Quodlibet IV

THE TEXT EXAMINED INTERIORLY

THE TEXT EXAMINED INTERIORLY THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG THE MANUSCRIPTS, ESTABLISHED BY A GENERAL TEST COLLATION Following the well-established custom of volumes previously edited in this series, a general test collation was made of all the manuscripts. Each of the known manuscripts was collated for representative sections of the critical text. For this edition, because the exact beginning points of each of the nineteen pecia of the first Parisian university exemplar are known, the general test collation was made for the first one hundred lines of a provisional working text of each pecia. As a result, the following lines of this printed edition were used for the test collation: pecia 1: q. 1, lin. 3 to q. 2, lin. 51; pecia 2: q. 7, lin. 93-213; pecia 3: q. 8, lin. 22-173; pecia 4: q. 10, lin. 3-97; pecia 5: q. 11, lin. 237-326; pecia 6: q. 13, lin. 293-386; pecia 7: q. 13, lin. 832-923; pecia 8: q. 13, lin. 1386-1481; pecia 9: q.14, lin. 125-235; pecia 10: q. 14, lin. 626-708; pecia 11: q. 14, lin. 1086-1160; pecia 12: q. 15, lin. 3-105; pecia 13: q. 15, lin. 655-744; pecia 14: q. 16, lin. 153-260; pecia 15: q. 20, lin. 64-158; pecia 16: q. 22, lin. 35137 ; pecia 17: q. 23, lin. 74-184; pecia 18: q. 29, lin. 54-133; pecia 19: q. 36, lin. 120 to q. 37, lin. 54. The general test collation revealed the common accidents which certain manuscripts share with other manuscripts,and thus suggested common models for these manuscripts, and it also provided the unique accidents, which pointed to the relative carefulness and skill of the scribes who copied these manuscripts.§1. The Common Accidents A. The groups of manuscripts characterized by the number of common accidents The general test collation revealed two major groupings of manuscripts, as could be expected from the two divergent groups of explicit pecia transitions , namely those manuscripts copied directly or indirectly from the first Parisian university exemplar and those copied from a second Parisian university exemplar. However, within the group of manuscripts copied from the first Parisian university exemplar there was a number of identifiable subgroups and within the group of manuscripts copied from the second Parisian university exemplar there were also sub-clusters of common accidents. THE TEXT EXAMINED INTERIORLY XXXI B. The groups characterized individually 1. Manuscript A The manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 15848 (ms. A), has been an extraordinarily important manuscript for the critical edition of Henry’s Quodlibeta edited to date. The manuscript does contain explicit and implicit pecia transitions in Quodlibet IV which correspond to those of the first Parisian university exemplar, yet in a number of instances this manuscript contains readings which seem independent of the first exemplar. These must and will be studied in detail below.1 2. The Group of Manuscripts Dependent upon the First Parisian University Exemplar In addition to ms.A, there are seven other manuscripts which contain explicit pecia transitions which correspond to those of the first Parisian university exemplar, namely manuscripts Bordeaux, Bibliothèque municipale, 146 (ms. 2); Erlangen, Universitätsbibliotek 269/1 (ms. 6); Paris, Arsenal 455 (ms. 19 = C); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 15353 (ms. 21); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 15847 (ms. 24 = B); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 15850 (ms. 26); and Biblioteca Vaticana, Borghese 299 (ms. 30 = H). These seven, those in the various sub-groups identified below, and mss. 3, 9, 12, 15, 23, and 31 contain common variants which suggest that they are ultimately dependent upon the first Parisian university exemplar. a. The sub-group of mss. 8 and 27 The manuscripts Kues, Hospital 92 (ms. 8) and Ravenna, Biblioteca Classense , 472/1 (ms. 27) contain numerous common accidents revealed by the general test collation. In the list below the accidents which these two manuscripts have in common and are variant readings when compared with the readings of the other manuscripts – those copied from both the first Parisian university exemplar and the second university exemplar – are given only for the third pecia, which is representative.2 1 Cf. infra, pp. xlvii-lviii. 2 The test collation indicated the following number of variant readings which these two manuscripts had in common: pecia 1: 19; pecia 2: 10; pecia 3: 16 (provided in the list); pecia 4: 9; pecia 5: 7; pecia 6...