Mommsen (1894) contains a two-and-a-half line description of the Great Stemma in a Latin preface to a critical edition of the Liber Genealogus. Describing the version in the Laurenziana in Florence, it reads:
cod. 54 f. 38-45 stemmata sacra ad Christum usque adiectis interdum adnotationibus, quarum prima haec est: Adam cum esset annorum CCXXX, genuit Seth: fiunt omnes vite sue DCCCCXXX ....[*]Mommsen, MGH,AA IX, 159
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) failed to notice the commonality between the Liber and the Great Stemma and copied none of its core text, merely abstracting part of the interpolated Legend of Gog and Magog and the first sentences of the Ordo Annorum Mundi which commences on the 16th page of the Florence manuscript, after the Great Stemma proper.[*]Mommsen's scribe seemingly made a few minor mistranscriptions: Assophargi for Anophargi, habominationes for abhominationes, rege for regem.
Neuss (1931) was the first publication examining the Great Stemma closely and to hypothesize that it was a document dating from the period before the Islamic invasion of Iberia which had been subsquently incorporated into both Spanish bibles and the Beatus manuscripts.
Wilhelm Neuss (1880-1965), who was obliged to work mainly from black and white photographs, collated the first two pages of the Stemma from half a dozen manuscripts. He correctly noted that the Stemma was a work apart, but missed the subtle ways in which material from Isidore of Seville and patristic authors had become attached to some recensions, particularly Beta:
Der Text der genealogischen Tabellen stimmt mit keiner der bisher veröffentlichten chronikalischen Übersichten, insbesondere auch nicht mit Isidors Chronicon, überein.[*]Neuss, Wilhelm. Die Apokalypse des Hl. Johannes in der altspanischen und altchristlichen Bibel-Illustration: das Problem der Beatus-Handschriften. Münster [Germany]: Aschendorf, 1931.
Drawing the first conclusions about the Stemma's origin, he based his argument mainly on artistic features of the decoration, not the text, and, like Mommsen, failed to detect the Stemma's points of commonality with the Liber Genealogus:
Beachtet man den früher erwähnten ausgesprochen afrikanischen Typus der Personen in [dem Saint-Sever Beatus] ..., so hat man zugleich einen deutlichen Hinweis auf den vormaurischen, spanisch-afrikanischen Charakter der Vorlage.[*]Neuss.
His argumentation was flawed by his admiration for the Saint-Sever Beatus. It would seem that he did not realize that the table in this manuscript, far from being the purest version of the Great Stemma, as he assumed, is in fact a heavily edited derivative work.
Neuss suggested that it might have been Beatus himself who decided to incorporate the stemmatic material into his Commentary on the Apocalypse:
Als sicheres Ergebnis der Untersuchung können wir die Einheitlichkeit des Ursprungs der genealogischen Tabellen unserer Beatus-Hss. buchen, ferner daß sie entweder von Beatus selbst in die Handschrift aufgenommen wurden oder allenfalls von einem Kopisten, dessen Werk vor der ersten uns erreichbaren Verzweigung liegen müßte, was ja sicher eine gewisse innere Unwahrscheinlichkeit gegen sich hat.
He only speaks here of someone uploading the Great Stemma into the Commentary as we might now say, and never suggested that Beatus might have been the author of the Great Stemma, a point on which Zaluska misrepresented Neuss's position in her initial summary:
L'auteur allemand est arrivé à la conclusion que l'origine de ces généalogies était à chercher dans la tradition des Beatus et qu'on pouvait les attribuer soit à Beatus de Liébana lui-même, soit à l'un de ses lecteurs-scribes.[*]Zaluska, Feuillets. My italics.
She later corrected this:
Neuss attribue la redaction à Beatus ou l'un des ses lecteurs-scribes (fin de VIIIe siecle).[*]Zaluska, Stemmata, 143, n. 5. My italics.
Ayuso (1943) noted that the text of the Great Stemma can only have come from a Vetus Latina translation of scripture, not from Jerome's Vulgate, and bolstered the case that it antedates the 7th century by describing the many ways in which it conflicts with the writings of Isidore of Seville:
Las de San Isidoro se hacen a base de la Vulgata, las de nuestros códices a base de la Vetus Latina ... Este detalle parece excluir una época posterior. Supone un momento en que la Vetus Latina tiene todavía cierta actualidad.[*]Ayuso, Marazuela, Teófilo. “Los elementos extrabíblicos de la Vulgata.” Estudios Bíblicos 2 (1943): 133-187. Here 158.
Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela (1906-1962) picked out its differences with Isidore's Chronica Maiora, Etymologiae and De Ortu et Obitu Patrum. His focus on the bible manuscripts rather than the Beatus versions helped him towards a clearer perception of the Stemma as a singular work. Regrettably, he decided against conducting his own detailed transcription of the Stemma, noting the challenge that "la dificultad de la transcripción en figuras" was likely to pose.[*]Ayuso, Extrabíblicos, 154 note 151.
His signal achievement was to combine the evidence from two other researchers, Mariano Revilla Rico and Deogracias Rodríguez Pérez, using it to prove that the Great Stemma had been in existence prior to 772:
Hacia la mitad del siglo VIII escribía el notario Justo un códice que contenía los Evangelios. En él, según costumbre, inserta un colofón pidiendo por su alma y a continuación una mano, poco posterior escribe: Obiit famulus Dei iustus die 12 Kal Ianuarii era 810. Justo moría, pues, el año 772, que corresponde al 810 de la Era Hispánica. No puede, pues, dudarse de la fecha de su composición. Si moría el año 772, antes tuvo que escribir los Evangelios.
Este códice se ha perdido. Se conservó, sin embargo, hasta el siglo XVI y allí le conoció Ambrosio de Morales. Por fortuna, le tuvo también en sus manos el P. Castillo, y con su acostumbrada diligencia transcribió algunas notas interesantes .... Hemos podido examinar despacio estas notas y transcribirlas. Pero no hay necesidad de publicarlas ahora porque ya lo hizo el P. Revilla con todo esmero en su magnífico estudio sobre este particular.[*]Revilla, Mariano. "El códice ovetense de los Evangelios y la Biblia de Valvanera." Ciudad de Dios, 117 (1919), 393-399; 118 (1919) 23-28 ("Sicut Lucas..." passage quoted at 25); 120 (1920) 48-55 y 190-210. Publicados luego aparte bajo el título, Fragmenta Biblica Scurialensia, El Escorial, 1920.
Lo interesante es saber que en este Ms. se encontraba la nota Sicut Luchas evangelista. El P. Revilla la ha transcrito exactamente. Corría ya por España a mediados del siglo VIII. Sin embargo, no era el principio de los Evangelios su lugar. Ha sido trasplantada desde las Genealogías...
Lo que pasa es que, como [El códice ovetense] no contiene sino los Evangelios, conociendo Justo esta nota, la arrancó de las Genealogías para ponerla al frente de su códicel.[*]Ayuso, Extrabíblicos, 161.
I have published a rough English translation of Revilla's article on my blog.
Ayuso also acutely observed that the Ordo Annorum Mundi (discussed on a separate page) was often present in the same codices as the Great Stemma, but he did not consider them to belong together.
He was able to demonstrate the Great Stemma's points of commonality with the Liber Genealogus (the above exegetical passage in both, which points to Revelation 5:5; the Vetus Latina names; the Joachimite explanation of Christ's ancestry), saying this similarity had originally been discovered and pointed out in an unpublished paper by Rodríguez.[*]Ayuso, Extrabíblicos, 159 note 163.
Unfortunately he made an appalling blunder, claiming that a passage about Cain and Abel was nearly identical in the two works, although it is not.[*]Fischer (Genealogía) skewered this error, pointing out that Ayuso had carelessly placed a text from Ca alongside a slightly different one from Le, and was not comparing Ca with the Liber Genealogus as claimed (cited as page 5 of Lagarde's edition): Más grave es el hecho de que el único texto que él imprime como prueba, no se halla en el Liber Genealogus; hace imprimir, seguramente por error, a la izquierda el texto de [Calahorra] y a la derecha el de [León]. Ayuso also blundered by claiming an affinity beween the Compendium-like text in the Barcelona bible Sig. Ms 856 and the Great Stemma. His exposition of the affinity between the two works is too poorly argued to be relied on. His rash hypothesis that the Great Stemma is a graphic, fifth recension of the Liber itself is without foundation.
He also came adrift in his quixotic attempt to link the Great Stemma to the shadowy Iberian Christian bishop Peregrinus, who had flourished in about 450 and had edited the Canons of Priscillian. Fischer (below) reserved especial scorn for this assertion, and it has not been supported by any other scholar.
Ayuso revisited the topic in 1961 but offered no new conclusions. [*] Marazuela, Teófilo. “La Bíblia Visigótica de San Isídoro de León.” Estudios Bíblicos 19-20 (1960): 5-24, 167-200, 271-309; 5-43, 243-259, 359-406.
Fischer (1954) was the first collation of the Great Stemma to appear in print, based on four bibles. It appeared as an aid to textual studies in the second volume, Genesis, of the new Vetus Latina bible.
