History as a Visual Concept: Peter of Poitiers' Compendium Historiae

Abstract

This report introduces a project to create a critical edition of Peter of Poitier's work, Compendium historiae in geneologia Christi. Composed at the end of the twelfth century, Peter of Poitier conceived the Compendium as a visual aid for teaching biblical history to theology students. Depicting history as a chart in the form of a genealogical graph, it quickly became ubiquitous in the Latin West. Our renewed effort to locate and appraise manuscript witnesses (to date ca. 300) of the Compendium has revealed its unparalleled formal and contextual breadth. Given the work's graphic features and richly varied manuscript tradition, the edition will appear in digital format. This report describes our editorial strategies in the face of the challenges posed by the Compendium's structural, textual, and pictorial variance and, more generally, the medial and graphic aspects of text in the Middle Ages.

The "History as a Visual Concept" project concerns Peter of Poitiers's diagrammatic work, the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi. Peter of Poitiers (1125/30–1205), a master of theology in Paris, originally designed the Compendium as a tool to help his students learn the complexities of biblical history. He developed a linear synopsis for visualizing time, a graph representing both synchronous and diachronic relationships between people and events. The Compendium soon became a standard work across the Latin West; more than three hundred manuscript witnesses are currently known. Despite its prevalence, however, the Compendium has neither been edited nor studied with regard to its graphical "metastructure" for the order of history.

Researchers at the Universities of Tübingen, Wuppertal, Graz, Venice, and London are creating the first digital edition of Peter of Poitiers's Compendium using the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI/XML), the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), vector graphics (SVG), and Semantic Web technologies.¹ Bringing together the fields of art history, medieval history, Latin philology, text editing, and digital humanities, this project will result in a freely accessible, online critical edition of the text embedded in a navigable visualization of the graphic metastructure. Along with a codicological database, the edition will serve as the platform for studies of variants of the work, individual manuscript witnesses, sociocultural contexts, and other aspects of the tradition.

The Compendium

The Author and Reception

Peter of Poitiers began his academic career in Paris in the mid-twelfth century, where he taught theology before assuming office as the chancellor of the cathedral school of Notre Dame in 1193.² One of Peter of Poitiers's predecessors, Peter Comestor, had produced a summary of biblical history that eventually became one of the most popular theological texts of the Middle Ages: the Historia scholastica.³ Building on the work of his predecessor, Peter of Poitiers authored a continuation of the Historia scholastica, a historical account of the Acts of the Apostles.⁴ He also based the Compendium, to a large extent, on the Historia scholastica.

During the thirteenth century and beyond, the Compendium served as a visual aid for the study of history. A large portion of the surviving manuscripts transmit the Compendium together with the Historia scholastica, especially those produced for the university in Paris or other academic institutions. Given that the oldest dated manuscript is linked to a Benedictine monastery at Mondsee (near Salzburg, Austria), the Compendium seems to have spread quickly from Paris to schools all across Europe.⁵ Early copies associated with cathedral schools are also present in the British Isles.⁶ The Compendium remained popular throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in both continental Europe and in Britain. Today more than half of the manuscript witnesses of the Compendium are found in Germany and England, with a significant number also in Austria and France.

Aside from the Historia scholastica, the Compendium accompanied other historical and encyclopedic texts, as well as Bibles. Its didactic hegemony lent it symbolic clout. Often transmitted on rolls, institutions invested in large formats and high-quality illumination (fig. 1). By the mid-fourteenth century several pictorial programs had emerged to illustrate the Compendium, notably for English rolls and French presentation copies.⁷ By this time, it served not only as a teaching aid but also as a picture of sacred time, symbolizing the cosmological underpinnings of creation and salvation. The Compendium thus appeared as a frontispiece for manuscripts such as the multivolume Bible given by the king of France to the College of the Sorbonne in 1270 and the immense early thirteenth-century copy of Flavius Josephus's Antiquitates Judaicae owned by Cambrai Cathedral.⁸

Figure 1.

