Titulus: Identifying Medieval Latin Texts. An Evidence-Based Approach (Brepols Essays in European Culture)

Modern perceptions of texts are often not related to the way in which medieval readers understood them - conventional titles, for example, are often those supplied by early modern editors rather than by the manuscript tradition. This essay on the fundamental principles of medieval bibliography argues that the tituli and colophons accompanying a text in manuscript should be treated as evidence for the text's bibliographical data and therefore recorded in descriptive catalogues of manuscripts and in bibliographical repertories of texts. The value of medieval library catalogues in showing medieval bibliographical perceptions is illustrated. Bibliographical co-ordinates of author, title, and incipit are discussed in some detail, and the historical accumulation of bibliographical tradition is examined. Reference books intended to assist manuscript cataloguers and students of medieval Latin texts are subjected to criticism; an annotated handlist of such books is included. Many texts in the middle ages were ascribed to various writers, and the habits of titling were far from constant, but the evidence of the manuscripts provides a better basis for understanding the changing perception of texts than has been recognized in the reference literature. Two extended examples demonstrate, on the one hand, a text consistently ascribed in the manuscripts but much misattributed by modern scholars and, on the other, one whose authorship and title were the subject of much medieval alteration but can none the less still be recovered from the tituli.Richard Sharpe is Professor at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College.