Patterns in the transmission of cultural texts: the case of medieval miscellany manuscripts

David J Birnbaum, Chair, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh

Digital Humanities Seminar, University of Kansas--Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities & Hall Center for the Humanities, March 6, 2012

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Medieval Slavic miscellanies are a type of free-form encyclopedia, compilations of texts of various genres from various sources. Compilation in medieval literary culture was as much a creative act as the authoring of entirely new texts, and the producers of new manuscripts were free to draw on all available sources, creating compilations whose originality was not constrained by any attempt to reproduce earlier compilations literally or faithfully. The variation that occurs in miscellany manuscripts is nonetheless surprisingly constrained; it is almost unheard of for two miscellanies to correspond perfectly in their contents, but there are nonetheless frequent partial correspondences that cannot be explained by genre, subject matter, or any other organizing principle, and that are inconsistent with a hypothesis that scribes compiled manuscripts without explicit constraint--even if that is what they thought they were doing. This presentation describes some of the patterns of agreement that emerge from comparing the structure of miscellany manuscripts, leading to a conclusion that despite the scribe's complete freedom to choose his texts, the contents of miscellany manuscripts were nonetheless severely constrained by the tradition, and in specific ways.