Manuscript Exercise 2

Livy: Hannibal and the Second Punic War

Building on the first manuscript exercise we did earlier this semester, today, we will continue to hone our skills as palaeographers and, by actually trying our hand at copying some text, will experience firsthand some of the challenges medieval copyists faced every day. How accurate would you want your transcription to be if you knew that it would be the only text of Livy to survive for future generations?

For this exercise we will be looking at Codex Parisinus Latinus 5731, a 10th c. manuscript written in Carolingian minuscule now housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

Line drawing of Hannibal, in C. F. Horne, Great Men and Famous Women, 1894, p. 14.

Instructions

• Login to bit.ly/lat203-omeka-f18 and in the “Collections”-tab select the “Annotate” link under your name. This opens a viewer with a palette of annotation tools in the top-left corner.

• You are now looking at the verso of folio 1 of Par. Lat. 5731. Zoom in and have a closer look at the beautiful script. Your first task is to find on this page the beginning of the passage we read in class in Wheelock's Latin Reader, p. 165: Missus Hannibal in Hispaniam … Mark the spot with a red annotation pin.

• Next, mark with blue rectangles three instances each of the following features and leave a note in the textbox explaining what you identified:

  • the letter s

  • the letter n (look for different types!)

  • ligatures

ligature: Two or more letters joined in such a way that the original forms of both letters have been altered in making the combined form.

Marking letters with blue rectanbles.

• Now, without looking at your textbook locate and highlight the chunk of text Missus … lineamenta using a green polygon and transcribe it as accurately as possible (including line-breaks!) into the textbox.

Adding a green polygon to a chunk of text.

• Finally, look at the text in your textbook and compare it with your transcription. Mark any differences with yellow circles and comment on them in the textbox. Is the mistake yours or do the textbook and manuscript truly differ?

Using yellow circles to indicate differences between the manuscript and our textbook.

• If you finish the above tasks, go ahead and highlight another chunk of text with a green polygon and transcribe it into the textbox!