Thursday, July 22, 2010

Inventorying the scholia to the Iliad

Previous publications in print both individually and collectively offer only a selection of the scholia to be found in manuscripts. As one part of a summer research internship at the College of the Holy Cross, Melissa Browne and Frankie Hartel collaborated with Profs. Mary Ebbott and Neel Smith to create the first complete inventory of scholia in the Venetus A manuscript, for books 3 and 4 of the Iliad. Each scholion has a unique identifier, and is assigned to one of the distinct groups of scholia distinguished by their placement on the folio, by orthographic features, and perhaps to a greater extent than it has been possible to appreciate from print publication by their contents.

The scholia are also indexed to the images Browne and Hartel are using to create an edition of the texts. The digital "working notebooks" Browne and Hartel developed are now being published at www.homermultitext.org/scholia-inventory.html, where references to regions of images are used to dynamically embed sections of images in the web page, and to create a color-coded overview of the contents of each folio side.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Google cites Venetus A as historic example of organizing scholarly content

In recent weeks the official Google blog and Inside Google Books  have linked to images of the Venetus A published via the Homer Multitext. Both posts stress Google's commitment to digital humanities research, the potential of text mining and other quantitative research techniques for the Humanities, and their interest in research on the ancient world in particular.

(Image courtesy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license)

Monday, July 12, 2010

Homeric Papyri and the Homer Multitext

The publication of ancient papyrus texts has always been central to the goals of the Homer Multitext project. The Homeric papyri are, with the exception of some ancient quotations, the oldest surviving witnesses to the text of Homer. The medieval manuscript tradition of Homer begins with the tenth century CE manuscripts of the Iliad known as D (Laurentianus 32.15) and Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus 454). Some papyrus fragments predate the medieval tradition by as many as 1200 years. In a 2001 article [Dué 2001a; on-line version], I argued that the multiformity of the Homeric texts, as evidenced by the earliest quotations of Homer and the Ptolemaic papyri, calls for a new approach to editing the texts of Homer. Building on the work of Gregory Nagy (especially Nagy 1996a), who was himself building on the insights of Parry and Lord into the oral traditional nature of Homeric poetry, I suggested that a web-based, “multitext” edition would be truer to the complexity of the transmission of the Homeric poems, which are oral-derived texts composed in performance. The texts as we now have them are the product of many singers over the course of many generations. What Parry and Lord’s work shows us most essentially is that there is not one original text that we should try to reconstruct. Instead of reconstructing an “original text,” the aim of the Homer Multitext, now at last becoming a reality after a decade of research and planning, is to present a series of complete, historically contextualized texts, together with images, and a variety of tools with which users can compare and analyze these historical documents.

The Homeric papyri are all fragmentary, and range in date from as early as the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. The vast majority of the fragments were discovered in Egypt, and now reside in collections located all over the world. They give us an otherwise irrecoverable picture of the Iliad and Odyssey as they were performed and recorded in ancient times. When taken altogether, Homeric papyri reveal a state of the Homeric texts in antiquity that can be quite surprising. There are numerous verses in the papyri that are seemingly intrusive from the standpoint of the medieval vulgate. These additional verses, the so-called plus verses, are not present in the majority of the medieval manuscripts of the Iliad and Odyssey. Other verses that are canonical in the medieval manuscripts are absent from the papyri—these may be termed minus verses. Also prevalent is variation in the formulaic phrasing within lines. In other words, it seems from this most ancient evidence that the poems were performed and recorded with a considerable amount of fluidity in antiquity. It is not until about 150 BCE that the papyrus texts begin to stabilize and present a relatively more uniform text.

The early Homeric papyri are the vestiges of a once vibrant performance tradition of the Iliad and Odyssey (see especially Nagy 1996a and Dué 2001a). In such a tradition no poem is ever composed, performed, or recorded in exactly the same way twice. In the earliest stages of the Iliad and Odyssey, each performance would have resulted in an entirely new composition. By the time of the first papyrus fragments, the oral composition and performance tradition of Homeric epic poetry had died out. But variation in the ancient textual tradition, the reflexes of this once oral and performative tradition, persisted for several more centuries. These variations, preserved for us in the Homeric papyri, are a unique window into the oral tradition that we have lost.