That series is accompanied by a directory of Christian authors of Antiquity, begun by Fischer and now in its 5th edition, which gives the Great Stemma a standard code, PROL gen.[*]The extracts appear, interspersed with other material, over pages 540 to 571 of the fourth fascicule. The four fascicules appeared progressively 1951-54. The collation is based on León, San Isidoro (Bible of 960; Zaluska siglum Le, Fischer L); Madrid, Bibl. Nac., lat 2 (A. 2) (Zaluska Ma, Fischer M); Madrid, R.A.H., cod. 2 (Zaluska Ac, Fischer E); Calahorra, Cathedral Treasury, ms. 2 (Zaluska Ca, Fischer C).
Bonifatius Fischer (1915-1997) brought a more sceptical approach to study of the Great Stemma, though he had no doubt that it was a witness to the biblical Latin that had been in use before 400. He also accepted that its relationship to the Liber Genealogus was close, but evidently doubted that its precise origins in Late Antiquity would ever be satisfactorily explained.
The Benedictine monks of Beuron Abbey in Germany had been studying the Spanish bibles since the 1930s. [*]An account by Julio Pérez Llamazares, "El Gothicus," in Hidalguia, 1968, 691 says the German Benedictines from Beuron first began studying the Le bible in Léon as a Vetus Latina source in 1934. Fischer was to be put in charge of publishing a new edition of Pierre Sabatier's Vetus Latina bible - the biblical texts used by Latin speakers in the first four or five centuries of the Christian era. This has been an enterprise taking decades and is still not complete.
Any passages of the Stemma not considered biblical in origin were omitted from the Fischer edition of Genesis, so the uncanonical names are absent from his collation.The current project editor, Roger Gryson, has told me he believes the handwritten Genesis notes were subsequently destroyed. Collated items relating to the other books of the Bible may still be in the Beuron Abbey card index, images of which have since been published by Brepols as an online database, but I have not checked this.
Fischer showed no interest in the graphic features of the Great Stemma and he (or Hermann Josef Frede, his successor) does not explicitly point out that this is a diagram (not a text) in the directory entry, which states, unchanged in the 5th edition of the handbook:
Genealogien am Anfang von spanischen Bibel-Handschriften, wohl aus BEA Apc [Beatus, Im Apocalypsin] übernommen; beruhen auf AN gen [Liber Genealogus]. Nicht gedruckt.[*]Gryson, Roger et al. Répertoire général des auteurs ecclésiastiques latins de l'antiquité et du haut moyen âge, 5th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 2007).
In the light of later research, neither the word übernommen (borrowed from) nor beruhen (based on) seems entirely accurate, and nicht gedruckt (unprinted) can now perhaps be modified, following the complete web publication of all five recensions in 2010 as an interim form of editio princeps. It is to be hoped that a full text-critical printed version will be produced in the future.
Williams (below) plausibly argues that the Apocalypse frontispieces in the Beatus manuscripts were probably inspired by the example of earlier bibles, not vice versa. As for a "basing" of the Stemma on the Liber Genealogus, there is no positive evidence that this direction of derivation is correct. It could be argued that the two works are simply cousins with a common antecedent, but my analysis comes to the conclusion that the Great Stemma is the prior work and the Liber is a kind of ekphrasis or discourse that explains and comments on the diagram.
Fischer did not publicly pronounce more on the Great Stemma until seven years later, as part of a wider attack on Ayuso's theories about Peregrinus. In an article which appeared in Spanish in 1961, he accused Ayuso of ignorance of the work of Neuss [*] Fischer, Bonifatius. "Algunas observaciones sobre et «Codex Gothicus» de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro en Leôn." Archivos leoneses: revista de estudios y documentación de los reinos hispano-occidentales XV (1961): 5-47. At Extrabiblicos note 38, Ayuso only mentions a 1922 and a 1931 publication by Neuss, not Die Apokalypse des Hl. Johannes. and of Mommsen's edition of the Liber Genealogus,[*]Ayuso certainly did consult Mommsen, as he refers to the Monumenta at note 192 of his 1943 article, but he had evidently overlooked the fact that both Mommsen and Lagarde had both published the Liber Genealogus. caught out a glaring Ayuso error (above), but conceded that there was a relationship between the two works which awaited further research:
Pero la dependencia de las genealogías respecto al Liber Genealogus es segura, a pesar de esta prueba insuficiente.
Fischer appears to have broadly accepted the views of Neuss, for he took up Neuss's comparison of two Beta manuscripts, León and Morgan, and offered what in hindsight appears to be a rather rash explanation for the differences between them.
