Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge Libraries

A catalogue of Western manuscripts and papyri at Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum and selected Cambridge colleges

Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 293

Diktyon no.: Diktyon 11891

Contents

Introduction: This manuscript, copied in England and completed in 1632, is the second part of a four-volume copy of the Panoplia Dogmatike of Niketas Choniates. The author was a high official of the Byzantine government in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, best known for his history of his own time, which includes the principal Byzantine account of the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Following this disaster, Choniates took refuge in Nicaea, seat of an emerging Byzantine government in exile, but failed to regain steady employment in imperial service. It was there that he completed this text, a vast theological compilation, which includes allusions to the straitened circumstances in which he now lived. The main purpose of the work was the refutation of heresies and other religions, including paganism, Judaism, Islam, and non-Orthodox strands of Christianity from antiquity to the present. Among these is the western, Catholic Church, whose emerging schism with the Orthodox Church had both contributed to and been inflamed by the outcome of the Fourth Crusade. Drawing heavily on existing texts, the work's most original sections concern various theological controversies that had occurred within 12th-century Byzantium. The early chapters were closely based on the similar work of the monk Euthymios Zigabenos, composed a century earlier. This copy was produced by the clergyman Thomas Bayly or Bailey, as part of his project to produce an edition and Latin translation of the text. The first five of its 27 books had previously been translated into Latin by Pierre Moreau, but it otherwise remained unavailable in print. Bayly's undertaking was never completed, but extensive evidence of his approach is present in his marginal annotations to the four volumes and a variety of associated papers which have been preserved alongside them. Although presently bound in four volumes, and referred to as such in Bayly's papers, the original pagination of the manuscripts is in two sequences, one covering the first and second volumes and the other the third and fourth. This suggests that they had perhaps been produced as a two-volume set originally but soon rebound as four when this proved unwieldy. Besides Moreau's publication, Bayly's only access to the work of Choniates itself was the single Bodleian Library manuscript which served as the exemplar for this copy, but he aimed to improve and expand upon the text by collating it with the texts of works on which Choniates had drawn. These included works of the Fathers of the Church which Bayly consulted through their printed editions, and the work of Euthymios Zigabenos, consulted via a manuscript copy in Trinity College, Cambridge. The four volumes are extensively annotated with proposed emendations from these sources, and Bayly also envisaged incorporating additional passages from Zigabenos which Choniates had omitted in his adaptation of the earlier work. Copies of some of these passages survive among the associated papers, along with notes regarding the planned translation and other texts which may have been intended to supplement the edition. There are also two sections of Latin translation, one a brief excerpt, while the other, longer section comprises the early part of Book 6 of the text. Since Moreau's translation had extended to the end of Book 5, this presumably represents the beginning of Bayly's main work of translation, and may well be as far as he ever got with the task. Like Choniates, Bayly's life was afflicted by warfare infused with religious controversy. A committed Royalist with Catholic sympathies, during the English Civil War he served in the defence of Raglan Castle in 1646, despite his clerical vocation. He also published tracts regarding the king's religious opinions and discussions with his own patron, the Catholic Henry Somerset, Marquess of Worcester, which had occurred while all three men were at Raglan. It was perhaps due to unemployment after the surrender of Raglan and Worcester's imprisonment that in December 1646 Bayly sold his manuscripts of Choniates to the London bookseller Cornelius Bee. However, in March 1647 he was able to retrieve two of the four volumes, along with a number of printed books. The circumstances are unclear, but evidently the four were subsequently reunited. Bayly was briefly imprisoned in 1649 after publishing writings in defence of the recently executed king and against the new regime of the Commonwealth, and subsequently left the country, converting openly to Catholicism. The manuscripts presumably remained in England, where they were acquired by another clergyman, Richard Drake, who donated them to Pembroke College in 1663. Dr Christopher Wright

History

Origin: The manuscript was copied by the clergyman Thomas Bayly (d. 1657) . The four-volume set to which it belongs was completed in 1632, as indicated by the colophon of MS 295, f. 136r.