And yet in Homeric textual criticism, the papyri are not always attributed the weight that their antiquity should bestow on them. The variations are dismissed by a variety of strategies, including the often cited assertion that the variations are banal and uninteresting, and the labeling of the Ptolemaic papyri as “wild” or “eccentric” (for counter arguments, see especially Dué 2001a and 2001b and Dué and Ebbott 2009). In several publications I have suggested that the Medieval transmission is given more authority than the papyri precisely because modern editors find the multiformity of the papyri and early quotations disturbing (see especially Due 2006 as well as Dué 2001a and 2001b, Dué and Ebbott 2009). The seeming fluidity of these earliest witnesses conflicts with a basic desire (among Classicists at least) to find a single text and a single author behind our Iliad and Odyssey. The Medieval transmission, while by no means reducible to a single “vulgate” text, is more uniform, and offers the mirage of a reconstructable original that is just beyond the reach of our sources. This mirage has enticed many an editor to attempt to reconstruct what “Homer” actually composed (see especially Dué 2006).

Neither I nor my co- editors of the Homer Multitext are seeking to privilege the papyri in any special way over the Medieval transmission; rather we seek simply to make them available to scholars and anyone interested in the transmission of the Homeric poems over the course of three millennia or more, and to suggest that they have great historical value in the picture they present of the state of the Homeric texts in the earliest state in which we have it. Modern editions of the Iliad and Odyssey report papyrus readings only very selectively. The nature of a critical apparatus, moreover, necessarily obscures the context from which these readings arise. Not only can it be hard to locate the date or geographical origin of a particular papyrus when it is cited (in a highly abbreviated form) in an apparatus, it is also nearly impossible to reconstruct the character of the papyrus text that is being cited as a whole. In other words, is a particular reading one isolated variant, or is the papyrus as a whole quite multiform from the point of view of the Medieval transmission? Is the text preserved on the papyrus short or long? Is what survives a few letters per verse, whole verses, or something in between? Is the papyrus a deluxe edition of the text, a school text, a commentary? These are just a few of the questions that are almost impossible to answer by studying a critical apparatus alone. The limitations of the printed page of course prohibit including such information in a typical printed edition of the text.

But a web-based edition need not be limited in the same way, and can present complete historical documents side by side, as transcribed texts and as images. While the physical experience of touching the paper or parchment may be difficult to convey in digital form, metadata conveying such information can be easily included in the digital image files and precise scholarly descriptions can be linked. The editors of the Homer Multitext plan to do exactly this with the Homeric papyri. It is our goal to build a library of TEI XML-encoded diplomatic editions of the papyri, and to cooperate with scholars, libraries, and collections to put images, descriptions, and metadata for these papyri on-line. An initial set of editions, now available here, has been created by a group of graduate students. These students are now scholars in their right. It is our hope that they and other interested scholars will contribute more such editions as the project develops, and help us to develop the standards for such editions. The initial set referenced here is really, we hope, just the beginning of a collaborative effort that will include contributions from many people.

The idea of publishing the variations present in papyrus texts in digital form long predates the Homer Mutltitext. Homer and the Papyri was a project first created and edited by Professor Dana S. Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, who published it on CD-rom and later on the web. Homer and the Papyri, as it was established by Professor Sutton, was a website consisting of a) lists of published papyri and related items for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and b) a repertoire of the textual variants presented by this body of material, hypertextually linked to the lists of papyri. In 2001 Professor Sutton handed Homer and the Papyri over to the Center for Hellenic Studies, with a view to its continuation and incorporation into the publications of the Center, including a multitext edition of Homer. (Dana Sutton’s introduction to his original web-based edition may be found on the CHS website.) At that time Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis were appointed as editors, and a team of advisors selected. In 2005 we asked John Lundon to join our team of editors, and Alexander Loney became a contributing editor. Since then, Bart Huelsenbeck has also been a frequent contributor to the project.

