Reading Medieval Latin Manuscripts: Living the Humanistic Ideal in the 21^st Century

Lora Louise Holland

University of North Carolina at Asheville

When they wish to consult an ancient text, most modern classical scholars and their students simply reach for a critical edition from the shelf, complete with word division, capitalization, quotation marks, punctuation, textual corrections and emendations, and a list of variant readings in the apparatus criticus. Why wouldn’t they? Reading an ancient author in manuscript presents enormous challenges. Depending on the century in which it was written, a manuscript used a rather idiosyncratic system of word abbreviation in addition to lacking many of the items enumerated above. And yet, until the advent of the printing press no other type of reading was possible. The legacy of Alcuin, Erasmus, and others serves as a potent reminder both of the labor involved, and of the importance of training the next generation to do this type of reading, since increasingly sophisticated techniques applied to archaeological discoveries and palimpsests mean that there are still “new” manuscripts that must be read and edited before they can be accessible to the modern world.

Most of us prefer to leave these tasks to others. Yet providing our students with the opportunity to read an original manuscript is a valuable exercise, even if most of us do not ourselves often (or ever) read manuscripts: not only do the students understand better how the ancient authors would have read a text, but they, too, become a reader in the fashion of an Alcuin or Erasmus, laboring over a text until they can in fact read it. This is often a profound and fascinating experience for a student (or teacher) at any level.

With a wealth of manuscript facsimiles and reading aids now available online, designing and implementing a manuscript project is within the reach of almost everyone. This paper first will recount briefly my own manuscript work and collaboration with students over the past two years, and then demonstrate how to provide an original reading experience for students in a beginning or intermediate level Latin class, with a brief description of a reading experience for students with no Latin, good for Humanities/ Classical Civilization-type classes and co-curricular activities as a way to attract students into Latin. Handout will include a current list of resources, some common manuscript abbreviations and other “insider” information, and a printout of sample projects, one for students with Latin, one for the Latin-less.