Neuss had observed that León crowds all of Adam's descendants down to the family of Noah onto a single page, instead of spreading them over three as in the Morgan manuscript, and moves the first group of King David's sons back to the preceding page which deals with the remainder of Jacob's offspring. To Fischer's mind, this was enough to prove, firstly, that the earlier and neater Morgan manuscript of the Beatus Commentary must have been the model for León and both the bible frontispieces of the Delta type (Millán and Calahorra). He secondly considered that as a general rule, the Beatus manuscripts, not the bibles, must have been the sole channel of transmission:
Las genealogías forman un componente original del comentario al Apocalipsis de Beato de Liébana (c.785), puesto que se encuentran en las tres familias de la tradición de Beato. Las tablas genealógicas de [León] están tomadas de manuscritos de Beato, como lo prueban el mejor orden y la mejor división del espacio que se encuentran en estos.
None of this is convincing. It is true that the León stemma is one of the most maladroit in the Beta group. But it is conceivable that it imitates not Morgan but some ancient and only dimly understood principle of page layout. In any case, the entire Beta group is ill arranged and has lost some of the internal logic of the Epsilon and Alpha recensions. León's defects can hardly be offered as proof that any of the Beatus manuscripts are somehow prior to it in the chain of copying. It is far more plausible to suppose that León and Morgan are parallel derivatives from a lost earlier model.
Nor am I convinced that the Delta recension (Millán and Calahorra) is derived from the Beta version. Delta contains unique glosses, such as that dealing with Enoch, which are absent from Beta. While one might argue that these are interpolations by a recensor, one could hardly argue that the Delta recensor deliberately switched Vulgate names such as Eldaa back to Vetus Latina versions such as Thogora. The Fischer hypothesis also fails a key test, based on the revision of the Horrite chiefs of Genesis 36: Beta offers the extreme revision, whereas Delta conserves an older tradition also found in the Liber Genealogus.
In other ways, Fischer's article was valuable. Following Mommsen's lead (above), Fischer was able to introduce to Spanish readers an example of the Great Stemma in Italy, the Plutei 20.54, (while omitting to mention that the Liber Genealogus is included in the same codex and copied in the same handwriting). He laid out the hypothesis that the bird-and-serpent image which appears in so many of the manuscripts may be an integral part of the document's tradition.
Williams (1980) contains a proposal that the genealogical table, together with a standardized frontispiece series (showing the four evangelists with their witnesses and angels) and a set of illustrations of the biblical Book of Daniel, comprise a fixed ensemble that travelled together.[*]Williams, John. "The Beatus Commentaries and Spanish Bible Illustration." In Actas del simposio para el estudio de los códices del 'Comentario al Apocalipsis' de Beato de Liébana, 2: 201-219. Madrid: Joyas Bibliográf, 1980.
Drawing on his thorough knowledge of the illustrations in medieval Spanish bibles and Beatus manuscripts, John Williams (1928-), an eminent US art historian, pointed out in 1980 that the ensemble shows up again and again as an established group in the Beatus series on the one hand as well as in the two Léon bibles (960 and 1162) and the Bible of San Millán de la Cogolla. He speculated that the Stemma could be linked to models in Antique art:
It is clear that the format of the Beatus Genealogical Tables descends from an ancient conception, made up, like the Evangelist pages, through an adaptation of a pagan formula.[*]Williams, Commentaries, 209.
Although he drew back from this idea several years later, the 1980 article raised the possibility the trio might have been assembled for an illustrated Spanish bible of the 6th century:
These densely illustrated manuscripts are of a character which indicates that they are descended from a richly decorated Visigothic bible.... It is possible that the [Evangelist pages] were adapted from some Beatus Commentary, but there is no reason to think that they too do not go back to an illustrated Spanish Bible of the sixth century.[*]Williams, Commentaries, 209-10.
At the same time, Williams questioned Ayuso's linking of the Great Stemma text to the Liber Genealogus of 427 and instead suggested the text was close to that in the Computatio of 452 (by which I take it he means the Chronica Gallica of that year), but offered no text examples.[*]The association is a weak one. There are major differences. The Chronica Gallica embraces the second Kenan who is excluded by the Great Stemma. It does not reproduce the identification of Jechonias with Zedekiah. However the Chronica Gallica and the Great Stemma do both partly descend from the Hippolytan world chronicle.
While Williams's ensemble hypothesis continues to be useful, he no longer maintains that the ensemble was of Late Antique character and transmitted via a Visigothic bible, doubting later that there was ever any such thing as "Visigothic bible illustration" and noting:
... the absence of a vital tradition of illustration within an otherwise healthy scribal culture ... the León bibles represent ad hoc arrangements, prompted by Carolingian examples ...[*]Williams, John. "The Bible in Spain". Imaging the Early Medieval Bible, 181. University Park. Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999.