When Professor Sutton first handed over Homer and the Papyri to the CHS team, the Homer Multitext project was in its infancy, and many questions immediately presented themselves. How could the data that Sutton had amassed be sustained over the long term? How could this data become interoperable within the architecture of the Homer Multitext? These somewhat technical questions raised more theoretical questions. Homer and the Papyri was an html list of variants, not complete texts of the papyri. How, then, to define a variant? What is the “original” from which the variants deviate? As I have noted, even the term “variant” fundamentally clashes with the findings of Parry and Lord that are the foundation on which the Homer Multitext project has been conceived. Sutton himself used a number of modern printed editions as points of comparison, and acknowledged some of the problems involved in doing so, including a lack of an equivalent for the Odyssey of T. W. Allen’s editio maior of the Iliad (see Sutton’s introduction to Homer and the Papyri).

The new editors quickly realized that a new approach to the project would be necessary, one that required a number of interconnected and labor intensive action items. First, Sutton’s data needed to be converted to TEI-XML, for its long term stability and so that it could be interoperable with other projects. Second, new papyri needed to be incorporated and assigned numbers in a systematic way. Not only are new papyri published every year (with new “variants,” however those are defined), often old papyri are joined, and so no longer require separate numbers. New descriptions must be written for the newly published or joined papyri and a bibliography maintained. Thirdly, we decided that we could expand the project’s utility by incorporating the data into a fully searchable relational database. Such a database was created by Michael Jones, with the cooperation and supervision of the Stoa Consortium, at that time edited by Anne Mahoney and Ross Scaife. This database allows the user to search in one of six fields, such as title (Iliad or Odyssey), book number, and line number. There are also fields for variants, witnesses, and a more general description field, in which the user may search for special features (such as material, location, or editor). The database, however, is flawed, for reasons that I will discuss further below. Our more theoretical concerns, moreover, were not solved.

These first three action items were our initial goal, and occupied several years of work on the project. But by this time, Martin West’s (1998-2000) Teubner edition of the Iliad had appeared. Not only did this edition track more papyrus readings than had been done by previous editors, it included a list of all Iliad papyri (including the papyri Sutton called “witnesses” and “Homerica”), and this list contained nearly 800 additional unpublished papyri in the Bodleian library, thereby doubling the previously known number. (This list was also published as chapter 4 of West’s Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad [West 2001a].) The editors of the new Homer and the Papyri faced a new dilemma. If we continued to assign numbers and  incorporate new papyri as they were published, our list would conflict with West’s. Our initial decision was to track the differences in a “comparatio numerorum” table. We have since had cause to reevaluate this decision, and are still debating the best solution.

But we faced a far greater dilemma in our continuation of the practice of reporting variants. Should the publication of West’s new edition affect what variants we report for the Iliad? Even as most papyrologists were beginning to make use of West’s edition for their own supplements when publishing new fragments, we wrestled with the idea of making it our default, notional text. Might not the Venetus A, the oldest complete text of the Iliad, make a better, more historical point of comparison? Yet the Venetus A is itself in its own way just an arbitrary edition. In fact, any one version of the text, whether historical or constructed in modern times, is simply one version. Providing only the “variants,” in isolation from their context (as Sutton’s method had been), is misleading, because it suggests that there is an historical “original” from which the variants are varying. For the Homeric poems, that’s simply not the case.

We realized that we wanted to undertake something quite different than what the founding editor, Dana Sutton, had originally envisioned when the internet was still quite new and few standards existed. Moreover, as we continued to test the new database, its problems became increasingly glaring. As is inevitable with a large amount of data entered manually in an unstructured way (I mean by using HTML, which is a descriptive mark up system, rather than XML, which is far more structured), we found numerous errors and contradictions in the data. These errors and a general lack of uniformity, despite the XML structure we attempted to impose on it, to this day prevent the database from working properly. Though it does have some functionality, few users have been able to use it regularly and successfully.

It soon became clear that in order for Homer and the Papyri to become current, useful, and fully integrated within the Multitext, we needed to conceive of the material in a new way. Therefore, just as we had begun to do for the Medieval manuscripts and their scholia, we began to commission new TEI-XML encoded diplomatic editions of the Homeric papyri. These papyri will be published as part of the Homer Multitext by means of the same services and tools that have been developed in conjunction with the manuscripts.

