Peter's Stemma

Notes

This page offers online links to manuscripts of the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi of Peter of Poitiers (Petrus Pictaviensis) which I researched for my own use, similar to the tabulation I created for the Great Stemma. Study of the Compendium has been been raised to a new level by the studies of Dr Andrea Worm whose Habilitationsschrift, Geschichte und Weltordnung: Graphische Modelle von Zeit und Raum in Universalchroniken vor 1500 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, forthcoming), is to appear as a book in 2017, but I believe this simple list, despite omissions and errors will remain useful to scholars, so I am leaving it online [*]See also: Worm, Andrea. ‘Diagrammatic Chronicles’. Edited by R. Graeme Dunphy. The Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
———. ‘Ista Est Ierusalem. Intertextuality and Visual Exegesis in the Representation of Jerusalem in Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi and Werner Rolevinck’s Fasciculus Temporum’. In Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West, edited by Lucy Donkin and Hanna Vorholt, 123–61. Proceedings of the British Academy 175. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.
———. ‘Visualizing the Order of History: Hugh of Saint Victor’s Chronicon and Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium Historiae’. In Romanesque and the Past: Retrospection in the Art and Architecture of Romanesque Europe, edited by Richard Plant and John McNeill. Leeds: Maney, 2013.
———. ‘Arbor Humanum Genus Significat: Trees of Consanguinity and Genealogical Trees of Salvation History in the Romanesque Bible Manuscripts of Parc, Floreffe, and Foigny’. In The Tree: Symbol, Allegory, and Mnemonic Device in Medieval Art and Thought, edited by Andrea Worm and Pippa Salonius. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. . I have been able to locate more than twenty manuscripts online in sufficiently high resolution to read the script.

My tabulation was based on a list published in 2003 by Laura Alidori.[*]Alidori, Laura. "Il Plut. 20.56 della Laurenziana. Appunti sull?iconografia dei manoscritti della Genealogia di Petrus Pictaviensis." In Cicli e immagini bibliche nella miniatura, edited by Laura Alidori, 157-170. Florence: Centro di Storia della Miniatura, 2003. Alidori says her sources were Stegm�ller, texts that deal with the Compendium such as those of Moore, Fossier, Panayotova and Monroe, plus discoveries of her own online and from catalogs and incipit collections, plus a few fortuitous discoveries. I first corrected, expanded and tabulated Alidori's unstructured list, translating most of it (one or two words may remain in Italian) and adding links to online versions.

I have assumed that items described as non miniato by Alidori are codices, and that the language is Latin in all items where there is no statement to the contrary. It would appear that her annotation cronaca universale refers to the third category of such manuscripts in a division which is summarized by Monroe as follows:

Apparently it first consisted of a "pure" or standard text as the author conceived it. This work then gradually became enlarged and extended by numerous additions and interpolations, principally passages borrowed from Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica but including other sources as well. In its third form the Compendium was incorporated into a number of universal chronicles which cover a period from the Creation to the time of Christ, ending with the entry of a contemporary event.

These categories are marked, where known, in the evolutions column, as standard (ST), interpolated (IP) or universal chronicle (UC).

Once Alidori's list had been adopted as a basis, it was then expanded with additional entries found in the mainly German catalogs, many of them new, available through the Manuscripta Mediaevalia web index. The 19th-century French catalogs are mostly online and can be tracked down using the Gatt� list. Brigitte Pfeil's portal, Handschriftenkataloge Online, is especially helpful in finding digitized catalogs. Newer catalogs and articles in turn pointed out several manuscripts that had been overlooked in literature up to the end of the 20th century, and a 1994 article by Andreas Fingernagel located several new items in Austria. Cahn's article on the Menora located several more.[*]Proper bibliographic references to these will of course be added here later when I have the time.

Targeted searches for the manuscripts that have been digitized can be conducted through Manuscripta Mediaevalia, the Digital Scriptorium and other web portals including Manuscrits Enlumin�s in France, Austria's Mittelalterliche Handschriften in �sterreichischen Bibliotheken and Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections.

Web searches for these incipits have helped to locate more Compendia:

Considerans histori(a)e (sacrae) prolixitatem necnon et difficultatem scolarium quoque circa studium sacr(a)e lectionis ...; or: Consideryng the lenght and the hardnesse of holy scripture and nameli of the ground of the lettir historial ...