Zaluska (1984) laid out the first informal stemma codicum for the Great Stemma and analysed it page by page at the level of what the author described as its chapitres.
Yolanta Zaluska (1940- ) conducted her own collation, but neither this (nor the full-scale book which one senses that she was preparing) was ever published. The Paris specialist on medieval art has never made her conclusions about the document's date of origin public.
Zaluska's detailed analysis established once and for all that the text was based on the Vetus Latina and clearly derived from a text much older than the Beatus Apocalypse or the bibles in which it appears. Guided by this perception, she was able to distinguish those interpolations that are drawn from the work of Isidore of Seville and explore the process of modification that happened during the document's transmission from Antiquity up to the 10th century, for example:
La forme particulière sous laquelle on cite (en α, en β et en S) le nom de la concubine de Nachor, Soma concubina Nachor alii Regma est très intéressante puisqu'elle témoigne d'une comparaison ancienne entre la Vulgate et la Vieille Latine (Vetus Latina = V. L.). En effet, Soma est une déformation de la Roma de la Vulgate, tandis que Regma est une forme selon V.L. du même nom. Il est important de noter que γ et δ n'ont que la forme Regma. L'expression alii, voulant dire "ailleurs", est très caractéristique des "apparats critiques" médiévaux et témoigne des recherches faites par le recenseur.[*]Zaluska, Feuillets.
One of her key discoveries was a corruption, in all recensions except Epsilon, of a passage on Job which had been both duplicated and distorted, probably by an early Spanish scribe. Its history helps us understand the text's evolution:
Il s'agit de la phrase empruntée à la LXX Job 42, 17e et qui devait être la suivante: Nam qui venerunt ad eum amici eius hii fuerunt: Elifaz de filiis Esau, Themanorum dux... Par suite d'une distraction de scribe on a inséré entre fuerunt et Elifaz le nom du troisième ami de Job, Sophar filius (Sophar Israel en Ac), l'expression Themanorum dux devenant en outre et Themanorum uxor. Après ces deux bévues le reste de la phrase n'est devenu qu'un écheveau de corruptions. Dans son effort de correction le rédacteur de α n'a su que revenir à la forme correcte de Themanorum dux (dernière ligne du texte), et a laissé de la place pour la suite.[*]Zaluska, Feuillets 248-1/2
Thanks to this and a multitude of other detailed observations, she was able to demonstrate that the manuscript families established by Neuss for the Beatus Apocalypse did not apply to the Stemma.
She adopted new sigla, re-arranged the manuscripts into six new families, and pointed out that all must derive from a single, already corrupted diagram.
Ajoutée à la faute commune constatée dans le texte sur Job (supra), cette observation (ed: the confusion over the Judaean kings' wives) permet de penser que toutes les recensions aujourd'hui connues descendent d'un modèle commun qui présentait déjà une version corrompue de l'archétype...Contrairement au texte sur Job dont la faute pouvait provenir de n'importe quelle source extérieure utilisée par l'auteur des tables, le ou plutôt les décalages dans la répartition des noms des femmes semblent provenir d'un remaniement d'un texte déjà disposé en médaillons.
She was rightly cautious about Ayuso's and Fischer's assumptions over the Liber Genealogus connection, writing:
... l'hypothèse d'Ayuso sur la parenté de celles-là avec le Liber genealogus n'est pas à rejeter en bloc. De toutes les chroniques comparées, le Liber genealogus est indiscutablement celle qui se rattache le plus à nos tables, avec lesquelles elle partage plusieurs points communs, dont le plus important est la présence de deux généalogies parallèles à partir de David: de Salomon, son fils, à Joseph, selon saint Mathieu, et de Nathan, autre fils de David, à la Vierge Marie (sic), d'après saint Luc.[*]Zaluska, Feuillets.
In itself, this statement is irreproachable. However it is not the presence of the parallel genealogies that is worth remarking (this is a given of Christian scripture that is frequently commented on by patristic writers, but rather their graphic treatment as two fila which separate and then re-unite. The similarities in data order, the copied errors and the peculiar forms of many names are also crucial points of similarity.
More unfortunately, she alludes to the differences between the two works in a fashion that may have misled Klapisch-Zuber, Rouse and McNelis into misunderstanding the connection, making the unwarranted assumption that the Great Stemma derives from the Liber Genealogus.
I laboured under the same misconception for nearly half a year during my research, then concluded that it was futile to seek any process by which the Liber could have inspired the Great Stemma. It was only when I explored the reverse hypothesis— that the earliest, G recension of the Liber is based on the Great Stemma— that a coherent hypothesis about the connection could be established.
Zaluska only indistinctly recognized the timeline within the document, noting the peculiar way in which the Sigma recension sorted the Judges material anew, and she suggested its derivation from the Chronological Canons of Eusebius.