Roll in two parts, Peter of Poitiers, Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, Canterbury, thirteenth century. Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, J. H. Wade Fund 1973.5.a–b.

The Compendium became a standard introduction for historical chronicles, continuations that were often based on local histories.⁹ It subsequently served as the basis for other visual biblical, royal, and world histories, such as Giovanni da Udine's Compilatio nova and printed world chronicles including the Fasciculus temporum (Cologne, 1475) and Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik, or Nuremberg Chronicle (Nuremberg, 1493). The Compendium, in other words, established a visual model for history that remains standard: the timeline.

Form and Content

The Compendium is formatted as a genealogical flow chart. Beginning with medallions containing Adam and Eve, lines extend downward to the medallions labeled as their children, in turn connected to their children, and so on (fig. 2). Blocks of texts are situated around the medallions, describing persons and events. The center line (the linea Christi) continues, unbroken, until the birth of Christ. Alongside this center line, the Compendium also includes chronologically simultaneous lines. It shows, for instance, the synchronicity between the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah (fig. 3). Encompassing lineages that were not necessarily bloodlines, the genealogical chart also includes judges (descending from Moses) and priests (descending from Aaron).

The Compendium displays additional historical information in the form of diagrams independent of the main genealogical graph. Almost all copies contain three of these extra diagrams. The first shows the forty-two encampments of the Israelites in the desert in three different years, the second the placement of the tents of the twelve tribes of Israel around the Tabernacle (fig. 4), and the third a plan of Jerusalem (fig. 5). Many exemplars of the Compendium also include one or more cross sections of the Ark of Noah. These diagrams speak to the mode of theological study dominant at the university in Peter of Poitiers's time, a mode invested in the analysis of numerical details as the basis for exegesis.

The Compendium divides history into six ages (which begin respectively with Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, Zedekiah, and the birth of Christ), demarcated in some cases by illustrations. But the flow of the graph remains continuous. In the codex format this meant that scribes had to find solutions for representing continuity over page breaks, often in the form of labels or color coding. The roll format, on the contrary, lent itself to a linear, genealogical graph: Peter of Poitiers's great contribution to the visualization of history.

Manuscript Database and Digital Edition

Manuscript Database

The Compendium historiae has never been properly edited and has been printed only once, in 1592, in what can be regarded as an antiquarian edition.¹⁰ The large number of manuscript witnesses, together with the graphic complexity of the Compendium, has made a critical edition nearly impossible. In 1954 Friedrich Stegmüller mentioned 75 manuscript witnesses.¹¹ Nearly fifty years later, Laura Alidori listed 164.¹² More recently, Jean-Baptiste Piggin provided a useful (if rather flawed) list of 273 manuscripts.¹³ One of the goals of the "History as a Visual Concept" project is to produce a database of the witnesses. This has involved, first, the verification of each entry given by Piggin and, second, a renewed effort to locate unknown copies. The current count of confirmed witnesses stands at 315.

The database will not only contain the standard information found in catalog entries (e.g., location, repository, folios, date) but will also feature visual and diagrammatic elements of the Compendium. This includes the layout of the graph, the design of the medallions, and which pictures and diagrams are present. In addition, the database will display textual co-transmission (e.g., the Historia scholastica) as well as diagrammatic and pictorial co-transmission. Items such as the allegorical seven-armed candelabrum or wind diagrams, often placed at the beginning or at the end of the Compendium, hint at the work's intellectual and cultural context.¹⁴

Each entry in the database will consist of a TEI document. Initially, this document will be filled with metadata available from library catalogs and secondary literature in fields such as "teiHeader," and "msDesc." Working with images from digitization campaigns, we will complete these TEI documents with more detailed visual and textual information. The TEI representation will contain references to relevant ontologies such as MeMO (The Medieval Manuscript Ontology) to model and relate the individual components to each other.¹⁵ Together, these data will create a picture of the textual, graphic, and pictorial tradition of the Compendium, thus allowing us to create an edition representing the most significant variants.

