First, I would like to say a few words about Croatia, as the setting, and about Marko Marulić, as the leading character of the story. Then I will tell you about one of Marulić's works which I think is worth editing again, and why I think so.
Now, Croatia is a small country across the Adriatic from Italy. Part of Croatian seaside is Dalmatia, and Split is one of two main Dalmatian cities, the other one being Dubrovnik. There, in Split, Marko Marulić was born in the year 1450. At that time Split, as most of Dalmatia, was for some thirty years under the rule of Venice. This rule brought Dalmatian cities certain prosperity; the cities were able to offer their sons humanist education, hiring fine teachers, often Italian. Consequently, Croatian Humanism has begun already around 1420--30. The full development of this humanism is represented, among others, by Marko Marulić. In 1501 he composed the Judita (Judith), a retelling of a biblical story in six cantos. Judita, published in 1521, is the first epic in Croatian language; it brought Marulić the title of the founding father of Croatian literature. Marulić himself was well aware of the fact that he is beginning something; in a letter from 1501 (discovered in 1991), he reported to a friend: "Fatto ho una opereta in lengua nostra materna, per rima, distinta in sie libri (...) Composta e more poetico, venite et vedetila, direte che ancora la lengua schiaua ha el suo Dante". - "I have written an opuscule in verse, in our mother tongue (...) Come and see it; you will say that the Slavic language has its own Dante".
During the Renaissance centuries two of Marulić's Latin works, on Christian morals and Christian life, became European, even international successes. One is the De institutione bene uiuendi per exempla sanctorum (Instruction on How to Lead a Virtuous Life Based on the Examples of Saints), printed in Venice in 1507, to be republished at least 15 times in Latin, and translated into Italian, German, Portuguese, French, Czech. The other is the Euangelistarium, first published in 1516, a collection of ethical teachings organised around the Gospels, also with 15 Latin editions and numerous translations.
As you can see, in Croatia Marko Marulić is a very important author: the first Croatian classic. Therefore, everything he wrote should be interesting to us. This would extend to his personal documents, perhaps even to the notorious level of Waschzettel of Goethe and Schiller. But for one text by Marulić --- a text which survives in an autograph codex of over 800 pages --- it was explicitly not so.
Existence of this text, the Repertorium, in a library in Rome was signalled to the scholarly community in 1923. And yet the lucky discoverer, the Croatian historian Ferdo Šišić, immediately decided that "it would be absolutely pointless to publish" Marulić's text. This pronouncement seems to have been universally accepted for 75 years, because this is how long literally nothing happened regarding the Repertorium. Its editio princeps appeared only in 1998, published by late Branimir Glavičić as the fourteenth volume of Marulić's Opera omnia.
What could have been the reasons for such a lack of interest?
Ferdo Šišić, who saw no point in publishing the Repertorium, was himself not a textual scholar. His field were early Croatian history and historiography. But Croatian literary historians and scholarly editors have themselves shown little curiosity for the Repertorium --- for next 75 years very few of them have taken even a look at the manuscript.
I see two, or three, probable motives for such scholarly indifference. First, the Repertorium is not an autonomous text, not an original literary work (Šišić described it as "a collection of quotations from various authors"). Secondly, the Repertorium is not in Croatian, it is in Latin. Thirdly, it has to do mainly with religion and morals. Finally, with over 800 manuscript pages, it is quite huge.
The Repertorium is actually one of Marulić's commonplace books. This means that the quotations Marulić selected, from forty carefully chosen Latin and Greek authors, are in the MS gathered together under headings. The headings are listed more or less alphabetically, but separately for each book Marulić excerpted --- first come all A's from Pliny, then all A's from Strabo, and so on. Each note is followed by a reference to page (or chapter, or canto) where it is culled from. The notes are rarely literal quotes; they are mainly paraphrases and summaries. An analysis of publishing dates of excerpted books and of changes in Marulić's handwriting shows that Marulić worked on the Repertorium steadily over forty years, from 1480's to 1520's, from his thirties to his seventies.