Une chronique universelle du type Eusèbe Jérôme, peut-être même celle d'Isidore apparaît comme un modèle approprié.[*]Zaluska, Feuillets.
She also highlighted an unusually precise excursion by the author into Persian history:
Particulièrement intéressante dans cette partie est la troisième légende: duo gemini regnatit menses octo ("deux jumeaux ont régné pendant huit mois"), qui fait allusion au gouvernement des mages à la mort de Cambyse. L'attestation de cet évènement quelque peu rocambolesque remonte à Hérodote.[*]Zaluska, Feuillets, where she adds: [M]ais il n'est que rarement rapporté par les chronographes chrétiens...On le trouve par exemple dans Paul Orose, Historiarum libri septem, P. L., 31, col. 763, ou dans le Chronographe de 354, Lib. gen. I, n.° 319 et Lib. gen. II, n.° 186 (éd. Mommsen, "M.G.H., Auc. Antiq.", IX, Berlin, 1892, p. 131; cf. Additamentum I, ibidem, p. 150 n.° (42]); aucun de ces textes n'emploie l'expression "duo gemini".
In 1986, Zaluska published some further, very remarkable findings. She had surveyed genealogical material in three bibles from the Meuse Valley and two more Spanish bibles. She had already chosen in 1984 to call this group a "sixth recension" of the Great Stemma.
Au cours de mon étude sur ces généalogies j'ai été amenée à distinguer six recensions différentes ...quatre de ces recensions, désignées comme les recensions alpha, bêta, gamma, delta 1 et delta 2, appartiennent à la tradition spécifiquement hispanique, la cinquième, sigma, est celle du Beatus de Saint-Sever, et la sixième recension, dont j'ai simplement signalé l'existence, d'après la Bible de Burgos, est celle dont nous nous occuperons aujourd'hui.[*]Zaluska, Bibliques 144.
It had by now became clear however that this "recension" was almost an entirely different work with quite a different emphasis. She noted that it:
Though I have not yet had a chance to study these stemmata in the five bibles, I sense that Zaluska had by now regretted her earlier decision to label this group a mere recension. it was by now plain that it had its own author and a separate history. She expressed those doubts thus:
Les Beatus n'ont avec nos Bibles romanes que des rapports extrêmement ténus et très indirects, discernables uniquement dans la mesure où l'ossature biblique remonte quelque part à un archétype commun.[*]Zaluska, Bibliques 146.
This was to be the only time when Zaluska hinted any guess at the age of the Great Stemma: she appears to have felt that it must be younger than the Lesser Stemma, though she held fast to the end to her hypothesis, which I remain doubtful about, that both stemmata somehow derive from a single Late Antique model:
La collation de ces textes montre, au-delà de tout soupçon, que les généalogies de ces cinq Bibles dérivent d'un modèle commun et que ce modèle est à la fois plus archaïque que les versions qui ont circulé dans les Beatus.[*]Zaluska, Bibliques 148.
On this website, I have continued to use the sigla and the codes developed by Zaluska to describe the recensions, while adding Epsilon to make a total of six. I would provisionally include Zaluska's Sigma, the heavily revised recension which she described in the greatest detail, though it seems to be greatly modified. I also do not describe the Great Stemma as 14 tables, but as one table.
Klapisch-Zuber (2000) introduced the Great Stemma to a wider audience. The book L'ombre des ancêtres contained a tabulation of most of the known copies, analysed its graphical character and encouraged readers to look beyond the religious connotation of the different genealogies of Christ and to grasp the significance of their graphic form for the history of western thought:
leur signification en tant que système et langage généalogiques me semble avoir été négligée. Elle mérite pourtant notre attention, car ces généalogies sont les premières conservées depuis l'Antiquité à nous offrir un exemple de visualisation systématique de la parenté.[*]Klapisch-Zuber, L'Ombre.
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (1936-) has devoted the later part of her career to the medieval history of tree-form diagrams. She has been agnostic about the possibility that this graphic form could have had its origins in an earlier age, the rational mental world of Antiquity. She rejects as unfounded the hypothesis that the Latin word stemma meant a "tree" diagram. In describing the Great Stemma, while recognizing that several generations of early medieval Spanish editors had plainly understood its underlying concept, she appeared to prohibit any speculation that this concept might have had an Antique source:
les illustrateurs ont recouru à des procédés graphiques et à des images auxquels on ne connait pas de prototypes.[*]Klapisch-Zuber, L'Ombre.
