Today a Bob Dole Kind of Day
I was absolutely worthless today - I couldn't help it. Unable to focus. Still got some things done, as I always manage to do, but everything was a struggle. Like Bob Dole, I just couldn't rise to the occasion. At times like this I attempt to find redemption in my blog, as I am not pleased with my performance elsewhere. I should just go to bed.
The Medieval Literary Masterwork You're Not Reading - Because You Can't
A lot of times I run into things that are interesting in the course of looking up other stuff. Such is the case with Patristic author Petrus Comester (ca. 1100 - 1178) whose name literally means "Peter the Eater", a reference not to a ravenous culinary appetite but to his facility for devouring books. He was born in Troyes, studied under Petrus Lombardus and ultimately became Dean of the Cathedral in Troyes, and in his last years, Chancellor of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. Between 1169 and 1173 Petrus wrote a 20-volume work called "Historia Scholastica" (literally "Scholastic History" but in its time largely taken to mean "Scholastic Stories".) This was a paraphrase of Holy Bible from Genesis to the Book of Acts, broken down into short chapters, interpolated with fables, illustrated and rewritten into a popular vernacular that was easy for the ordinary Joe of the Medieval world to grasp.
How well did it do? Well, for the next four centuries the "Historia Scholastica" was better known to the average Medieval citizen than the Holy Bible itself; Dante Alghieri felt that it was equally important. Every sizeable collection of Medieval manuscripts has a copy of all or part of it - more than 800 copies of the book in manuscript are documented as extant. That means that the "Historia Scholastica" is sort of like the Medieval eqivalent of paperback copies of "Jaws". It's everywhere.
And yet it's nowhere - at least to the modern reader. It has never been translated into English, and the last time it was published at all was in Jean-Paul Migne's massive 221-volume collection of all the writings of the Latin Patristic fathers dating from 200 through 1219 CE which appeared in Paris between 1844 and 1855. That was not the case in the early days of movable type, when many editions of the "Historia Scholastica" were put into print.
This is part of the problem: the earliest printed editions of the "Historia Scholastica" appeared in Germany, the first coming out in Augsburg in 1473. Petrus Comester added a lot of color commentary to the "Historia Scholastica" and didn't stick strictly to what's in the Bible - frankly, paraphrases of this kind seldom do. One point where Comester departed from his source was that he introduced speculative material about the lost tribes of Isreal, and how someday they would come back and attempt to put an end to Christianity for purposes of revenge. The German printers, in their translation of Petrus, expanded upon this concept and identified these imaginary Jews as "The Red Jews", a secret society bent on bringing Christianity to its knees, and therefore, precipitating the end of humankind.
Many Medieval scholars (and publishers of Classic Literature) are Jewish, and I can't say that I blame them for being aware of this literary work, and yet, not being excited about the prospect of reintroducing the "Historia Scholastica" to a public that seems ill-equipped to grasp the true significance of non-canonical sacred texts in general - witness the recent spate of silliness attending to a work of fiction, "The Da Vinci Code". But the German edition of Petrus goes to the very roots of European anti-semitism, and I'd certainly rather study it than a totally fraudulent book such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", purported to be an ancient text but actually written in Russia in 1906. And besides, the original Latin version of the "Historia Scholastica"
is canonical; a central work of an important early church father that was known to everyone who could read in the Medieval world.
I'm not asking for a comprehensive edition of the whole enchilada, anymore than we would commonly refer to a complete publication of the "Confessions" of St. Augustine or Jean-Jacques Rousseau if we're just looking for a taste. A compliation of the most salient passages will do, for now. If one is really desperate to know it, I guess you could cough up the $16,500 one auction house is currently asking for a 1500 vintage print of the original. For that kind of money you could pay a team of scholars to translate the "Historia Scholastica" and almost have enough left over to publish it.
To be fair, there was a Swedish scholar named Agneta Sylwan, once attached to Gothenberg University, who collected a sizeable research grant to prepare a critical edition of the "Historia Scholastica". The grant was awarded in 1994, but nothing has yet surfaced of her edition. Also, as footnote, in addition to the "Historia Scholastica" the extant output of Petrus Comester includes two or three other large evangelistic works, a book of glosses on sayings of Petrus Lombardus, around 200 sermons in various places, twelve unspecified manuscripts in the library of Notre Dame Cathedral and some verse. None of this has been published, except some sermons which were printed in Migne under the names of wrongly attributed authors (a common problem in Migne). Finally, the jury is still out if an intriguingly titled book of Petrus Comester's maxims, "Liber Pancrisis", is still extant.
Thanks for making it this far with me.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com