Nosey around Parker

A facetious title for an event which really should be celebrated: the ambitious project to digitise the manuscripts of the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge is now fully available on-line. As a click on the link will reveal, full access does not come without a price. Through the summer, the site has been teasing and tantalising us (those of us who get excited by such matters) with selected riches glistening for all to see. Now, any viewer can see for free complete manuscripts, but without zooming, and catalogue descriptions, but without bibliography or search facility. The other facilities are provided on subscription and any good university should be moving post-haste to sign up, if they have not already done so.

This site provides a resource the full potential for which will only become understood over time. The educational potential is immediately obvious, in  the possibilities of both on-line palaeography tutorials and transcription exercises. The quality of the images will be a joy to those whose attention centres on illuminations. The search facility provides the ability for researchers to find their own route through the collection, hunting, for instance, for annotations by the Archbishop-collector, Matthew Parker himself, or by provenance (though, as always, some ingenuity is required in defining the right terms for a search). What the site also makes accessible are texts which have never made it into print. Let me give one example from my own area of study: the dialogue, written in England by Pietro del Monte, De Vitiorum inter se Differentia, has never enjoyed a wide circulation, and most would say justifiably so. As I discuss elsewhere it is a derivative work, lifting most of its text from Poggio’s De Avaritia. But how it takes that text and how it was read in England, to where its audience was nearly completed confined, are themselves interesting issues. The learned eighteenth-century successor to del Monte as Bishop of Brescia, Angelo Maria Querini, put into print a small section of the work, and its preface has received a modern edition, but now, for the first time the full text is available — admittedly, in a derivative copy, written in an uneven, though legible, anglicana cursive, but one which shows signs of Parker’s own interest, marked in his characteristic red crayon.

In other cases, what is now available on-line adds to the methods in which we can engage with a text. The Life of Henry V by Tito Livio Frulovisi is a work which those of you who read closely this site will know has been a recent focus of my attentions. It was edited in 1716 by Thomas Hearne, and that printed volume is available from Mr Google. Hearne worked from a transcription collating two copies, one in the Cotton collection and the other a manuscript in ‘Biblioteca collegii sancti Benedicti, sive Corporis Christi’, that is MS. 285 in the Parker Library. It is, in fact,  the dedication manuscript of the work to Henry VI, written throughout in Frulovisi’s attractive littera antiqua script. I am an admirer of Hearne’s work but I know which version I will prefer to read in future.

In short, our bookshelves are changing. I still sit surrounded by wooden cases, which bow under the weight of hardback volumes. I would not want to give up the touch or the smell of that physical proximity. But new vistas for our libraries extend before us, as we can now complement what we have on the desk with what we view on screen. And what is on screen is not confined by the old economics of print circulation; there is a new age of manuscript culture.

These comments are only my first response to the potential of Parker on-line. Only over time will more become appreciated, as our own skills at ‘virtual discovery’ develop. But, for the time being, let me finish with a word to Christopher, Nigel and all those involved in the project: plurimas gratias vobis ago agamque.

Can we trust Wikipedia?

The wickedness of Wikipedia is a common theme — the worry that students garner their information from the on-line encyclopedia, at the expense of ‘real’ work, undertaken surrounded by piles of printed tomes. We have all heard the urban myths of lecturers going on the internet to add intentionally false entries to Wikipedia so that they can catch their students if they plagiarise. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but should every good scholar ignore it completely?

First of all, let us not become protective of print encyclopedias, which often fall far below the level of extensive, unquestionable knowledge that we naively expect of them. I should know, I have edited an encyclopedia of the Renaissance. I would rate only two printed volumes: the Thames & Hudson Dictionary of the Italian Renaissance, edited by J. R. Hale, and the more recent and wide-ranging Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance by Gordon Campbell. To warn students off a true-ready reliance on what they read in print, I am fond of quoting an example from another encyclopedia of the Renaissance, one which sits quietly on the open shelves of the Bodleian and which states: ‘Petrarch was the first man to use the Latin term humanismus.’ As there is no such word in Latin, as it is a German term invented in the early nineteenth century, and as Petrarch did not employ any word or phrase cognate with humanismus, this is utter nonsense. Piffle. Twaddle. Moonshine. Balderdash. Codswallop. And claptrap. In short, hard copy does not equal hard facts.

