Griffin, Nathaniel Edward/ Guido De Columnis, Historia Destructionis

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Griffin, Nathaniel Edward/ Guido De Columnis, Historia Destructionis THE MEDIAEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA PUBLICATION No. 26 GUIDO DE COLUMNIS HISTORIA DESTRUCTIONIS TROIAE GUIDO DE COLUMNIS HISTORIA DESTRUCTIONIS TROIAE Edited by NATHANIEL EDWARD GRIFFIN THE MEDIAEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 1936 The publication of this book was made possible by grants of funds to the Academy from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the American Council of Learned Societies COPYRIGHT BY THE MEDIAEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA 1936 Printed in U. S. A. IOANNI- WHEELER- GRIFFIN FRATRI- IVRIS- PERITISSIMO LITTERAS- COLENTI- ARTESQVE- HVMANIORES D-D D PREFACE THIS edition of the text of Guido has been made possible by the scholarly zeal and personal kindness of Professor Carleton Brown of New York University, at whose instance the Modern Language Association of America petitioned the Carnegie Institution of Washington for a sub- vention to defray the expenses of a complete edition of the Historia Destructions Troiae. The petition was referred by the Carnegie Insti- tution of Washington to the American Council of Learned Societies, which, after careful study of the project, secured a subvention for the preparation of the text from the Carnegie Corporation of New York City. The text is published by the Mediaeval Academy of America with certain assistance from the American Council of Learned Societies. To these five organizations, and especially to Dr Waldo G. Leland, Permanent Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies, who has taken a quite personal interest in the edition, and to Mr G. W. Cottrell, Jr., Executive Secretary of the Mediaeval Academy, for skilful assistance in preparing copy for the printer, I here express my deep gratitude. The text which is now offered furnishes, of course, but the initial con- stituent of a complete edition of Guido. For over thirty years I have been collecting material for a descriptive catalogue and critical evalua- tion of the manuscripts and printed editions of the Historia, a study of its sources and influence, and of the life of its author. It is for the proper execution of these undertakings that I have begun with the editing of the text. From the commencement of my textual labors in 1929 I have profited constantly by the invaluable counsel of Professor J. S. P. Tatlock of the University of California, who, at the request of the American Council of Learned Societies and later of the Mediaeval Academy of America, kindly consented to act as adviser to the enterprise. Without the many valuable suggestions of Professor Tatlock, whose skill in all matters pertaining to text construction has ever been at my disposal, this edition would never have attained its present form. Many times after experimenta- tions of my own I have found myself returning to his recommendations. Especially am I grateful to him for warnings against the alluring temp- tation of relying upon the "doctored" readings of the printed edition of Strassburg, i486, and too little upon the "duriores lectiones" of the manu- scripts, for his ingenuity in suggesting explanations for many of the more difficult entries in the Glossary of Uncommon Words, for his prompt and vii viii Historia Destructionis Troiae patient replies to letters of inquiry, and for reading through the entire text — parts of it more than once — while in process of construction and once again in galley with scrupulous care. For the readings adopted in the text he is not, of course, responsible; while many of them were sug- gested by him, the ultimate decision has always been mine. I have also profited greatly by the acute observations of Professor Charles L. Sherman of Amherst College. Scholars at Harvard University have been most generous in responding to calls upon their time. Among these Professor E. K. Rand has never failed to point me unhesitatingly to the solution of difficulties of the most varied sort, and more than once has offered helpful comments upon ob- scure passages in the text. To Professor C. H. Haskins' palaeographical knowledge I am indebted for suggestions regarding the provenience of my five principal manuscripts. By Professor Joshua Whatmough I have been instructed in more than one matter of phonology. Mr George Washington Robinson has offered stimulating suggestions regarding tex- tual procedure, and Dr Alexander Pogo, Associate Editor of I sis, has in- terpreted the astronomical passage on p. 16. To Professor William C. Greene I am indebted for advice regarding classical Latinity and to Pro- fessor William Thomson for assistance in the definition of the Arabic Saphy in the Index of Proper Names. For the collation of occasional passages of exceptional difficulty in three otherwise unused manuscripts in the British Museum and for two readings from a copy of the Cologne Edi- tion there I am under deep obligation to the expert and generous services of Mr Henry Bergen, the learned