Beuron Numbers of 1949

Notes

This page lists and links the Beuron Numbers, a method of referencing those ancient manuscripts which contain any surviving fragments of a Latin text of the Bible which was in use before Jerome of Stridon created his Vulgate translation. Whether these so-called Vetus Latina scriptures, all created by anonymous western Christians before 400 CE, were ever compiled into a pandect or single complete bible is much to be doubted. Whatever the case, not only does no such pandect exist today, but many of the texts it might have contained are irretrievably lost.

Anyone researching the Great Stemma, the Liber Genealogus and various patristic authors inevitably runs into the Beuron Numbers. These are named after the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron in Germany, where an institute which has been attempting to reconstruct the Vetus Latina bible for many decades devised them in the 1940s.

Bonifatius Fischer published the first Beuron Number list in 1949 and it rapidly gained global acceptance as a reference standard.[*]Fischer, Bonifatius. Verzeichnis Der Sigel F�r Handschriften Und Kirchenschriftsteller. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1949.

An expanded and corrected list was published by Roger Gryson, a later Beuron director, in two volumes 1999-2004 in a mixture of German and French. Gryson noted that there had been numerous errors and that in at least one instance a single manuscript was listed twice.[*]Gryson, Roger, and Hermann Josef Frede. Altlateinische Handschriften. Manuscrits vieux latins: r�pertoire descriptif. Mss 1-275. Herder, 1999. Gryson, Roger. Mss 300 - 485 (Manuscrits Du Psautier). Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2004.

A few lucky researchers will have a full research library just down the hall from their academic office, or a fat book budget allowing them to buy their own (very expensive, two-volume) Gryson directory to keep in their room. For many however, those are impossible luxuries. If you work outside the ivory tower with photocopies, scans and loose pages, you will often be exasperated by a reference to a manuscript by its Beuron number with no further hint of what the item is.

This page solves that problem and in many cases leads you to a digitization of the manuscript. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first full list online of Beuron Numbers, although it is limited to those of 1949. It expands on the very helpful list of Beuron Numbers for gospel manuscripts issued in 2008 by the Vetus Latina unit at the University of Birmingham. A separate, up-to-date but unlinked list of New Testament numbers 1-89 can be found on Wikipedia.

The page is new work which was created by scanning the original Beuron List published by Bonifatius Fischer, reducing it to its bare essentials by deleting the Sabatier and De Bruyne and bibliographic references, reorganizing and structuring every entry, partly translating the list and then researching and adding web links.

It would of course have been preferable to digitize the Gryson volumes, but unaccountably these were published by Herder without any table of contents or summary page, so it was impracticable to scan and convert the books. Gryson's many additions and revisions will have to be introduced to this page by hand at some point, but I have decided to publish the list in Fischer's obsolete form for the time being: it serves the basic purpose of publishing the bulk of the numbers right through to the psalters, thus covering the notable manuscripts repeatedly mentioned in the associated literature over the past century.

Rows in yellow mark a selection of the manuscripts that are accessible in full online. Click on the shelfmarks of these to open the links.

Notes

Links in the white rows do not lead anywhere, so do not click them. They are only shown white as it would have been another irritating step in programming to show them without a link.

At some point in the future, I will integrate Gryson's additions and  revisions into this list and translate the notes into English. Alternatively, if you would like to volunteer to do this, I would be glad of the assistance. Many OCR errors will also have to be detected and eliminated.

The Library of Latin Diagrams by Jean-Baptiste Piggin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.