The editors of the Homer Multitext feel that this new vision is true to Dana Sutton’s project, whose aim was to make accessible to interested people and scholars the multiform texts that survive on papyrus. Not only will users be able to access these papyri as complete, diplomatic texts, they will also be able to view them side by side with other historical documents, including other papyri and Medieval manuscripts.

Accomplishing what we envision - a complete library of TEI-XML encoded diplomatic editions of all published Homeric papyri - will require a great deal of work. We very much welcome contributions from other editors, and such contributions will be properly attributed and given recognition. (All contributions must be openly licensed under a Creative Commons license.) We also very much hope to include images from collections who will allow publication under a Creative Commons License, and plan to link to those existing images on-line that have stable URLs. If you are interested in contributing diplomatic editions and/or images to the Homer Multitext please contact Casey Dué (casey at chs.harvard.edu) and Mary Ebbott (ebbott at chs.harvard.edu).

Works Cited and Further Reading

[Allen 1924] Allen, T. W. Homer: The Origins and Transmission. Oxford, 1924.
[Allen 1931] Homeri Ilias. Oxford, 1931.
[Dué 2001a] Dué, C. “Achilles’ Golden Amphora in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus and the Afterlife of Oral Tradition.” Classical Philology 96 (2001): 33-47.
[Dué 2001b] “Sunt Aliquid Manes: Homer, Plato, and Alexandrian Allusion in Propertius 4.7.” Classical Journal 96 (2001): 401-413.
[Dué 2002] Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2002.
[Dué 2006] “The Invention of Ossian.” Classics@ 3 (2006).
[Dué and Ebbott 2009] Dué, C., and M. Ebbott. “Digital Criticism: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1 (2009).
[Haslam 1997] Haslam, Michael. "Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text." in I. Morris and B. Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer. Leiden, 1997.
[Lord 1960] Lord, A. B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass., 1960. 2nd rev. edition, 2000.
[Lord 1991] Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.
[Lord 1995] The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca, N.Y., 1995.
[Nagy 1996a] Nagy, G.  Poetry as Performance. Cambridge, 1996.
[Nagy 1996b] Nagy, G. Homeric Questions. Austin, TX, 1996.
[Nagy 2000] Nagy, G. Review of Martin L. West (ed.) Homeri Ilias. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.09.12.
[Nagy 2002] Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Cambridge, Mass., 2002.
[Nagy 2004] Homer’s Text and Language. Champaign, IL, 2004.
[M. West 1998–2000] West, M., ed. Homeri Ilias. Recensuit / testimonia congessit. Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998–2000.
[M. West 2001a] Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Munich, 2001.
[M. West 2001b] “West on Nagy and Nardelli on West.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06.
[M. West 2004] “West on Rengakos (BMCR 2002.11.15) and Nagy (Gnomon 75, 2003, 481–501) on West: Response to 2002.11.15.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.04.17.
[S. West 1967] West, Stephanie. The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer. Köln, 1967.

* Papyrus image courtesy of Wikimedia.org

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Digitizing Homeric Manuscripts at El Escorial

This post will describe, briefly, the technology for digitization of two Iliadic manuscripts in the collection of the Real Monasterio de El Escorial, outside of Madrid, Spain.

Casey Dué has provided some initial notes on these in the previous post. The two manuscripts were created in the 11th century CE. Their catalogue numbers are: Escorialensis ω.I.12 (513 = Allen E4) and Escorialensis y.I.1 (294 = Allen E3).

For this digitization work, we are collaborating closely with Dr. Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Enviornments. Aspects of this work have been funded by the National Science Foundation.

We see this as an exciting opportunity both to advance our humanist scholarship on oral poetry and the history of Homeric texts, and the integration of technologies for multi-modal imaging of cultural heritage objects in the field. For these manuscripts, we hope to capture multi-spectral images and 3-dimensional surface maps, and ultimately to integrate these by means of the networked infrastructure developed by the Homer Multitext.