Provenance and Acquisition

Bought along with the other volumes from Bayly by the London bookseller Cornelius Bee (1636-1672) , 8 December 1646, as indicated by a note on the cover of MS 294.

Two of the four volumes, along with a number of printed books, were retrieved by Thomas Bayly on 11 March 1647.

Donated 24 June 1663 by Richard Drake (1609-1681) , as recorded in the Book of Benefactors (MS LC II.77, f. 90r).

Part 1 [Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 293, ff. i, 1-5, 7-156]

Contents

Language(s): Greek

1. f. i recto
Contents list

Includes Books 5-11

f. i verso is blank.

2. ff. 1r-5v, 7r-156v
Choniates, Nicetas, approximately 1140-1213, Πανοπλία Δογματική Panoplia Dogmatike Thesaurus Orthodoxae Fidei

Books 5-11

Filiation: The manuscript was copied from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Roe 22 . It was omitted from those consulted by J. L. Van Dieten, Zur Überlieferung und Veröffentlichung der Panoplia Dogmatike des Niketas Choniates (Amsterdam, 1970).
Incipit: f. 1r Ἐκ τούτου, διήγησις τοῦ κατὰ Ἄρειον, Άρτιον[sic], καὶ Ευνόμιον[sic]
Explicit: f. 156v μετὰ δὲ τὴν ἀνάστασιν ἄφθαρτον ἐγένετο καὶ κατὰ τοῦτο τὸ σημαινόμενον
Final rubric: f. 156v Τομου[sic] δωδεκαιδεκάτου[sic] τέλος

TLG 3094.006 (extract)

PG 139, coll. 1093-1444; PG 140, coll. 9-284

f. 157r is blank; f. 157v is blank apart from a note in Latin.

3. f. 6r
Cyril, Saint, Patriarch of Alexandria, approximately 370-444, Thesaurus de sancta consubstantiali trinitate

Excerpt: PG 75, col. 372, lines 21-28

Rubric: f. 6r Ex Euthymio τοῦ ἁγίου Κυρίλλου
Incipit: f. 6r Εἰ πάντα ὁ Πατὴρ δια[sic] τοῦ Υἱοῦ ἐργάζεται
Explicit: f. 6r καὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπῳ πρέποντα φρονεῖν τοῦ αυτοῦ[sic]

TLG 4090:109

PG 75, coll. 9-656

f. 6r is blank apart from this brief excerpt, which is marked for insertion into the facing text on f. 5v; f. 6v is blank.

Physical Description

Form: codex
Support: Western paper, folded in folio. Watermark: Bird ( 54 × 52 mm. ) in the centre of the folio, similar to Heawood 174. This example is dated to 1628.
Extent: Codex: 1 + 157 leaves. 399 × 265 mm.
Foliation: The manuscript is foliated with the numbers i + 1-157 in pencil, in Arabic and Roman numerals, recto, upper right.
Foliation: ff. 1r-5v, 7r-156v are paginated with the numbers 293-602 in brown ink, in Arabic numerals, recto, upper right, original to the production of the manuscript. This is part of a single pagination sequence for the first two volumes of the work, this manuscript and MS 292.

Collation

The manuscript consists of 28 quires, of which one is a quinion, two are quaternia, three are binia, two are single bifolios and the rest are ternia.

  • Quire 12 ff. 1-2
  • Quire 210-2 ff. 3-10 The last two folios have been cancelled, without loss of text.
  • Quire 34 ff. 11-14
  • Quire 46-1 ff. 15-19 The first folio has been cancelled, without loss of text.
  • Quires 5-96 ff. 20-49
  • Quire 108-2 ff. 50-55 The first and seventh folios have been cancelled, without loss of text.
  • Quire 116 ff. 56-61
  • Quire 122 ff. 62-63
  • Quire 134 ff. 64-67
  • Quires 14-236 ff. 68-127
  • Quire 244 ff. 128-131
  • Quires 25-276 ff. 132-149
  • Quire 288 ff. 150-157

Catchwords appear on every page.