While acknowledging Ayuso's and Zaluska's discovery that the ur-language of the Great Stemma draws on pre-Jerome biblical material, Klapisch-Zuber clearly preferred to work from a hypothesis that the table was a product of the early medieval period, assembled from material in the Liber Genealogus and the works of Isidore and given graphic form. Her reference example was the table drawn at Saint-Sever in southwestern France and now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and she developed her argument by citing those of its features which could only have come from Isidore:
Les chiffres retenus ici correspondent aux calculs d'Isidore de Séville et comptent au total 5 228 années entre la Création de la passion de Christ.[*]Klapisch-Zuber, L'Ombre.
At the same time, she stressed the deficencies in the Saint-Sever design, including its lattices of roundels which obscure parent-child relationships, its inconsistent visualization of marriages and its lack of any coherent colour-coding. In a chapter which lays the groundwork for her subsequent exposition of the design innovations brought by Peter of Poitiers to his Compendium, she implies that the Great Stemma did not even manage to competently reproduce the theory of the Seven Ages of the World set out in Augustine of Hippo's City of God:
les cinq premiers âges qui, depuis Augustin, couvrent la période vétéro-testamentaire sont ici condensés en quatre, car la césure de l'Exil à Babylone est ignorée.[*]Klapisch-Zuber, L'Ombre.
While her dismissive judgement toward the Great Stemma might seem inflexible, one can only sympathize with her predicament: even at the end of the 20th century, not a single critical edition of the stemma in its entirety had been published, little was known of its textual and graphical evolution and the objective of reconstructing the Late Antique ur-form as it had been intended by its author had not yet been conceived of. Working from Paris, both Zaluska and Klapisch-Zuber necessarily concentrated on reading the Saint-Sever Beatus, the only manuscript kept in that city, despite its imperfection of content. They lacked the easy access we enjoy today via the internet to the manuscripts in Florence and Madrid.
Rouse/McNelis (2000) presented evidence that the Liber Genealogus, often associated with the Great Stemma, had been bound into two compendiums of aids to biblical study, one or perhaps both of North African schismatic origin. The article in essence revived Ayuso's hypothesis, suggesting that the Great Stemma may have been drafted in Spain using one of those handbooks:
Works in the Compendium appear to have been sources for the extensive genealogical tables found in a group of Visigothic Bibles.[*]Rouse, 227.
This hypothesis is one which I cannot share: the evidence does not bear such a conclusion. (As noted above, I also prefer speaking of a table in the singular, since the Great Stemma is a single infographic spread over multiple pages.) As far as I can tell, Richard Rouse and Charles McNelis did not re-collate the Great Stemma texts themselves, but relied on the analyses published by Zaluska:
Zaluska's studies confirm that the Liber Genealogus was the source drawn upon by the compilers of the genealogical tables.[*]Rouse, 228, quoting Zaluska, Liminaires, 241 and note 21.
As we have seen above, this misrepresents Zaluska's cautious conclusions. In my view, the preponderant evidence is that the Great Stemma is the older of these two works.
Rouse/McNelis only cites the single Zaluska passage quoted above and refers to the "Sicut Lucas..." passage in the Stemma text. To speak of a "correspondence, frequently verbatim, between the biblical genealogical tables and the Liber genealogus" over-simplifies a complex situation. Ultimately Rouse/McNelis does concede that these matters are in need of checking:
Whether these scattered intimations of the Compendium actually reflect its use in Spain will need further investigation.[*]Rouse, 227.
There also appears to be a misunderstanding of Zaluska's position towards the Great and Lesser Stemma (I have not yet studied the latter):
[Zaluska] noted that a common feature of the tables (all of Spanish origin) which linked them in a general fashion to the Liber Genealogus of 427 was their focus on biblical history developed through numerous secondary biblical lineages, the names at times being enriched with etymologies and typological meanings.[*]Rouse, 228, quoting Zaluska, Stemmata, 148-149.
Zaluska contended that what I call the Great Stemma placed its focus on Old Testament history and explored the secondary lineages; by contrast, the document I call the Lesser Stemma had a typological focus, meaning that it showed how Old Testament stories and figures prefigured the New. The Lesser Stemma has a different structure, a different history and almost certainly a different author. The Lesser Stemma, as we have seen above, has been found in three bibles from the Meuse Valley and two from Spain.
Etymologies are in fact conspicuously absent from the Great Stemma. There are a handful of instances, in the Alpha and Beta recensions only, where a gloss gives the significance of a name. For Leah we read for example: id est laboriosa. But these instances can be certainly attributed to a medieval editor, not to the Great Stemma author, because they are mostly copied from the writings of Isidore.