The manuscript rests on the Conservation Copystand built for the CHS by Manfred Meyer. The camera is a medium-format bellows-camera with a digital back. The digital sensor is monochromatic, and 38 megapixels. The resolution is a good thing, and the lack of color is also a good thing. In a normal, color, digital camera of, say, 24 megapixels, there is a color filter laid over the sensor. Of the 24 million pixels, 8 will be filtered through red, 8 will be filtered through green, and 8 will be filtered through blue. So each full color "pixel" will consume three pixels of resolution. The software in the camera will merge the three pixels into one, full-color pixel, at the cost of some softness to the image.

Our black-and-white camera has no color filter in front of the sensor. This does not mean that we won’t have lovely color images of these manuscripts, however.

The lights for this photography consist of banks of LED lights, with each bank bank of LEDs emitting a specific frequency of light. There are thirteen banks, ranging from ultraviolet, through the visible spectrum (blues, greens, oranges, reds) down to several levels of infrared. The camera and lights are controlled by a computer, which will automatically cycle through the spectra of light, taking a picture for each one.

The result is thirteen monochromatic images, each showing particular features of the page, as different kinds of ink and different kinds of stains or damage reflect differently.

At the end, the thirteen images can be merged to create full-color images that take advantage of the full resolution of the sensor. Other “false color” images can be generated to suit particular kinds of analysis.

In addition to this digital photography, the team is capturing structured light data using a custom-programmed projector tied to the camera. The projector uses a laser, rather than a bulb, which allows it to maintain perfect focus across an uneven surface. By projecting a series of images onto the surface of a page, and by processing the resulting pictures of that page, the team can create a 3-dimensional model of the surface. This model, in turn, can be used to remove distortions from the text, or to make a vividly realistic digital reconstruction of the page and its text.

This project relies heavily on the talents of many people. Brent Seales provided the vision of integrating this technology with humanist inquiry, and raised the funds that made the project possible. Matt Fields, Ryan Bauman, and Dan Staley are our indefatigable experts on the computer-and-imaging systems. David Jacobs protects the books with his expertise as a conservator. Juan Garces provides liaison and his professional skills as a Greek scholar and curator. Chris Collins provides high-tech environmental monitoring equipment. Amy Blackwell oversees the video team and works with David on handling the manuscripts. Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, Neel Smith, and Christopher Blackwell stand by to see what discoveries these manuscripts may reveal.

The staff of El Escorial, particularly Director José Luis del Valle Merino, and his assistant, Padre Fabian, have been warmly welcoming, enthusiastic, and generous. It is a great privilege to collaborate with these professionals and to work in such an exalted space.

The raw data from this work will be archived, and available for use, at the Homer Multitext’s data archive at the University of Houston. Human interfaces to the data will emerge as we conduct post-processing, indexing, and linking during the late summer and autumn of this year.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Some preliminary notes and bibliography for Escorial Iliad manuscripts E3 and E4

(Updated 1/6/2011) As work begins in Madrid, I thought it would be helpful to gather here some preliminary notes and bibliography for the two manuscripts of the Iliad that are being digitized over the next few weeks. Once we have had a chance to study the images, I or others on the team should be able to improve upon these initial notes, which were taken before arriving in Spain.



E3 (= West E, Escorialensis Υ.I.1) is an 11th century parchment codex consisting of 336 folios, containing Iliad 1.1–24.717 with accompanying scholia.The first seven folios have been restored by later hands (folio 1 in the fifteenth century, folios 2–7 in the thirteenth century). Individual books are preceded by a one verse metrical summary, (the same one verse summaries that you find in Venetus B, but occasionally the one from A is also added in a later hand - see, e.g., folio 40r, the beginning of book 3). There are no hypotheses, subscriptions, or critical signs. The text and scholia in this manuscript are closely related to the ones in the Venetus B, which is also from the eleventh century; Maniaci (2006) has argued that Venetus B and E3 are “twins,” in that every folio matches the layout and content of the corresponding folio in the other manuscript. (As Bethe first noted, it is only the oldest, numbered set of scholia from B that is found in E3.)  According to the catalogue, the manuscript was purchased in Venice 1572 by  Guzmán de Silva for Philip II, which supports the connection between the two manuscripts—though of course all three were almost certainly produced in Constantinople not Venice, ca. 400 years before coming to Venice. Venetus A, Venetus B, and E3 all have the same style of binding.

