2017/06/22 by Carmela Vircillo Franklin · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Religious Studies of Rome #Medieval Literature and History #Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books
paper · doi:10.1086/692789
openalex publication_date 2017/06/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Previous articleNext article FreeReading the Popes: The Liber pontificalis and Its EditorsCarmela Vircillo FranklinCarmela Vircillo FranklinCarmela Vircillo Franklin is Professor of Classics at Columbia University, New York (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMedieval texts are "living texts," and the role of the philologist is to coax them into telling us their stories. Creating an edition is not so much about establishing the "original text," which classicists desire, or the "best manuscript text," as the French philologist Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) thought we medievalists should settle for, but about understanding and appreciating the metamorphoses a text has undergone. We ask not only what emendations were made to a text during its scribal reception, but also what the variations reveal about contemporary political, religious, and intellectual concerns. Changes are thus not mere corruptions—instead they yield distinct sources to be read and examined. Such work expands the role of the editor to that of an interpreter, whose edition shares contemporary scholarly preoccupations, a far cry from the image of the editor as a drudge deciphering scripts and creating stemmata. The Liber pontificalis and its rich editorial history both in manuscript and print culture illustrate this point, and today I will concentrate on an important portion of that history—the seventeenth and eighteenth century.The Liber pontificalis—the papal chronicle which begins with Saint Peter and stops, incomplete, in the middle of the "Life of Stephen V" in 885, is an exemplary text for a medieval philologist in search of an editorial project. Its characteristics present all of the challenges of a long and diverse reception: the work is anonymous, yet highly authoritative, the major source for the history of the Church of Rome and its liturgy, laws, and customs; it is deeply conservative in the format of its chronicle narrative, yet it was constantly changed, a variable text which was updated, and even revised, at every new pontificate; it was written in Rome, in the heart of papal bureaucracy, yet so appropriated into different historical, geographical, and political contexts as to give rise to a variety of redactions that have gained labels, if not titles: "the Lombard redaction," created in Lucca in the ninth century, or "the Frankish redaction," circulating in Gaul during the eighth and ninth centuries; or "the Saint-Gilles redaction," composed in Provence in the 1130s.1As a result of its extraordinary variability, the Liber pontificalis survives in more than one hundred manuscripts, and its edition has not been undertaken by the faint-hearted. The most recent editors are the French priest Louis Duchesne (1843–1922), who, to my mind, is the greatest editor ever of a medieval Latin text; his philologically innovative edition of the Liber pontificalis (1886–92)2 can be expanded or improved, but never replaced, in the words of another significant, and rival, editor of the Liber pontificalis, the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen, who published only a portion of the text for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1898.3The editio princeps—the first printed edition—of the Liber pontificalis was brought out in Mainz in 1602, by the printer Johannes Albinus. Its editor, though anonymous, was the Jesuit Iohannes Busaeus of Nijmegen (Jean Buys; 1547–1611).4 It is not a good edition from any point of view. First, Busaeus based his text on a late sixteenth-century copy of the eleventh-century Vatican manuscript Vaticanus latinus 3764, provided by Alessandro Ranaldi, then vice prefect of the Vatican Library.5 Busaeus, on occasion, adds variant readings in the margin of his edition. He does not take these from other manuscripts, however, but from printed books that had cited the text, an example of the nonlinear relationship between manuscripts and print even as late as the seventeenth century. Secondly, it is an exceptionally polemical edition, produced as part of the Catholic scholarly arsenal against Protestant challenges to papal privilege. Finally, this first printed edition of the Liber pontificalis canonized the incorrect ascription of authorship to Anastasius Bibliothecarius (810–878), the librarian and archivist of the Roman Church under Popes Nicholas I and Hadrian II.6In the early eighteenth century, two new and competing editions of the Liber pontificalis were printed, both in Rome.7 One was by Giovanni Vignoli (1667–1733), vice prefect (1712–30) of the Vatican Library. Dedicated to Benedict XIII, the first of its three volumes came out in 1724. The other two volumes appeared after Vignoli's death in 1733.8 Despite its philological claims, it made no progress over the edition of 1602.9 Both Busaeus's and Vignoli's editions follow the philological practice of early printed Latin texts. One manuscript, selected because of the legibility of script rather than the quality of the text, was chosen as the source of the printed work, following early printers' preference for a manuscript that was easy to read and to set. Both of these early editions are ultimately based on the Vatican manuscript Vaticanus latinus 3764, written in a beautifully clear Roman version of Carolingian minuscule, and with standardized Latinity. The only lasting achievement of Vignoli's edition is that it gave the papal chronicle its modern name and removed Anastasius Bibliothecarius as the author, relying on arguments made from content and style.10 It would take the scientific methods of its other eighteenth-century editor, Francesco