Rouse also discusses one of the most perplexing correspondences linking the Great Stemma, the Lesser Stemma and the Liber generationis I as a putative group:
The possibility that the Compendium itself was the source, however, is suggested by what seems to be an echo, among the Spanish biblical tables, of another work from the Compendium, the Liber generationis. In one of the tables (the most faithful manuscript of Zaluska's "sixth recension"), Sedechias, last king of Judah, is misidentified with his brother Jechonias, from whom Christ descends: "Iechonias qui et Sedechias ipse est". The probable source of this is Liber generationis I no. 293, "Ioachim cuius nomen Sedicias qui et Iechonias".[*]Rouse, 228, quoting Zaluska, Stemmata, 144, note 8.
This affinity is indeed there, but I am not sure if it is enough to demonstrate that the Compendium was used by the Great Stemma author. It is a part of a tradition going back to Hippolytus (discussion here). When one observes that the Jechoniah-Zedekiah identification is absent from the Liber Genealogus, which explicitly treats those two kings as having separate reigns, the other leg of the Rouse/McNelis argument is undermined.
While the sequence of transmission suggested in the Rouse article seems to be unsupported by the manuscripts, the general direction of the authors' argument is illuminating. They propose that a large set of bible-study aids— perhaps the sole surviving set from the Classical Latin world, if we exempt various chronographic works from this definition— survived at a Donatist congregation or school in North Africa, and that exiles or refugees carried this to Spain, and perhaps also to Naples, allowing its preservation as a Compendium in two distinct recensions.
This would not only neatly explain how the Lesser Stemma came to be written in Spain. It also suggests a conceivable route by which the Great Stemma itself could have reached Spain and survived, somewhat corrupted but still largely intact, to be copied in the 10th century. This would certainly fit well with what we have discovered in the present research.
Klein (2002) reaffirmed the view, now renounced by Williams, that the Great Stemma was transmitted by Visigothic bibles:
Die Genealogischen Tabellen dürften also wohl noch auf Vorbilder aus dem westgotischen Bibel-Illustrationen zurückgehen, ihr Alter bleibt weiterhin offen.[*]Klein, Peter. Beatus de Liébana, Codex Urgellensis: comentario a la edición facsímil. Madrid: Testimonio, 2002. 32
In his multiple commentaries on the Beatus manuscripts, Peter Klein has described page by page how they present the Great Stemma, and has upheld Zaluska's method of differentiating the Alpha, Beta and Gamma recensions.
Worm (2010) associated the Great Stemma with medieval diagrammatic chronicles. Andrea Worm cautiously suggests that it is a diagram "possibly going back to fifth-century prototypes".[*]Worm, Andrea. "Diagrammatic Chronicles", in Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 522-32.
The Piggin (2010) collation is the first of the Great Stemma from beginning to end to actually be published, along with a schematic image.
This website has demonstrated that the document is not simply a genealogy, but also contains the world's earliest known timeline. In addition, it has produced evidence that the chart was originally drawn on a single large sheet, presumably a roll, and was only later sectioned into codex pages.
The work has confirmed that all of the extant manuscripts have a common parent, probably a Visigothic manuscript, which contained distinctive mistakes and which was thus itself some distance from the Antique archetype. [*]First proposed in Zaluska, Feuillets, quoted above.
This is consistent with the hypothesis that the Epsilon and Alpha recensions are the only ones bearing any close graphical resemblance to the archetype and that the layout of all the others is more corrupt. However a different set of considerations applies to the text: here, Alpha is less reliable (a point Zaluska noted) whereas Delta, despite its graphic degradation, is a remarkably pure witness of the old text also found in Epsilon.
Close analysis of the different recensions will allow us to soon attempt an evidence-based reconstruction of the Great Stemma's original format, its content and its sophisticated graphical conventions.
As for the other versions, Sigma is too heavily edited to be reliable, Gamma is too sparse to be of any great use and the Lesser Stemma (Zaluska's "sixth recension") is too different to be regarded as a variant of the Great Stemma at all.
On August 11, 2011, fresh findings were presented at the Oxford Patristics Conference. I showed that the sequence of information in the Liber Genealogus mimicked the graphic arrangement of the Great Stemma and suggested that the former might be an ekphrasis of the diagram.
I remain sceptical of the supposed connection to the Liber Generationis I (a work translated from the Greek before AD 334[*]Rouse., 207.), since the evidence for this seems remarkably tenuous.
The Great Stemma is the largest and most complex information-graphic document to survive from Antiquity and it ranks in historical importance alongside both the Chronological Canons of Eusebius and the mathematical and astronomical diagrams devised by the Greeks. Its arrangement of text into complex flow charts demonstrates not only a surprising skill at rational abstraction but also suggests that the literacy of readers in Antiquity was adequate to make ready sense of stemmatic or timeline layouts on a very large page.
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