What, of course, printed reference works do claim is some sort of academic recommendation, supplemented by the reputation of a worthy publisher: thus, the lists of advisors that appear at the front of any volume (completed with university affiliations), a page or so after the imprimatur of the publisher. These may encourage confidence where none should exist, but they do at least demonstrate a link, however tenuous, with academia. Wikipedia lacks such a patena of respectability, presenting itself instead as the standard-bearer of on-line democracy, encouraging anybody to contribute. In those areas of life which attract attention on the internet, this can create clashes, ‘vandalism’ and repeated re-writings without necessarily any improvement in veracity — but, then, we are not interested in articles on Britney Spears or which is the best George Clooney film (Michael Clayton, by the way). Most of the articles of interest to a student of the Renaissance are not battlefields in the same way: a reader is more likely to be caught out by accidental error than caught in the crossfire between contributors reflected in an entry.

Wikipedia has developed its own rules of engagement for contributors, centring on providing a NPOV (a Neutral Point of View). But there is a curious result from this: Wikipedia is consciously, achingly non-hierarchical but it can certainly be deferential. For example, the discussion board for contributors about Machiavelli has one of them objecting to a sentence in the entry because it makes assertions ‘Without reference to a reliable academic source‘ [their italics]. As another contributor points out, there is much about Machiavelli which is controversial within academia, but there does seem to be a tendency in Wikiworld to seek external justification for what is said by reference to the supposedly impartial truth found in the writings of academics. It leaves little room to realise that even the driest historical monograph can hide bias, blindspots and mistakes behind its dour binding.

There is an added issue with Wikipedia which is worth mentioning: it is not one but several encyclopedias. It exists in all the major European languages, including Latin, but the text in each language can be separate from that in others. Sometimes, an article is simply translated but often that is not the case. This can create some oddities: the character Burckhardt celebrated as the archetypal Renaissance man, Leon Battista Alberti, has a stub of an entry in Latin with an external link — to his works in Italian; the corresponding Italian entry does not provide that link; and neither of these lead the reader to those Latin texts which are available on-line at the Biblioteca Italiana site. In other cases, if one only looked at the English entry, you would come away with only very limited information: for another humanist of the early quattrocento, Guarino da Verona, the most detailed articles are those in Italian and German. More generally, the rule for the reader should be that if you are interested in a subject, check the article in the range of languages listed in the left-hand bar of Wikipedia: even if you can not fully grasp the text, the links provided could lead you to more information than you could gain by only reading one version.

My own impression, having spent some time looking over a range of Renaissance articles on Wikipedia, is that the limitation most often is not as much inaccurate  as incomplete information. In the entries for Alberti, the English version has a list of works which is highly truncated — a reader would be in a dangerous land if they assumed that the article provided a sufficient base of knowledge. There may be a seemingly counter-intuitive principle in play: the more obscure a character, the more likely it is that the Wikipedia entry (if there is one) will present useful information. In some cases, of course, Wikipedia simply will not have any entry: I have recently sent off an article on an interesting humanist, Antonio Beccaria, who spent some years in England; he does not appear on the website. On the other hand, I have also written about the even less well-known Tito Livio Frulovisi, who does have a fairly good article — because (I admit it, gentle reader) I put it there. For the more recherché, if somebody has bothered to post an article, they are likely to have put some effort into doing it.