Bianchini, wholly to refute this error. And it is to that edition that we now turn.In contrast to the Vignoli edition, that by Francesco Bianchini is an extraordinary monument of antiquarian scholarship in an age of science, to borrow Anthony Grafton's characterization of the period 1450 to 1800.11 Bianchini's scholarly method can be situated within trends identified among mid-seventeenth century scholars of antiquity, and also, although less acknowledged, among the antiquarians who studied the Middle Ages and nonclassical civilizations, like the Etruscans, Egyptians, and those of Asia and Africa. Having rediscovered the importance of source criticism, these scholars saw the physical remains of antiquity as "genuine witnesses," and they stressed an empirical, observational practice to their scholarship. Their approach paralleled the observational methodology used in contemporary natural philosophy and mathematics. Many of them were both scholars and scientists. Isaac Newton (1623–1747), most famously, applied to problems of biblical chronology and scriptural interpretation methodological rules which were analogous to those he employed in his Principia mathematica. Francesco Bianchini was also a multitalented mathematician and scientist.12 Like the better-known projects produced by the Bollandists, the Maurists, and the Rerum Italicarum scriptores of Ludovico Muratori, Bianchini's edition applies the scientific methodology of direct observation and the historian's appreciation of material evidence to the text of the Liber pontificalis. And, like these other well-known works, Bianchini's edition should be appreciated as part of the burgeoning and critical study of the Middle Ages and its sources in the antiquarian world of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.13Francesco Bianchini and his Liber pontificalisBorn in Verona in 1662, Bianchini14 was educated at the Jesuit collegium of Bologna,15 where he first learned Galilean science, and then in 1680 at the University of Padova, where he studied mathematics and astronomy.16 His early Jesuit education also provided instruction in drawing, in which he acquired great skill, and which would be useful for his studies of mathematics and science, and also for the documentation of archaeological and historical data, as we shall see.17 The son of a modest family, Bianchini moved to Rome in search of advancement. He joined the household of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, later Pope Alexander VIII, for whose library he prepared a still important catalog of manuscripts.18 Bianchini had been aiming for a position at the Vatican Library, but when Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Albani became pope as Clement XI in 1700 and offered him the post of vice prefect, Bianchini preferred the more exalted position of cameriere d'onore of the new pope.19In Rome, Bianchini maintained the scientific interests he had begun to pursue in his native Verona. He became member of the Accademia Fisico-matematica, a scholarly association founded by Cardinal Giovanni Giustino Ciampini (d. 1698), one of Rome's leading natural philosophers, which, despite the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, managed to conduct experiments and observe the stars.20 When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) came to Rome in 1689 to lobby the Holy Office to lift the prohibition on heliocentrism and to embrace the more moderate elements of the "new science," he was welcomed at the Accademia Fisico-matematica, which met at the palazzo of Queen Christina of Sweden, a patron of the arts and of science and a collector of manuscripts.21 The Catholic Bianchini, who had been named secretary for the reform of the calendar, and the Lutheran Leibnitz corresponded on calendric and astronomical measurements until Leibnitz's death in 1716.22 These same circles introduced Newton's Opticks in a Latin translation into Rome, and during 1707–8 attempted the first replications of Newton's optical experiments at the Quirinal, under the patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, Pope Clement's nephew. The highlights of Bianchini's trip to France and England in 1713 as papal envoy23 were his visit to the Greenwich Observatory and his long conversations with Isaac Newton in London in January and February of that year.24Bianchini thus moved between the world of libraries and book learning and that of the small but active scientific world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Rome, centered in the academies, whose elusive goal was to bring harmony between Catholic teaching and experimental science.25 He was known as Rome's leading astronomer—the comet of 1685, which he had observed, is named after him; and, as an archaeologist, he was the first to make important discoveries on the Palatine.26 He was also an inventor and an engineer. Under Pope Clement, he devised the transportation of the newly excavated Antonine Column to Piazza Montecitorio. And in 1702, he built the astronomical meridian at the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the former baths of Caracalla, which was the best and most complex meridian ever built up to then and served as an ambitious model for later ones. He was a member of the royal societies of London and Paris. 