog only contains books with a literary content, including legal texts, but no letters or documents. The basis of the edition is solely the palaeography (style of manuscripts). Each codex or each title in a codex is documented by a summary of its content, a description of the state of preservation, the font, the probable place of creation and age as well as its transmission history. In addition, a black and white photograph on a scale of 1: 1 is always included.

construction

The Codices Latini Antiquiores consist of eleven volumes organized by country of storage, a supplement from 1971 and two supplements from 1985 and 1992.

Affiliate and reprint from 1988

The sister company of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores was set up for the document writing .

The reprint of the CLA from 1988 is significantly smaller than the original. However, this change is neither mentioned nor recognizable, as the original edition dispenses with length scales in the images.

Author and collaborator

The CLA are the most important work in paleography and the life's work of Elias Avery Lowe at the University of Oxford and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton . As a classical philologist who graduated from Cornell , Lowe continued his studies in Germany from 1902 and became a student of Georg Wissowa in Halle , then of Ludwig Traube in Munich . At Traube's suggestion, he wrote his dissertation entitled The oldest calendars from Monte Cassino (1908), which later gave the impetus for the Codices Latini Antiquiores .

The German paleographer Bernhard Bischoff began working on the CLA in 1933 as an unknown student. He took over the editing of the Grenzzeit around 800, which includes a large number of codices.

The task

Lowe had evaluated far more books for his dissertation than had been used by previous authors for comparable questions. It was clearer than ever how widely the old manuscripts were scattered. Only after almost all of them had been sighted would one be able to gain an overview of what was written when and where. And only then would the importance of individual writing schools for their time be assessed and their production in late antiquity and in the early Middle Ages quantified.

To the statistics of the manuscripts

Temporal and spatial distribution

With all additions, the catalog now contains 1,884 books; the number of titles, i.e. the actual manuscripts, is well over 2,000, mostly fragments . Before the middle of the 4th century only archaeological finds date , after that, up to 800, theological titles predominate. In the 6th and 7th centuries, the copying or creation of secular texts became almost completely extinct .

The data from Italy are astonishing : the loss is total for the period before 350, although it should be noted that until the 3rd century it was not the codex but the papyrus scroll that was the normal book form. Thereafter, between 400 and 800, there was a practically constant book production, a linear increase in the amount of books delivered. The extreme turmoil of the Migration Period and the devastating war with Byzantium in the 6th century do not seem to have significantly influenced either the production or the rate of loss of Italian monasteries.

The Italian codices (and almost only theological ones) were exported to the whole of Christian Europe until production itself started there. In France this happened from around 650, in England and Ireland around 730 and in Germany and Switzerland not until around 800. For the 5th to the middle of the 7th century one sees a strong flow from Italy to France. For the 8th century there was a noticeable flow of codices from France and England / Ireland to Germany. These were mainly theological works. A movement of pagan classics cannot be statistically proven for the entire geographical and temporal area of ​​the CLA. The 14 classic recorded in the movement patterns are likely later or as Palimpsest migrated.

Graphics

  • CLA production statistics: By content

  • CLA production statistics: By origin

  • CLA migration statistics: storage by origin

  • CLA statistics of migration: production and movement patterns according to content

literature

Codices Latini Antiquiores. A palaeographical guide to Latin ms. prior to the 9th century , edited by Elias Avery Lowe :

  • The Vatican City, Oxford 1934 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 1).
  • Great Britain and Ireland, Oxford 1935; 2nd edition 1972 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 2).
  • Italy. Ancona - Novara, Oxford 1938 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 3).
  • Italy. Perugia - Verona, Oxford 1947 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 4).
  • France. Paris, Oxford 1950 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 5).
  • France. Abbeville - Valenciennes, Oxford 1953 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 6)
  • Switzerland, Oxford 1956 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 7).
  • Germany. Altenburg - Leipzig, Oxford 1959 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 8).
  • Germany. Munich - Zittau, Oxford 1959 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 9).
  • Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt and Holland, Oxford 1963 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 10).
  • Hungary, Luxembourg, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, USA and Yugoslawia, Oxford 1966 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 11).
  • Supplement, Oxford 1971 (Codices Latini Antiquiores 12).
  • Index of scripts. Comp. by Rutherford Aris . Osnabrück: Zeller 1982.
  • Addenda to Codices latini antiquiores. Bernhard Bischoff and Virginia Brown. Toronto, 1985 (special print from: Mediaeval studies 47, pp. 317–366).
  • Addenda to Codices latini antiquiores (II). Bernhard Bischoff, Virginia Brown, and James J. John. Toronto, 1992 (special print from: Mediaeval studies 54, pp. 286–307).

Footnotes

  1. ↑ See Chartae Latinae Antiquiores Online .
  2. ↑ James J. John: Lowe, Elias Avery . In: Ward W. Briggs (ed.): Biographical dictionary of North American classicists . Greenwood Press, Westport 1994, ISBN 0-313-24560-6 , pp. 376-378, here p. 377.
  3. ↑ Bernhard Bischoff : Elias Avery Lowe, October 15, 1879 - August 8, 1969. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , year 1970, ISSN  0084-6090 , pp. 199-203.