The inverse of this is that the better-known characters can not be as well served. So, Machiavelli himself has, in English, a long entry with a useful listing of his works. But the text makes some significant errors. For instance, looking at it this morning, I noticed it states that he considered The Prince his magnum opus. I can see how the contributor made this assumption — the famous letter to Vettori in which he describes his method of composition gives a sense of Machiavelli’s depth of engagement in the project at the time of writing — but it hardly fits with the fortunes of the text in his own lifetime: it circulated in manuscript, but, like the Discourses was only printed after his death. The only text that Machiavelli actively promoted himself by having it printed was one which we study much less nowadays, his Art of War. That work, and his History of Florence, hardly get a mention in this English Wikipedia article. A fuller treatment of his life, with some useful quotations, appears in Italian, though again attention is directed to a minority of his works.

If the guideline is, the bigger the name, the lower the value of the article, there’s another that can be added: names are better than things. Wikipedia is weaker talking about concepts than about characters. Take ‘civic humanism’, Hans Baron’s master-concept used to describe a tradition of Florentine republican justification: it does not appear in an article on its own, but instead the reader is re-directed to ‘classical republicanism’. This does not give much room to highlight the controversy which surrounds ‘civic humanism’. The wider concept of Renaissance humanism comes off even worse: the entry is hardly worth reading.

Yet, we should return to the comparison with print encyclopedias. Wikipedia’s sins are, in many ways, unoriginal: its weaknesses are the ones you could also find in most older encyclopedias. They too are often weakest on concepts, and least satisfying when they are talking about the most famous — and, so, most controversial — characters. What, of course, they often have lacked is the ability to develop. The future of reference works, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica knows, is on-line, where information can be added and corrected. A comparison between Britannica and Wikipedia suggests that, for our area, each has some advantages over the other: of the characters we have talked about, Machiavelli has a judicious article in Britannica, but most other humanists receive only a insubstantial summary. Even a significant figure like Leonardo Bruni is treated in this way, while Wikipedia gives more information (though it is, at present, skewed towards only a few of his works). In Britannica, the lesser humanists I mention are featured not at all. Where, of course, Wikipedia has a singular advantage is that it has the ability not just to be corrected: you can do the correcting.

So, if I should end by answering the question I set myself: of course we should not trust Wikipedia, just as we would not trust any other work or source. As historians, we trust nobody. But that does not mean we don’t use them and learn from them. The advice to students must be: read but read carefully. The advice to academics should be: if you don’t like something, change it. Admittedly, some entries might be beyond redemption but that is the case for a very few dealing poorly with concepts. Most are capable of improvement — and it is our job to do it. So, as I said, this morning the Machiavelli article talks erroneously of The Prince being his magnum opus. By this evening, I will make sure it does not anymore.

Which was the first Latin Life of Henry V?

I am about to upset the ghosts again. I have done so before when I described Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, as a book-lover but not a book-worm (a judgement I stand by, though I would express it with more subtlety now), or when I pointed out that Paul II, sometimes considered a humanist pope, in part because of his book-collecting, actually owed much of his library to the activities of one previous collector. On this occasion, the spirit who will be shaking his gory locks is far less distinguished than a royal or papal prince; it is the humanist, Tito Livio Frulovisi.

I have just seen the final set of proofs for an article coming out in the next issue of English Historical Review on Frulovisi’s most famous work, his Vita Henrici Quinti. Frulovisi – despite his resonant forenames — was hardly a great success in his own lifetime, but his Vita is remembered as the first posthumous biography of Henry V and, at a couple of removes, a source for Shakespeare’s play. The Vita was also, it is said, the source for another biography, called the Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, which was once thought to have been by Thomas of Elmham, and is now sometimes known as Ps-Elmham. Though this latter work was, like Frulovisi’s biography, edited and published by Thomas Hearne in the eighteenth century, it has not found much favour with historians: much longer than Frulovisi’s, it is considered simply more prolix, with little extra information, and in an overblown style which compares poorly to Frulovisi’s humanist Latin. Frulovisi, as secretary of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, is thought to have been, in effect, ghost-writing the war memoirs of Henry V’s youngest brother, which the Ps-Elmham did little more than copy.