27 As a scholar, Bianchini applied a similar scientific approach to historical and philological studies, based on increased critical inquiry of the literary sources and buttressed by archaeological and material observation.28 In addition, Bianchini's strong emphasis on rectifying chronological inconsistencies in sources led him to draw evidence from astronomical information, such as eclipses and related phenomena.Always known as a scientist, Bianchini has attracted scholarly attention in recent decades precisely for his combination of mathematical and scientific interests with antiquarian ones in producing L'istoria universale provata con monumenti e figurata con simboli degli antichi (Rome: Antonio De' Rossi, 1697).29 The title speaks to the method he employs in this work: it is a universal history "proved by monuments" from distant antiquity, and illustrated with symbolic images—generally pastiches designed by the author to serve as memory aids for the large themes of the work; the recurrence of historical patterns, for example, or the interconnections among cultures. The forty-two images in L'istoria, one for every chapter and drawn by Bianchini himself,30 were on an equal footing with the text. They were not, in Bianchini's own words, "frivolous ornament" but an instrument of analysis. In this project, Bianchini is credited by modern scholars for opening up "a new and original route into the past—that of comparative iconography."31Bianchini's edition of the Liber pontificalis, contrary to L'istoria universale, has received absolutely no attention from scholars of the Enlightenment, perhaps because it is all in Latin, or perhaps because of its unexciting subject matter. It receives no mention in any of the recent scholarship on Bianchini.32 Yet, like L'istoria universale, it also is an example of how the methodologies of the natural sciences and the stress on observation and empiricism were adapted to the editions of texts and to their commentaries. Bianchini is the first editor of the Liber pontificalis—and perhaps of any medieval text—who so clearly applies to literary manuscripts the methodology developed for charters by the Maurist Jean Mabillon. This is a novel application, for neither classicists nor biblical scholars, in contrast to medievalists, had available abundant original written documents contemporary to their sources. The age of the manuscript becomes crucial in Bianchini's estimation. Previous editors of the papal chronicle had been less interested in the age of manuscripts than in their readability, correctness of language, and completeness, as we saw for Busaeus's and Vignoli's editions. And, as in L'istoria universale, Bianchini here also fully exploits the technology of printing to add a variety of images as instruments of independent analysis and meaning, and not just as adornment of the text.The election of the scholarly Giovanni Francesco Albani as Pope Clement XI in 1700 provided the opportunity for a history of the church which could, like Bianchini's universal history, also be "provata" and "illustrata" through the witness of material evidence.33 Albani—who is best remembered for his 1713 anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus, reasserting papal primacy—wanted to "document" early Christian history following contemporary scientific standards.34 He restored San Clemente's upper church, which was thought to be the Constantinian basilica; he supported generously the excavations of early Christian and classical sites and began a program aimed at the preservation of Roman antiquities, which included Bianchini's ambitious plans for Rome's first museum.35 During Clement's pontificate, the Vatican Library was enlarged with manuscripts obtained from the Ottoman Empire, and primarily patristic works in Syriac and Coptic which affirmed pontifical supremacy in church affairs and upheld the pretensions of the Latin rite. Historical scholarship could play a role in validating pontifical claims to primacy against the challenges of secular and religious thought and could bolster the temporal power of the pope, whose states were diminished by the alienation of the important Duchies of Parma and Piacenza and the territory of Comacchio at the end of the Wars of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Bianchini's edition of the Liber pontificalis, dedicated to the pontiff who financed its research and lavish printing, can also be seen as part of Pope Clement's larger scholarly agenda.36The project was planned in five volumes "in folio" although only three were published during Bianchini's lifetime, coming out in 1718, 1723, and 1728; the fourth was brought out by his nephew Giuseppe Bianchini in 1735. The fifth was never executed.37It is an enormous work, whose contributions to the study of the Liber pontificalis were appreciated by Louis Duchesne and Theodor Mommsen.38 It includes not only the text of the Liber pontificalis proper, but also numerous related works, some of them published here for the first time.39 The enormous commentary consists of notes to the text and of several prefaces and appendices that treat particularly thorny problems, such as the chronology and succession of the early popes.40 Its learned thoroughness marks the significance the papal chronicle held for Bianchini and his intended audience, most especially the pope, as the most authoritative history documenting the apostolic succession of the bishops of Rome from Christ through Peter.In Bianchini's hands, the Liber pontificalis is interpreted as supporting claims of papal power.41 At the same time, Bianchini's "scientific" approach includes the use of evidence, such as the chronological data derived from the eclipses (Fig. 1), countering literary sources, whose expressed opinions, mistakes, and willful deceit could make them untrustworthy. In his most important contribution to the history of the Liber pontificalis's reception, Bianchini applies the new, eighteenth-century practices of observation and demonstration by making large use of material evidence—inscriptions, epitaphs, archeological and monumental objects, and manuscripts, reproducing many in print as independent historical evidence. Bianchini brought even Galilean observation to his edition of the Liber he the chronological information, for example, through the evidence of natural through and and adds both the of his and the as he does in an image his of the of the and its significance in the inconsistencies in the of eclipses in sources, which the of the of Pope I The observation of eclipses from different