editor of Lydgate's Troy Book and Falls of Princes. I am also very grateful to the Rotograph Committee of the Modern Language Association, especially to its efficient chairmen Pro- fessor R. K. Root and Professor W. L. Bullock, for obtaining for me rotographs of five Guido manuscripts — including one in French, which I have not used — and to the officials of the Library of Congress, espe- cially to Dr J. F. Jameson, and of the Harvard College Library, especially to Mr W. B. Briggs, for the loan of these rotographs from Washington so that I might use them in Cambridge. I hope that I may not have proved entirely unworthy of the substan- tial assistance I have received from these already mentioned and from others too numerous to mention; "nihil est infelicius ea qui multis peritis usus se imperitum praestat." NATHANIEL EDWARD GRIFFIN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 17 MAY 1935 CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION xi HISTORIA DESTRUCTIONS TROIAE Prologus 3 Liber I 5 Liber II 11 Liber III 22 Liber IIII 33 Liber V 43 Liber VI 56 Liber VII 67 Liber VIII 80 Liber VIIII 87 Liber X 9° Liber XI 99 Liber XII 103 Liber XIII no Liber XIIII 118 Liber XV 127 Liber XVI H7 Liber XVII 151 Liber XVIII 155 Liber XVIIII 159 Liber XX 166 Liber XXI 170 Liber XXII Liber XXIII Liber XXIIII 186 Liber XXV 189 Liber XXVI 197 Liber XXVII 206 Liber XXVIII 211 Liber XXVIIII 2*7 Liber XXX 228 Liber XXXI 237 Liber XXXII 245 ix x Historia Destructionis Troiae Liber XXXIII 253 Liber XXXIIII 262 Liber Ultimus 269 GLOSSARY OF UNCOMMON WORDS 277 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 281 INTRODUCTION THE SELECTION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS THE present edition of Guido de Columnis' Historia Destructionis Troiae is the outcome of investigations undertaken before the World War. In the summers of 1907, 1912, and 1913 I examined ninety-three manu- scripts of the Historia in various libraries of England, France, Italy, and Sicily, and subsequently examined another in America. All these I hope to list in a later volume. From each of these ninety-four manuscripts I copied four brief equi- distant passages. A comparison of these passages revealed absolute same- ness in content accompanied by innumerable variations of orthography and phraseology. There was some disagreement among the scribes respecting the chaptering of books. Moreover the scribes of certain manuscripts had added, at the end of the text, after the epitaphs, a dating of the Fall of Troy or a metrical Deploratio Troiae or both. These scribal vagaries might, of course, have furnished some initial clue to a classification of the manuscripts. But the ninety-four manuscripts examined were by no means all the manuscripts of Guido that have ex- isted. While in Europe I located forty-two others, making one hundred and thirty-six manuscripts in all. Listed in catalogues I did not see and uncatalogued there must be many more, not to mention the number that must have perished or become lost. Obviously from so many manu- scripts no authoritative stemma could be constructed. Accordingly I de- cided to depend upon scribal dates and to select from among those of my ninety-four manuscripts that were dated by the scribes the five that bore the earliest dates. Of the five manuscripts chosen the earliest bears the date 1334 and the latest the date 1353. The earliest manuscript was written forty-seven years after the original, which was composed in 1287, as stated by Guido in his colophon {vid. p. 276), and the latest sixty-six years thereafter. Two of the manuscripts certainly, three in all prob- ability, and not improbably all five were written in widely separated localities {vid. pp. xii-xiii). Hence they present a fairly early, and, in all likelihood, a fairly broad cross-section of the manuscript tradition. A COMPOSITE TEXT PREFERRED In the treatment of these five manuscripts two methods of procedure were possible. Either the best of the five manuscripts could be printed literally with only its most obvious blunders corrected from the remaining four, the variants of which would appear in the footnotes, or else a com- xi xii Historia Destructionis Troiae posite text could be constructed from all five manuscripts, with one manu- script used as base but corrected as thoroughly as possible from the other four. The former plan, though favored by Mr Tatlock, seemed to me to supply little more than "materiaux pour servir a. une edition critique," provided the reader had the skill and patience to construct for himself, as he went along, a proper text from the fund of variants supplied at the foot of the page. What seemed to be needed, for an author as widely translated and imitated as Guido, was a sort of middle-of-the-road text, which would, save for the necessary retention of such indifferent features as the word-order and purely graphic peculiarities of the basic manu- script, be freed from the eccentricities of any one scribe, and combine from all the manuscripts used whatever seemed most likely to have been the reading of the author.
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