Condition

There is a small hole in f. 2 and a minor tear from the edge of f. 3. The deckle edges are brittle and there is some creasing. There is slight water staining and some areas of dirt. The loose inserted leaf is affected by iron-gall corrosion.

Layout

A single column of 29 lines. 291 × 160 mm.

Hand(s)

The manuscript was copied by Thomas Bayly in a calligraphic mixed minuscule script, slanting to the right, in brown ink, with moderate variation in letter size. There are deletions by expunctuation and strikethrough.

Syllabic abbreviations appear throughout the line. Breathings are round and mute iota is subscript, often appearing as a dot rather than a line. Use of the double dot is functional only, while nomina sacra are uncontracted. Accents are sometimes joined to letters and abbreviations. Marginal quotation marks are in use.

The modern eta, modern nu, sigma telikon and loop epsilon are present, and there are inclusions of letters within omicron.

Punctuation used includes the middle and upper points, lower and middle commas, question mark and full stop.

Decoration

Some headings, sections and proper nouns begin with slightly enlarged initials in modern capital letters.

Additions

There are numerous marginal annotations in Greek and Latin by the copyist. These include collations of variant readings in the text's patristic citations with printed editions and with the text of Euthymios Zigabenos (c. 1050-c. 1118) , Panoplia dogmatica ad Alexium Comnenum (TLG 3038.001; PG 130, coll. 20-1360) in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.8.9. There are also Greek and Latin annotations by other hands.

Binding

Bound in a 17th-century limp vellum binding. Four leather straps have been inserted through holes in the cover for fastening, of which one survives in part while only stumps of the other three remain. The classmark and the title ‘Niceta Panoplia, vol. 2’ are written in ink on the spine. The present classmark and the former classmarks 622 and 4.11.13 are written inside the left cover.

410 × 282 × 45 mm.

Both inner joints are partially split.

Accompanying Material

A bookplate reading ‘Ex dono Ricardi Drake S.T.P. Coll. Soc. 1630’ is pasted inside the left cover. A Pembroke College bookplate dated 1700 is pasted to f. i verso.

Part 2 [Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 293, ff. [a]-[b]]

Contents

Language(s): Latin

4. ff. [b] recto-[b], [a] recto verso

This text is written on a folded sheet of paper inserted loose between ff. 51 and 52. It has been folded the wrong way, so that the text begins on the second page and continues onto the first

Choniates, Nicetas, approximately 1140-1213, Thesaurus Orthodoxae Fidei

This is a Latin translation of the content of f. 50r, line 17-f. 52r, line 11

Rubric: f. [b] recto Eiusdem, ex scriptis eius de eodem argumento
Incipit: f. [b] recto Quae ab illis obiiciant, sunt huius modi
Explicit: [a] recto sed ostendens vocis frequenter mittere significationem suam alternare

f. [a] verso is blank.

Physical Description

Form: sheet
Support: Western paper. Watermark: Pot ( 67 × 28 mm. ) in the centre of the folio.
Extent: Sheet 2 leaves. 302 × 200 mm.

Layout

A single column of 44-46 lines. 271-283 × 140-160 mm.

Hand(s)

Copied by Thomas Bayly.

Additions

The copyist has marked the number 391 at the beginning of the text, indicating the page of the manuscript where the passage translated here begins, and added marginal citations of sources and other notes in Greek and Latin.

History

Origin: This sheet was probably written around the time of the production of the four volumes containing the main text.

Additional Information

Availability

Researchers should note that Pembroke College's western European medieval manuscripts are housed at Cambridge University Library. Scholars who wish to consult Pembroke College manuscripts should contact the Special Collections Reading Room to arrange their visit; all University Library admissions procedures will apply. For information on eligibility and admissions procedures, see Joining the Library. For further enquiries, and to confirm the availability of the manuscript, please contact the Special Collections Reading Room.

Bibliography

    A descriptive catalogue of the manuscripts in the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, James, M.R. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1905)

Funding of Cataloguing

The Polonsky Foundation

Digital Images

Cambridge Digital Library

Abbreviations

View list of abbreviations and editorial conventions.

Study at Cambridge

About the University

Research at Cambridge