During the summer of 2023 working with Professor Bill North I compared two manuscripts of William of Fly’s commentary on Lamentations. William, a childhood convert from Judaism, wrote his commentary on Lamentations—the five chapter acrostic from the Hebrew Bible about the destruction, ruin, and exile of Jerusalem—while exploring, investigating, and connecting the Hebrew alphabet that scaffolds Lamentations with the established meanings of Hebrew letters.
I’ve heard the quip “small is beautiful” being thrown around in my classes with Professor North, but it wasn’t until this project that I fully understood how a small difference, carefully analyzed, becomes the basis for a powerful claim.
The technical term for what I did is collation, which in my case meant comparing two manuscripts word for word, or abbreviated word for abbreviated word, sifting for differences in substance and form. Collation is necessary because medieval manuscripts predate the printing press and were copied by hand, and often contain a litany of differences from human error: omissions, additions, substitutions, changes in word order, and changes in spelling.
In addition to being a “shield against deception” (Martin. L. West, Textual Criticism and Eeditorial Technique) textual criticism yields other fruits. The close scrutiny applied with collation instigates new conversations and avenues of thought. The differing way the manuscripts rendered “t” vs “c,” sollemnitatem vs sollempnitatem, and the abbreviation “id est,” was striking. MS V always rendered numbers as roman numerals while MS B wrote them out.
For me, collating this 12th century Latin exegetical commentary involved not only learning the conventions of textual criticism but also 12th century ecclesiastical Latin and medieval exegetical customs. This meant my days were far from boring. To give a sense of this, here is an excerpt of my daily summary for August 2nd.
“Today, I practiced first and second conjugation Latin verbs, biked over to St. Olaf, read the commentary on VAI, headed to Kierkegaard Library to look up words in their Latin dictionary, walked down to the reference library where I finished collating Eth, and Collated ZAI. After that, I biked back to Carleton, and compiled all of the files for the Vatican manuscript into one document and read the first two parts of Smalley’s chapter 5 on Masters of the Sacred page, Peter Comestor, Peter the Chanter, and Stephen Langton.”
I’ll never forget that exhilarating rush of excitement from discovering a difference between manuscripts, however small, like when I caught the change from forte (strongly) to certe (certainly) or the addition of sancta before ecclesia. Just for a moment, I felt closer to a mind from the middle ages, whether William or another Scribe.
On a personal note, going through this collation process has made me an organized examiner, editor, and recorder. Working with Bill was a great pleasure. With the best guide, I was able to navigate the worlds of textual criticism, medieval exegesis, and ecclesiastical Latin.