Sixty-eight years ago, in 1950, Heinz Quirin published a German-language introduction to studying medieval sources, which he called the Einführung in das Studium der mittelalterlichten Geschichte. It proved popular among German-speaking professors and students, and went through several editions. After a couple of decades--presumably somewhere in the 1970's--Denis L. T. Bethell (of University College, Dublin) and János Bak (of Central European University, Budapest) decided that an English-language adaptation of Quirin's handbook was needed. They worked on it until Bethell's untimely death in 1981. At that point, the chapter on manuscripts was among the few that had been completed.
In the preface, Bak tells how he kept using this chapter to teach medieval manuscripts to his graduate students in the decades that followed Bethell's death. When he published the chapter online in the Digital Commons series of Utah State University, a good number of readers downloaded it. Seeing this, Gorgias Press, which publishes concise introductions to a subject for students and scholars, offered Bak to publish a revised and updated version of the chapter as a paperback. The result is the seventy-page long Introduction to Working with Manuscripts for Medievalists, with János M. Bak's name on the cover.
In what respects does Bak's Introduction differ from Quirin's Einführung? The most obvious difference is the scope of these works: where Quirin wrote an introduction to medieval studies as a whole, Bak confines himself to manuscripts. This gives Bak room to delve deeper into the subject of manuscripts, providing more context, and finding room to cover a few contemporary methodologies. Yet there are also passages--long passages--where it is obvious that Bak did not intend to deviate very far from his model. Compare, for example, Quirin and Bak's respective guidelines for describing a manuscript heading. Quirin, Einführung (5th ed. 1991), p. 158. ‘1. der Name der Bibliothek, des Aufbewahrungsortes. Das Studium der Kataloge zeigt, daß die hier üblichen Abkürzungen sich meist auf Orts- oder Personennamen beziehen; eine große Anzahl von ihnen gilt international und ist deshalb stets anzuwenden. Der Kenner weiß, daß mit clm ein lateinischer Codex der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek zu München, mit Cod. Vat. Reg. Lat. ein lateinischer Codex aus dem Fonds gemeint ist, der durch die Königin Christine von Schweden, die Tochter Gustav Adolfs, in den Besitz des Vatikans kam. Ein Guelferbytanus gehört in die Herzog-August-Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel und stammt unter Umständen aus dem Besitz des gelehrten Bücherfreundes Flacius Illyricus (1520-1575), der für die Geschichtsschreibung der Reformation bedeutsam wurde. Über diese Bezeichunungen orientiert man sich am schnellsten bei W. Hall, A companion to classical texts (Oxford 1913).’ Bak, Introduction (2017), pp. 9-10. ‘I. Heading. This identifies the manuscript by its present place of deposit (for example the library or museum), shelf mark, author(s) or title(s), date, language, and a brief note on provenance […]. The pressmark (also called the shelf mark or call number) usually consists of an internationally accepted abbreviation for the manuscript collection, accompanied by the manuscript’s number in that collection. For example: Clm = Codes latinus monacensis = a manuscript in the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) at Munich Cod. Reg. lat. = Codex Vaticanus Reginae Latinus = a manuscript from the library of Queen Christina of Sweden, now in the Vatican Apostolic Libary Guelph. = Guelpherbytanus = a manuscript from the Herzog-August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the residence of the Guelph (Welf) Dukes of Brunswick, and likely to be one of the manuscripts they obtained with the collection of the bibliophile Illyricus (1520-1575). An extensive list of MSS of narratives and their abbreviations is found in the EMC 2: 1653-1727, an older guide is F. W. Hall, A Companion to Classical Texts (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1913). Such abbreviations should however, be used with caution, and only when they can be presumed to be familiar to likely readers; even then it is essential to include somewhere in the publication a table of abbreviations indicating in full the collections to which they refer.
In this fragment, Bak has cleaned up the original text (by changing Quirin's confusing Cod.Vat.Reg.Lat. to the more common Cod.Reg.Lat.), added a warning to use abbreviations with caution, and added a reference. On the other hand, Bak forgot to mention that holding libraries are abbreviated just as frequently as their manuscript collections (think of BL for British Library, BnF for Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BM for Bibliothèque Municipale…) On the whole, however, Bak remained quite close to his German source.
Without a doubt, Bak's Introduction is a very useful tool for college professors who want to teach medieval manuscripts to their upper-level or graduate students. It gives a clear and unambiguous template that ranges from basic manuscript description to the challenges of presenting a bi-lingual edition. There are, however, three things to keep in mind.
First of all, students could not be expected to use this book without the aid of an instructor, because it presupposes quite a bit of background knowledge. Bak's guideline for describing decorations, for example, is that "a short summary of miniatures, historiated or inhabited initials, and border decorations is sufficient" (17). A student who is new to manuscript studies would probably not know how to distinguish a historiated initial from an inhabited initial. To describe a binding, Bak's guideline is that one should provide "date and origin, technique and decoration. It is especially important, if possible, to date the binding" (17). Again, the reader is not instructed how she would figure out the date and origin of the binding, what kind of "techniques" she is expected to describe, and whether the decorations on the binding have particular names that she is supposed to use. Bak does not provide suggestions for further reading on these subjects, so that an unsupervised student would most likely be stuck.
Secondly, the concise nature of the Introduction means that some of Bak's definitions and explanations are, perhaps, somewhat too succinct. For example, not only is a manuscript defined as "a handwritten document from the age preceding the invention of printing" (thus ignoring the many manuscripts produced in the age of print), Bak also explains that "medieval codices were not made of sheets of paper folded one or more times, but of pieces of parchment cut more or less to the same size, and folded in half to give pairs of leaves (bifolia)." That is not incorrect, but it is too much of a generalization--some manuscripts were made of paper, some were made of pieces of parchment that were not folded at all, or folded four times, or even eight times. Again, students would need a teacher to qualify some of the definitions and explanations in this book.
Thirdly, the book's conceptual take on manuscript studies does harken back to the 1950xs. There is no hint of the "Material Turn," or the "New (or Material) Philology" (see Speculum 65:1 [1990]). Bak describes differences between manuscripts in terms of "copyist's mistakes," and the end goal of textual criticism as obtaining "a text that is as near as possible to the 'original,' to the author and his/her time" (21). This definition has been subject to debate for some time now, and I would have liked to see a footnote (or better yet, a paragraph) that acknowledges this debate. I would also have expected Bak to acknowledge the possibility of digital editions, and to discuss the different set of possibilities and difficulties that digital editions present to students and researchers. Words like "XML," "TEI-P5," or even "computer" do not occur in this book, with the exception of a hesitant nod to stylometrical methods to determine authorship (the results of which, Bak grumbles, "are open to debate" [42]).
This Introduction is, in short, the English-language adaptation of a German handbook from the 1950s. It provides a template for editing medieval manuscripts. Students who are new to manuscript studies could not be expected to use this template without the help of a teacher, and the book as a whole does not discuss state-of-the-art evolutions in the field of manuscript studies. Yet if you are a college professor who is looking for a guide that helps you teach students to prepare a good old print edition of a Latin manuscript, this slim volume may be exactly what you are looking for.