MEDIEVAL  MANUSCRIPTS

AND  THE   MODERN   DATABASE:

Mirabile Dictu
 

Consuelo W. Dutschke
 

11
 

^his paper recounts an episode
that began as does all research: an
impetus, questions, search. The
impetus was provided by a single leaf of a medieval manuscript that I bought
a year ago. The questions are those that arise almost naturally in looking at
such a fragment: What does it say? How old is it?

I use this small leaf as a stand-in for vast numbers of surviving medieval
manuscripts, our single greatest legacy from the pre-print era and the key
factor in the intellectual continuum from andquity through to the sixteenth
century, when manuscripts' contents were transferred to printed form. It is
important to recognize the double aspect of medieval manuscripts: had
there been no physical survival, there could have been no intellectual
survival, ('onversely, without a text there is no manuscript. Thus, identifica¬
tion of a manuscript's text is the answer to the first question, placing value
on the intellectual content. To discover a manuscript's place and date of
origin is to answer the second question in a response that privileges the
physical over the textual aspect. Without precise answers to questions of
textual identity and textual circulation, we can only guess at the steps that
lead us from the thinking of earlier times to our present condidon.

When I first acquired this leaf, I paid a visit to the Electronic Text
Service (ETS) in Butler Library and obtained the answer to my first question
with remarkable ease. I began by isoladng a string of several words, "quia
operta est"; then, using the CLCLT: CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts
on CD-ROM (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1991-), I searched the chosen
words. The reward was the textual identity of this fragment: Gregory I,
Homilies on Ezechiel, Book 2, homily 5. Seven years ago we could not have