Bianchini, Library Bianchini exploits the of an image to the historical and it to the example, in to the that Pope I to be made from Bianchini adds an of several (Fig. drawn both from his own and from that of Cardinal Alessandro The of this image is similar to that of the images he used in L'istoria It is by Bianchini as a to and the significance of Pope expressed with the material of by the in on the two now in his He notes that the image of Christ the into at the at on the larger to and the power Christ gave to the of the new to into a to the Catholic of the whose historical Bianchini at great in his He that the image of the on the it to be a for the he the image of the Holy as the to the role of the as the by which the of the Holy are to the priest at the of He notes that the are on the the who had them and their the power of these to the by the on both The significance of the on these that the which them be in a point, Bianchini "in are even though is a large of it is to which and which so that the will not which he to over to the observation but one which the of Pope I and the Liber pontificalis to the contemporary practice of the The image and Bianchini's make their independent contribution to the of and the of the The of these speaks also to Bianchini's in and so used in L'istoria universale, and to contemporary to a scientific Bianchini, Library most example of the power of an image is by the of the of Pope the on the of this of Bianchini had the in during its translation to the under his new in Saint was the first pope to be at Saint in the His first under I is in the Liber In his Bianchini the of from this first translation to the Bianchini the that the translation at the end of the century, and which survives only as in a to the during the of the new was out in under when the was under the of Santa Maria until the Alessandro could the over Pope new The and translation of to his on the and of a century after had been The translation to Pope Clement's in the of and of their and the to Protestant and Catholic scholars who were the of The with which this translation was by Bianchini is also an example of Bianchini's in observation and documentation and of his own in the over adds a of the translation of the of I in his commentary on the at the opening of the on the of Bianchini was so to the that he could a of the in their and of the by which they were He to make a of his with the on when Pope Clement to the as they in in the of Saint The of Bianchini's was by the who out the of and of as some of them had during the In his commentary to the "Life of Bianchini adds an of this drawing, with a which includes the measurements of the Bianchini also includes a of the and of their of As the image they are but still the in their and Bianchini the in their them and them to those in He for example, that the was with a as if a and he states the that it is from such a that the he notes the the and the and a because of its to the in long is the for the he that the opening for the and for the in the have been by these in his and then and printed, are the result of his own as he to the is most about Bianchini's of this is the emphasis on observation and documentation attention to the of the and of the to that they are both he the of the translation of Pope of a of a rather than one from only does Bianchini's of remains and the history of their over the have for the under great more than after his but also the image which he and printed as a of what he Bianchini's of the and of their both image and text, even be read as the of an archaeological complex Bianchini between text and is also in his use of Bianchini was not a critical We will have to until the late century for a critical edition of the Liber pontificalis. his in the Middle Ages and in material as evidence and his with the and other manuscript in made him that manuscripts, especially if contemporary to their could be material Jean a in the learned world of late his in search of manuscripts, and other for the library of his Louis were to he Bianchini when he a of the Accademia the relationship that developed after this Bianchini became in In his of introduced a comparative method for creating a of part of his the of He that a be not by its and and to contemporary also by its physical these material observation and to the and of contemporary his scripts from the scripts of antiquity to the century, in of his was on to which he In his use of manuscripts as objects, and especially in his appreciation of the manuscript as a Bianchini methodology to the perhaps the first to novel use of manuscripts as which he contemporary for the of the text of the papal chronicle is seen all in his of an extraordinary manuscript of the Liber pontificalis, the to the was written in in the century, as we only because Bianchini images from its and included them in his Liber script was developed in late antiquity and used up to the Carolingian when it was to use as a In however, as a book are up to the early ninth century by a The of the is a particularly it the would be among the manuscripts of the Liber had been at the in Rome by the and Catholic who served as of the Vatican Library in the middle of the seventeenth It was a the first and as as several from the the characteristics of the which he as "a manuscript, written in or than which more can be of this The was not yet used to from other Bianchini and other scholars had for the after this first but had been to it at the library in that the manuscript have been to the in or to their in where many books of the library had been Bianchini a of the who the manuscript in the library of the in in a as he Bianchini in a of Bianchini's of the search for the manuscript in Rome and Parma and its the significance of the of the manuscript, a long and in by is and restored to the of as he learned of the of the Bianchini, who could not up to the manuscript, to have a made of one of its a in their as he two