Titulus: Identifying Medieval Latin Texts: an Evidence-Based Approach (review)

The authors and titles of medieval texts are notoriously difficult to identify. Title-pages are rare before the later 15^th century, and any titles or authorial attributions in the manuscripts themselves are likely to be diverse and contradictory, when they are not absent entirely. To this must be added the sometimes – perhaps often? – misleading or incorrect information in printed editions, even down to the present day. Many of the available reference works for identifying medieval Latin texts are 'ill thought out, very often unhelpful, and sometimes downright misleading' (p. 29). This is the starting-point of Richard Sharpe's book.

Sharpe is well-known as the compiler of the invaluable Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540. He also has extensive experience editing medieval library catalogues and working on the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, and is in a strong position to apply critical analysis to an area of scholarship which has tended to be dismissed as something which can be left to research assistants.

Instead of uncritical acceptance of existing attributions, Sharpe advocates what he describes as an 'evidence-based approach', using an analogy drawn from medical research. By this he means revisiting the evidence from the manuscripts themselves and from contemporary catalogues and citations, and using it to review and revise the titles and authors used in modern reference works. This evidence consists of three key coordinates: author, title, and incipit. By using this kind of evidence critically, the scholar will be in a much better position to identify and recognize texts correctly.

Sharpe uses two extended examples to demonstrate the way his approach works in practice, by looking at writings attributed to 'magister Iohannes de Toleto' and to 'Malachias Hibernicus'. These illustrate very clearly the difficulties involved in untangling the authorship and titles of such works, as well as the benefits to be gained from a more soundly-based identification of them. Sharpe discusses the limitations and weaknesses of various well-known modern reference works, such as Thorndike and Kibre's Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin. He offers some comments on the use of databases in this area, particularly In Principio (published by Brepols). He also provides an extensive annotated list of relevant reference works, including listings of authors, listings of texts, bibliographical works, and some major collections of texts.

Textual bibliography is an essential part of research into medieval texts, as Sharpe observes: 'sound textual bibliography is a demanding subject, but it is one that informs every area of text-based disciplines' (p. 29). He makes an important contribution to the development of a 'science of medieval texts that is concerned with their identification' (p. 249), and his book is essential reading for anyone doing research which involves medieval Latin texts. Its only drawbacks are the lack of an index and of any running titles, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to navigate.