Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella: Ninth-Century Commentary Traditions on 'De nuptiis' in Context ed. by Mariken Teeuwen and Sinead O'Sullivan (review)

This is a collection of fourteen papers derived from a conference, organised by Mariken Teeuwen in 2008, that considered aspects of the scholia and glosses associated with the ninth-century transmission of Martianus Capella's De nuptiis. The collection is preceded by a useful and lucid Introduction by Teeuwen herself.

The book is eminently readable in its own right, for the team of authors assembled is a strong and distinguished one, but there is a sense in which it might be regarded as no more than a comprehensive series of footnotes to a much larger enterprise. Six years before the conference took place, Teeuwen began her 'Martianus Project', the development of a digital tool called eLaborate, the aim of which was to facilitate the 'collaborative transcribing and editing of texts'. I recommend a visit to the project's web site at <http://martianus.huygens.knaw.nl> before reading this review further.

Readers who visit the site will discover an exciting new approach to the editing of commentary, that most elusive, fugacious, and insubstantial branch of ancient and medieval literature. Here is a kind of apotheosis of a Wikipedia article: it offers the reader all the available information and invites contributions from those scholars who wish to take part in its workshop in the Cloud!

It also discloses a high degree of scholarly cooperativeness: Sinead O'Sullivan was engaged in another field of research on Martianus when she heard of Teeuwen's work and agreed to join forces. Most works of this kind have been, in the past, quite literally closed books: the scholar or scholars write their book, print it, and wait (for months and probably years) to see what reception it receives. Nowadays - surely one of the genuine blessings of the internet age - a 'book' such as this one is a work in progress, to which scholars from all over the world, already distinguished or quite unknown, can make their own contributions.

It is fitting that this kind of approach should be adopted for the editing of scholia and commentary. Teeuwen clearly recognises that a collection of commentaries cannot be a closed book, but rather something more akin to a growing organism, whose component parts have been invented, borrowed, and transcribed (sometimes inaccurately) by many hands. Only when such a set of commentaries is printed does it assume the appearance of something that it is not, a finished and integrated literary work. Teeuwen summarises thus: 'the search for a single author should be abandoned, since the gloss tradition shows characteristics of being the work of multiple authors … and the scholarly nature of the gloss tradition should be reconsidered and viewed outside the old frames of the schoolbook discussion' (p. 5). Much as one admires the diligence and intelligence of the great scholars of the nineteenth century, there is no doubt that much of their work on commentary was flawed by their perception that there was a single 'author' behind each collection.

Having formerly edited scholia on Virgil, I found this book and its associated web site particularly exciting. I recall the difficulty of explaining the nature of the commentary as well as Teeuwen has succinctly done. The invention of the modern printed volume has taught us to see books as final objects, the productions of scholarship, and all authors like to think (or at least hope) that their book will be the last word on their subject. Only those who have worked with manuscripts can appreciate how little respect (in a sense) the scholars of the past had for the written word. It is a strange paradox: books were vastly more expensive and precious than they are today; yet nobody hesitated to write and draw in the margins, to disagree with...