Ancient Epic and Late-Medieval Pecia Schoolbooks
These Latin works of two of the most famous poets of the ancient world were not meant to adorn library shelves but to be read, marked, and used for didactic purposes. Filled with marginalia—neat and organized in the scribal copy of Virgil’s Eclogues, messy and at times frantic in the printed edition of Homer’s Iliad—these books are utterly unique, customized with the commentaries and glosses of the individuals who owned them, taught with them, and learned from them. They offer to us a glimpse into the construction, format, and function of the medieval precursor to the modern textbook.
This manuscript edition of Virgil’s Eclogues contains not only the text itself but also extensive marginal commentary, as well as interlinear glosses, syllabic notations, and etymological notes. Intentionally drafted with wide margins and large spaces left between lines, this may have been created for a professor who worked from this heavily annotated copy to teach the content, rhythm, grammar, and syntax of Virgil’s famous poetry. Some of the marginal notes appear in a larger font, making them far easier to find quickly while delivering a lecture; others feature red limning that corresponds to the red initials at the beginning of each line of the neatly prepared scribal text. While other contemporary schoolbooks often bear heavy marginalia in the beginning that then tapers off, perhaps because an individual class read only a portion of a work that was copied in full, this edition is heavily marked with several paragraphs of annotations on each of its twenty-eight pages, reinforcing the hypothesis that it belonged to a teacher and not to a student.
Though the incunabular edition of Homer’s Iliad was produced in print rather than in manuscript, it is as heavily annotated as the Virgil edition and also probably functioned as a textbook used by either a student or his teacher. It seems more likely that this one belonged to a student, perhaps one who preferred dabbling in art to poring over classical poetry, as in the back there are doodles of a pretty castle and a dark crest. Medieval students, it seems, were not so different from ours after all.
In contrast to the meticulously neat annotations in the margins of Virgil’s Eclogues, those in Martin Landsberg’s printed Iliad are larger and messier, often spilling across the top borders of the page and tumbling down into the right margin. Nevertheless, they clearly correspond to the text, being connected to the relevant line with red initials, following much the same system as the manuscript Virgil. Indeed, despite its printed production, this Homer edition still bears the mark of the scribe in its red initials, rubricated pages, and even a typeface that closely mirrors a scribe’s gothic hand.
Secular scriptoria could be subject, variously, to the governance of metropolitan bishops or guilds, the authority of universities, or even all the above. All manner of book specialists in the pay of university rectors and chancellors are described in the archival record according to their specialized skills: cartolarii (parchment and paper merchants), correctores (copy editors), exemplatores (copyists), illuminatores (illuminators), ligatores (binders), rubricatores (rubricators), stationarii (stationers), and so on. Some Italian, German, and French universities maintained a direct, proprietary role in the commercial production of textbooks according to a pecia system that endured from the thirteenth century into the era of print.
Scribal exemplars of school texts officially approved by university authorities were effectively rented out to merchant booksellers (stationarii peciarum) who had been sworn to obey university statutes. They, in turn, would administer the secondary copying of select, numbered “pieces” (peciae) of the exemplar in short, serialized installments of four or more sheets (often marginally designated “p,” then “pii,” etc.) whose separate parts might later be stitched or bound together. Pecia manuscripts were also often copied out leaving ample margins and wide interlinear blanks in order to encourage students to record their classroom recollectae in the form of personal manuscript annotations and glosses—a tradition that also carried over into print. Together these specially prefabricated texts offer useful insights not only into piecemeal contemporary philosophical book production but also into their active textual interrogation by scholars and students.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Ann Blair, “Student Manuscripts and the Textbook,” in Emidio Campi, Simone de Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony T. Grafton (eds.), Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe (Libraire Droz S.A., 2008), 39–73; Cora E. Lutz, “Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books,” The Yale University Library Gazette 49:3 (January 1975): 261–67; Graham Pollard, “The Pecia System in the Medieval Universities,” in M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (eds.), Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries (Scolar Press, 1978), 145–61; Nikolaus Weichselbaumer, “‘Quod Exemplaria vera habeant et correcta’: Concerning the Distribution and Purpose of the Pecia System,” in Richard Kirwan and Sophie Mullins (eds.), Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World (Brill, 2015), 331–50.