What I argue – what I hope I demonstrate – in my article is that the Vita et Gesta is actually the earlier of the two works, and provides Frulovisi’s main source. There are several reasons to reverse the usual chronology — to return, indeed, to the chronology which many pre-twentieth-century scholars considered to be the case — and they include matters of both structure and style. I do not intend to repeat the arguments in detail here, but the stylistic argument is that Frulovisi was converting the florid Latin into humanist diction, but not always being successful. I give in the article two extracts to show how this worked; examples could be drawn from most pages of the works. I will give you another brief example which I do not mention in English Historical Review. It comes from early on in the biographies, and relates to the revolt of Owen Glendower:

Ps-Elmham, Vita et Gesta, p. 10	Frulovisi, Vita, p. 4
quousque totam Wallie rebellionem sua virtute penitus exstirpavit et ipsam patriam, cum universis incolis suis, eidem patri suo subjectam restituit	cum reliqua Wallia in deditionem patris reducta
excepto ipso Owanno, capitali rebelli, pre timore in loca deserta et latebrosas caveas, absque pugnancium fortitudine fugiente ibidemque vitam inhonorifice finiente	preter Owanum quendam Wallicorum caput, qui propter metum et conscientiam facinoris in deserta loca et antra sine comitibus fugatus vitam inhoneste finivit
eius filius et heres isti principi Henrico post in regem coronato serviens ei familiaris extitit domestico famulatu.	eius Owani Henrico postea regi famulatus est filius.
De hiis Wallie guerris, per multa annorum continuatis curricula, de obsidionibus, conflictibus, frequenti strage, discriminosis incomodis, fortuna et infortuniis, aliisque infinitis in eisdem contingentibus, idem expavescens calamus pauca ponit, quia ad veram et certam singulorum noticiam non pervenit.	Et hoc de Wallicis bellis satis, quorum ad certam quoque singulorum notitiam non devenerunt.

Frulovisi’s phrasing is, as ever, more succinct but it retains many of the terms used in the Vita et Gesta, even when they are of dubious usage (see the repetition of famulatus, which the Vita et Gesta uses as a noun in the non-classical sense of ‘household’ while Frulovisi attempts to make it more classical by turning it into a past participle, but the verb from which it comes is of rare occurence in classical Latin). At other times, though, he strains to be different from that in the Vita et Gesta. Notice, for instance, that Ps-Elmham talks of Glendower hiding in gloomy caves — caveas — but Frulovisi, wanting to be different, uses antra, a term which is only to be found in poetry, not prose. My point is not that Frulovisi was a poor Latinist — humanist phrasing was in the making and mistakes were unavoidable — but that the verbal resonances are one sign that Frulovisi copied from the Vita et Gesta, rather than vice versa. The Vita et Gesta pays scant attention to the rules of classical phrasing — using guerra rather than bellum, say — and if it was following Frulovisi, it would have achieved the remarkable feat of stripping out all the humanist usages, and keeping those which were non-humanist. It makes more sense, I would contend, to see Frulovisi trying, and sometimes failing, to render the Vita et Gesta into ‘better’ Latin.

The best way to demonstrate the range of reasons why we should take Frulovisi’s work to be derivative of the much-derided Ps-Elmham would be to have a modern edition made of the work (there has not been one since the efforts of the redoutable Thomas Hearne in the early eighteenth century). If my article spurs renewed interest in the Vita et Gesta, that would be an achievement. But, you might ask, does it matter? Does the relative dating have any significance? The answer is yes, because, as I point out briefly in my article, it changes our view of the connexions between the different chronicles of the fifteenth century, and can also give us pause to reflect on the nature of political culture in the 1430s, when both these texts were written. It also raises a question mark over the usual perception of Humfrey as an engaged patron, supposedly directing ‘his’ scholars — an attitude which belittles those scholars’ own efforts, however unoriginal their works might have been. That is an issue which I will certainly be discussing again.

UPDATE: the article is now published and if you go to the page listing my publications, there is a free link to it on the Oxford University Press website.