VULGATE-
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879
Frnnce a whole congeries of corrupt readings from Spain. The best specimen of his revision is the exquisite Bible at Paris numbered Lat. 93S0 in the Bibliotliique Nationale. Theodulf's worlv had a dillerent late from Alcuin's ; it was tlie private enterprise of a scholar, not a public work under- taken for public utility at the instance of a monarch : and so its influence on the history of the lext was (fortunately) slight, whereas Alcuin's was great.
The very favour and reputation which the Alcuiniau recension enjoj-ed, proved indeed the cause of its speedy degeneracy. The demand for Bibles containing it became so large that the resources of the great writing school at Tours must have been severely strained ; and the rapidity with which the MSS were copied and multiplied proved fatal to purity of text. They were trans- Bcribed hastily and from various exemplars, good and bad ; and the large imposing volumes of 'Caroline' Bibles, specimens of which are to be found in almost all our principal libraries, vary indefinitely, from a nearlj- pure Alcuinian text to one almost worthless.
Verj' soon therefore after Alcuin's time com- plaints of the corruption of the text meet us again, the old cry is re-echoed, ' tot exeniplaria pa-ne quot codices.' Yet effort after eflort was made to arrest the decay. Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, 1069-89, ia related by his biographer* to have worked at correcting all the books of the OT and NT, and also the writings of the Fathers, ' ad orthodoxam lidem'; and to have encouraged this study among his pupils : none of his corrected MSS, however, are known to survive. We are more fortunate in possessing the results of the labour of other critics. Stephen Harding, third abbot of Citeaux (about the middle of the 12th cent.), mtde a similar revision; and his correcteil Bible, in four volumes, is still preserved in the public lilirarj- at Dijon (MS No. Q""). He purged the text of a large number of interjiolations, partly by collatin<j' good Latin and Greek MSS, l)artly with the aid of some Jewish scliolars, whom he consulted as to the suspected passages in the OT ; it was in the books of Samuel and Kings that the ' major pars erroris iuveniebatur.' t His example was very soon followed hy the Cardinal Nicolaus Maniacoria, whose criticisms are preserved in a MS at Venice, t
With the latter part of the 12tli and the 13th cents., however, we are introduced to a new and more organized system of correction. The number of Bibles belonging to these centuries, especially the 13th, testifies to the very large scale on which they must liave been copied. §
Almost every library possesses some of these small manuscript Bibles, written in double columns on thin vellum, generally with wonderful regiilarity and beautj'. raris, according to Koger Bacon (Hody, p. 420 f.), was the city where the greatest business in the copying and selling of these Bibles was carried on, the theologians and booksellers com- bining to produce a regular and lixed type of text, which he calls the Exemplar Pariiiense ; the de- mand was large in consequence of the fame of the Paris University in the 13th cent., and the numbers of students who Hocked to it. The Exemplar Parisiense, however, being hastily and unscien- tifically prepared, furnished a degenerate type of
* Milo Crib-pinut, a monlc of Bcc ; see Migne, Pat, Lat. ol. pp. bb and 101 1
t See tIo<l> , ^. 418 ; van Ess, p. 162 f. ; Kaulen, p. 246 : and, for tbia section, a valuable article by Uenifle, * Die lldsa. d. Bibel- correctoricn des 18 Jahrh.,' in the Ardiio/. Literar. u. Kirchen- gucfi. drs M.A. Iv., Freiburg, 1S«8.
J Marciana, Lat. class, x. cod. \7ii, fol. 141 ; see Denlfle, p. 270.
( See KenyoD, The Bible and theAneimt JUSS, London, 1896, p. ISO.
text, and Bacon com|)lain3 bitterly of it.* Etforts were now made to emend it by societies of scholars, who united tlieir labours and researches in the Currectoria Bihlivrum, as they were called. Here the authority of Latin and Greek JISS was regis- tered in cases of doubtful reading, the testimony of Fatliers was quoted, even variants of punctuation were taken account of, and short critical notes were added stating which reading was to be pre- ferred.
The principal corrfctoria are (1) The Correctorittm Parisiense, prepared probably about a.d. Vl.'.i> by the Paris Tiieolo^ians : t lliis was in the course of the next twenty years adopted and enlarged by the Dominicans residing at Sens, and jios-ibly authorized by the bishop of that diocese ; and it is sonu-liniea culled the Correctoriiim Senonense in consequence (possibly to be found in the Paris .MS, IJ.N. 17). Rot,'er Bacon had a poor opinion of the Paris correrlors and their work ; whether Franciscans or Dominicans, he spe.iks of them with contempt ; the carelessness of the scribes at Paris was bad enough, but the ignorant ci irrectora made things worse ; ' quilibet lector in ordine minorum corrigit ut vult, et similiter apud prajdicatorcs, et eodem modo scolares (or seculares?), et quilibet mutat quod non intelligit."
(2) The Correctoriuin Sort/onicum, so called because it is pre- served in a Sorbonne MS, I varies little from the text of the Snwnense, and is a sort of collection of more important readings from the earlier correoforul.