A peek behind the curtain
Among the Kuttner Institute materials recently deposited here are two pieces indicative of the work the Institute continues to support – creating editions of Medieval Canon Law.
The first picture, a page from a notebook used by Stephan Kuttner, shows his notes on variant readings found in texts of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and they occupy the top half of the page. The bottom half has his thoughts regarding which of the texts he consulted served as the source for the other texts, visually expressed by the tree in the bottom right corner of the page.
This second picture demonstrates another method of tracking variant readings. A scholar working on Pseudo-Isidore used sheets of graph paper (taped together to form pages of over three-and-a-half feet in length) to list changes between manuscripts line by line. Painstaking labor with a rather cumbersome physical result, but still a good way to see copy errors and textual corruption at work.
- ANNA FRANZ, Rare Book Fellow