Superstructure and Navigational Graph

The basis of our edition will be an idealized and navigable form of the Compendium's genealogical graph. This norm graph (or "NavGraph") will

Figure 2.

Adam, Eve, and descendants, Peter of Poitiers, Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, France, early thirteenth century. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 29, fol. vir. Image courtesy of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Figure 3.

Kings of Juda and Israel, Peter of Poitiers, Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, France, early thirteenth century. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 29, fol. ixr. Image courtesy of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Figure 4.

Encampments and tribes diagrams. Peter of Poitiers, Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, France, early thirteenth century. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 29, fol. viir. Image courtesy of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Figure 5.

Jerusalem diagram, Peter of Poitiers, Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, France, early thirteenth century. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 29, fol. xr. Image courtesy of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

serve as the portal to a "second layer." Opened upon clicking, this second layer will display the textual and structural edition of single portions of the main graph, with links to digital facsimiles of the manuscripts representative of significant variants.

Many of the relevant manuscripts are already digitized and available via IIIF manifests. The IIIF infrastructure supports the sharing of image resources worldwide, allowing us to integrate the manuscript facsimiles into our edition without hosting them on our local servers.¹⁶ IIIF viewers have the capability not only to display entire manuscript pages but also to capture zones within images accompanied by commentary and references, and they will be embedded in the Compendium edition.¹⁷

To model the Compendium's structure and its variance, we have developed a "superstructure" system. The superstructure synthesizes the elements that appear across the manuscript tradition. This involves creating an identifier for each node, text, connection, diagram, and picture that may occur in the manuscripts. The superstructure ID for the Adam node (n-adam), for instance, identifies the medallion in the Compendium labeled "Adam," independently from the single witnesses. Although the Adam medallion is present in most manuscripts, there are cases in which Adam and Eve appear together in a single medallion. In this case the node receives the ID "n-adameve." As the ID "n-adam" is tagged as "canonic" and n-adam-eve as "variant," n-adam appears in the code for the norm graph and n-adam-eve in the code for one of the variants shown in the second layer of the edition. In the digital version of the Compendium's graph, this information can be accessed via a clickable section linking to the respective variants.

Philological Aspects and Critical Apparatus

Given that the Compendium has never been published in a critical edition and philological aspects have been widely ignored in recent scholarship, our work also entails an analysis of textual variance.¹⁸ Based on transcriptions of the earliest manuscript witnesses, we are currently establishing a critically annotated text of the so-called short version.¹⁹ Other manuscripts contain an "interpolated version," which will be treated separately.²⁰ Eventually the edition will include the following apparatuses: (1) a critical apparatus, indicating significant variants of the manuscript witnesses;²¹ (2) an apparatus biblicus, providing references to the respective biblical books; (3) an apparatus fontium, identifying Peter of Poitiers's sources (e.g., Peter Comestor, Flavius Josephus); and (4) an apparatus testimoniorum, listing the use of the work by subsequent authors. In the digital edition the reading text will appear with various options to simultaneously view scholarly annotations, an English translation, and transcriptions of several representative witnesses.

Outlook

In the first decades after Peter of Poitiers introduced the Compendium historiae in geneologia Christi as a teaching aid in Paris, it took hold across the Latin West. Enjoying multivalent power as a didactic, spiritual, artistic, and political tool, the Compendium appeared in classrooms, ecclesiastical institutions, noble and royal courts, and personal libraries. Its ubiquity, while signaling the need for scholarly attention and a critical edition, is paradoxically what has rendered traditional editing almost impossible, given that the Compendium's functional multivalency mirrors its impressive graphic, pictorial, and textual variation.

Our edition project, therefore, will not only establish new ground for scholarly inquiry into intellectual, artistic, and political histories but will also allow for insights into the points where these histories intersect. While the digital approach captures the breadth and variation of the Compendium's tradition, the longevity of our edition will be ensured insofar as both texts and graphic structures will be encoded in TEI. Convertible into various publication formats, the edition is intended to be a platform for new directions in textual scholarship that confront graphicality and mediality as significant bearers of meaning.