However, as Fingernagel points out, some of these are likely to be of the universal-chronicle category or to be completely new evolutions of Peter's idea. In May 2014, an edition of one of these evolutions is to appear in print with a digital edition attached. Lisa Fagin Davis has edited the Chronique Anonyme Universelle for the Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History (HMSAH) series from the Belgian-based publisher Brepols. See Twitpix for an image of a roll, MssCol 2557 MA 124, in the New York Public Library.

I have not conducted closer checks on any of the new finds yet, but new 14th-century items such as quart. Cod. ms. 989 in the BSB in Munich seem to be the genuine thing, and it is plain that the list can be weeded at some point in the future if any of these turn out to be sightings of diagrams that are not the Compendium. Items excluded for any reason will be removed to the foot of the table and marked XX in the left column.

The list was later compared to two standard reference sources which supplied more leads. One was Friedrich Stegm�ller's Repertorium biblicum Medii Aevi, vol 4 (1954) at number 6778 (use the online RB). This was consulted by Alidori: it contains five items which she excluded without explaining why. The other list of Compendium manuscripts checked was that published by Dan Embree on Repertorium Chronicarum (not updated since January 2007). This also yielded further leads. The various scholarly books on the Compendium (I will do a bibliography later) contain manuscript lists as well.

If possible, this tabulation will also be compared to the rather thin list of Compendium manuscripts in Graeme Dunphy's Encyclopaedia of the Medieval Chronicle, published in 2010: the article there by Dr Marigold Anne Norbye states that the Compendium survives in "more than 100 manuscripts".[*]Dunphy, Raymond Graeme, ed. Encyclopaedia of the Medieval Chronicle. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2010. For more information about the community of scholars who wrote the Encyclopaedia, see the website of the Medieval Chronicle Society, of which Dr Dunphy is president.

In August 2012, Klaus Graf offered a useful blog post in response to this page, pointing to two further German-language manuscripts (Augsburg and Klagenfurt, both German translations by Bollstatter) of the Compendium which I had not mentioned at that stage. Those interested in the German reception should see his 1987 dissertation which discusses the work's evolution in German. Along with other help, I would like to thank Werner Hoffmann for further kind suggestions.

Dr Dunphy suggested in his preface (page ix) to the Encyclopaedia that we might one day have access to a one-stop web portal leading to European and near Eastern chronicles, but as far as I know, no such web project has come to fruition.

The Compendium goes under a wide variety of names, including Genealogia Sanctorum Patrum. Alidori lists:

• Genealogia Petri Pictaviensis ab Adamo ...
• Genealogia Magisteri Petri Pictaviensis
• Arbor historia biblice
• Compendium veteris testamenti
• Summa historia biblie
• Genealogia historiarum
• Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi (preferred by Klapisch-Zuber and adopted here)
• Liber chronicorum
• Epitome historie sacre usque ad Christum natum
• Genealogia bibiae

When this list was first placed online it ran to 185 items, but quite quickly expanded to more than 220. It is clear that some items will turn out not to contain the Compendium after all, or to contain late works derived from it, such as the Compilatio librorum historialium totius biblie of Johannes de Utino or the Chronique universelle d'Orléans of Jennelot, a work compiled in about 1450 (a copy of this was offered for sale by Les Enluminures some years ago) and it will also doubtless emerge that there are other copies of the Compendium in circulation which I have missed. Please write to me if you can add to or correct the list.

The dates in the right column of the table are obviously very approximate, and are only included to make the table sortable: click on the headers to arrange the materials by date, by language, or grouping what has been digitized, and so on.

Notes

Rows above with a gold background can be read online in their entirety: about twenty such manuscripts have been located in high resolution. "Details" on a gold background means only parts of the document are shown online though this is enough to sample the layout and style, and often the resolution of those images is adequate to read the script. "Catalog" means that there is nothing online beyond the linked catalog entry. The text itself has appeared four times in print.

1. For a link to the editio princeps by Zwingli, see my blog.
2. The first modern transcription, by Vollmer in 1931, was based on a single manuscript (Hamburg Theol. 2029), but is well done and is matched page by page to a German version. It is not as far as I know online.
3. The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenb�ttel, Germany contains a typewritten transcript of the Blankenburg 305 roll which was made by the art historian Heinrich Brauer and which was deposited in 1951 at the HAB at shelfmark 1.4� 163 (catalog). See my posts with the correspondence and a reference to Bernhard Pez.
4. The Moleiro facsimile edition of the Rome, Casanatense manuscript published in 2000 contains a transcription by Miguel Vivancos.

An online interlinear comparison of these four transcriptions would be highly useful. There is also a partial transcription of the initial section of the Compendium text online at the site of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome (see the link above).

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