The Repertorium is a text that rises from other texts and points again towards them. Therefore it promises an insight into the books Marulić read, into their passages he found important, into the ways he reshaped them. Headings and quotations of the Repertorium could constitute a sort of topic map, a grid by which Marulić's mind and thought are structured. The visual and material aspects of autograph codex, on the other hand, while fascinating in themselves, testify how Marulić's handwriting (and in some cases orthography) changed over the years, offering an important point of reference to philologists interested in Marulić's chronology.
But to study and research all this --- other texts, development of Marulić's ideas, material changes in the codex --- we need to access the Repertorium through a suitable edition. This is a challenge.
Unfortunately, this challenge was not met by the 1998 editio princeps. The editor chose not to treat the Repertorium as a dependent text, a document pointing to other texts. The passages Marulić cited were not identified. There was not even a list of titles and editions of the books which Marulić excerpted. Much interest of the editor was directed at recording Marulić's spelling and abbreviations, but even here the edition did not provide support for systematic study of such features, for there are no word lists or lists of variants. Finally, the edition did not register any changes in handwriting.
There is no need to criticize further; I only wanted to point out how much the editor was hampered by the medium he was working in, and thinking in --- by the scholarly edition as a printed book --- and how, against the grain of the work itself, its author was still understood and presented as a solitary genius.
To really study the handwriting changes in the Repertorium, you certainly need a facsimile of the manuscript. To really understand the relationship of quotations to their sources, you need access to the source texts themselves. To study the development and structuring of Marulić's thought, you need to rearrange the Repertorium, and to rearrange it many times if necessary. Also, you need the means to follow themes and keywords of the Repertorium through other Marulić's works.
None of this can be done in a printed book. But in a digital edition it might be feasible.
Let me demonstrate how this can be done. Here is a short example. We start with a quotation from St Jerome's Letters, which Marulić listed under "auaritia", referring to page 210 of the first volume of his 1480 Parma edition. All this information can be encoded in TEI XML. The page reference becomes a pointer to the actual page (that is, to the page image) from Marulić's copy of Jerome's book (both volumes survive, and today they are held by the Dominican monastery in Split). When we come to the page 210 verso of this volume, we find not only Jerome's text, formulated a little bit differently --- "qui amat pecuniam deum amare non posse" --- but also Marulić's marginal notes, in drawing and in writing. Note how handwriting and the ink in the margins look different from those in the Repertorium!
Moreover, if we search for the combination of strings pecun- and deu- in Marulić's Latin works which are now in the Croatiae auctores Latini collection (just one work is currently lacking), we will find similar occurrences in three Marulić's original texts: the Vita diui Hieronymi (1507), the Euangelistarium (first published 1516), and the De humilitate et gloria Christi (first published 1519). The connections are here, ready to be interpreted.
At least two more strands of research can be followed from an XML edition of the Repertorium. We could study reoccurrences --- not only of words, but of whole quotations which return under different headings. Also, we could easily, automatically, and systematically reorganize the text (using the XSL transformations) to reorder Marulić's notes by the reference numbers of their original sources. Here some surprises could be expected. If, for example, we select all notes from Hyginus --- whose Poeticon astronomicon Marulić probably obtained from the Venetian publisher Melchiore Sessa, who published Marulić's own Euangelistarium --- we notice that the reference numbers go only from 1 to 6. They are obviously not page numbers.
To conclude. The Repertorium is a text from another time and another mindset. It is also a dependent text. Therefore, it can not be fully understood separated from the library whose image it is, without the books from which the notes were culled. So, to make the Repertorium worth editing --- which means, for us, worth studying --- we should present it in a way which brings together Marulić's loci communes and the pages from which he selected them. Furthermore, the Repertorium is not a text for continuous reading. It is an information retrieval device, and because of that it lends itself easily to digital manipulation --- to rearrangements and fragmenting --- and to digital medium, which can connect the visual and the verbal, a single work and its many intertexts. Discontinuous nature of the text implies also that we can experiment with piecemeal editing --- at first we could present in full encoding, with all pointers, not the whole thing but only the parts we are currently interested in (this is similar to the way Marulić himself compiled the Repertorium). Finally, a digital edition in cyberspace seems to me to be limited today much less by printing costs and physical constraints than by scholarly resources. Ultimately, the edition will depend on its editor's time and patience, attention and devotion, engagement and imagination.
Date: 2010/11/22 15:54:23