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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS

IN

CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY

Vol. 5, No. 8, pp. 135-141, plates 1-11 October 13, 1920




THE SUPPOSED AUTOGRAPHA OF JOHN THE SCOT

BY

EDWARD KENNARD RAND

{Transcriber's Note: ^ and {} around a number or letter signifies
a superscript.]


In the fifth part of Ludwig Traube's _Palaeographische Forschungen_,
(which I had the honor of publishing after that great scholar's
death)[1] evidence was presented for Traube's apparently certain
discovery of the very handwriting of John the Scot. In manuscripts of
Reims, of Laon, and of Bamberg, he had observed certain marginal notes
which were neither omitted sections nor glosses, but rather the author's
own amplifications and embellishments of his work. Johannes had made
such additions to his _De Divisione Naturae_ in the Reims manuscript,
and they all appear in that of Bamberg. In the latter manuscript there
are fresh additions--or enlargements as I shall call them in the present
paper--which have similarly been absorbed into the text in two
manuscripts now in Paris. We thus have, in an interesting series, the
author's successive recensions of his work. One of the shorter forms is
the basis of the text published by Thomas Gale in 1681; the most
complete form was edited by H. J. Floss in 1852 from the Paris
manuscripts.[2] Though not venturing to carry out Traube's elaborate
plans for treatment of the subject, I attempted to corroborate his
belief that the notes were in the hand of Johannes. The evidence seemed
conclusive to me at the time, and was not questioned, so far as I know,
in any subsequent publication. In the summers of 1912 and 1913, however,
I examined the manuscripts of John the Scot in Paris, in Reims, in Laon,
and in Bamberg, and became convinced, most reluctantly, that his
autograph is yet to be found. I here present the chain of facts that
make this conclusion inevitable.[3]

Let us start with the hypothesis that the marginal notes discovered by
Traube are in the hand of Johannes himself and let us support this
hypothesis until it becomes too heavy to bear. Our first document is the
Reims Manuscript 875 (= _R_) of the _De Divisione Naturae_. This is the
work of some six or seven writers, whose hands are sometimes hard to
tell apart. Though it is the briefest and hence the earliest form of the
text that I have found, it is not the original draft of the work. The
scribes could not have taken it from the author's dictation, for they
commit errors of various sorts that presuppose the existence of a text
that they were copying.[4] This text, which is as near to the original
as our present information permits us to come, I will call _O_.

Besides making corrections and additions in their copy of _O_, the
scribes also insert marginal notes that have all the characteristics of
the author's own amplifications of his work. This fact does not militate
against our present hypothesis, if we assume that Johannes added these
marginalia, or caused them to be added, in _O_, and that the scribes of
_R_, at first forgetting to include them in the text of their new copy,
later wrote them in the margin.[5] In some cases, as we might expect, a
different ink is used. The insular hand (= _I_), which we are assuming
to be that of Johannes, corrects minor errors in these enlargements now
and then.[6] This fact is entirely in accord with our hypothesis.

A number of enlargements omitted by the writers of the text were
supplied not by them but by special correctors, who were assigned, it
would seem, considerable portions of the manuscript to revise.
Particularly important among these wide-ranging correctors are two hands
that I will call _r^{1}_ and _r^{2}_. The former is a largish hand with
some slight traces of Insular habits.[7] _r^{2}_ is very similar, and
indeed may be merely a smaller variety of _r^{1}_. In the specimen that
I have reproduced, as is true of both _r^{1}_ and _r^{2}_ elsewhere,
correction by _I_ may be observed.[8] In all, I detected, or thought I
detected, five or six correcting hands, which sometimes supplement
stretches of text written by others, sometimes supplement their own
text, and, in all the cases under discussion, add notes of the author
which were evidently in the margin of _O_. It is sometimes hard to be
sure whether _r_ is the text-hand or not. The point is not vitally
important