E4 (= West F, Escorialensis Ω.I.12) is another eleventh-century parchment codex, thought by Allen to be later than E3,5 consisting of 216 folios, containing a complete text of the Iliad, a commentary with lemmata on Iliad 1–2.300, hypotheses, lives of Homer, a summary of the Cypria, an excerpt from the Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of Frogs and Mice”), excerpts from Porphyry, and other scholia with lemmata. The main text of the Iliad begins on folio 7, where a new set of scholia likewise begins. Individual books are preceded by hypotheses and a one verse metrical summary (the same one verse summaries that you find in Venetus A), and the right columns consist of a paraphrase. According to Allen (1931:148), E4 is not related to any of the other early minuscule manuscripts. The scholia seem to have been collected from several different sources. There is a set of numbered scholia which corresponds to the numbered scholia in B, E3, and Laurentianus 32.3 (= West C). There is another set of scholia in the same hand that is connected to the text with signs, which contain material from the so-called “D scholia” (also known as the scholia minora). This set of scholia is also found in B, but it is in the second, later hand of B. The scholia in this group are linked to the text through signs. The manuscript seems to have been acquired in Venice for the price of 25 ducats, according to a subscription on the last folio (liber mei Benedicti Cornelii quem emi meis pecuniis pretio ducatorum viginti q).

[The image is of folio 124 recto of manuscript E3, showing the beginning of book 10 of the Iliad.]

Bibliography (in order of publication)

Tyschen, T. C. “Beschreibung der Handschriften des Homer in der Escurial.” Bibliothek der alten Litteratur und Kunst VI (1789): 134–144.

Bekker, I., ed. Scholia in Homeri Iliadem. Berlin, 1825-1827.

Miller, E.  Catalogue des Manuscrits Grecs de la Bibliotèque de l’Escurial. Paris, 1848.

Dindorf, W., ed. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem. Oxford, 1875-1888.

Bethe, E. “Zwei Iliashandschriften des Escorial.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie Neue Folge 48 (1893): 355–379 and 484.

Allen, T. W. Homeri Ilias. Vol. I–III. Oxford, 1931.

Revilla, A., ed. Catálogo de los códices griegos de la biblioteca de el Escorial. Vol. I. Madrid, 1936.

de Andrés, G., ed. Catálogo de los códices griegos de la Real biblioteca de el Escorial. Vol. II–III. Madrid, 1965–1967.

Erbse, H., ed. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem. Berlin, 1969-1988.

West, M. L., ed. Homeri Ilias. Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998–2000.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Digitization of 2 Iliad manuscripts in the Escorial to begin next week


Next week Mary Ebbott, Christopher Blackwell, Neel Smith, and I will travel to Madrid, where we will meet up with David Jacobs and Juan Garcés of the British Library and Brent Seales and a team of researchers from the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments. Our goal is to capture the best possible images of two important Iliad manuscripts in the collection of the Escorial monastery in San Lorenzo. Subsequent posts will give more information about the imaging process, and the significance of the text and scholia in these manuscripts.

Geneva Iliad to provide exciting challenges for HMT

I had the opportunity to visit the Genavensis 44 manuscript of the Iliad last week during my trip to Switzerland for the E-codices workshop. The manuscript is undergoing an extensive restoration and has been completely unbound. I was able to see that the manuscript is indeed in need of extensive restoration, and I learned a great deal about the manuscript by seeing it in person. For example, although I knew that there is an interlinear paraphrase that runs through approximately the first half of the poem, I was not aware that this paraphrase is of the same size and same hand as the main text. It raises the question, for me at least, as to how to characterize this text from the point of view of transcription and identification of text groups. Line numbers are of course modern editorial additions, but when we transcribe this document we will have to make some choices about what to put where. I assume we will separate out the paraphrase from the text of the poem, but having access to the images of the manuscript itself will allow users of this transcription to appreciate that the paraphrase was originally written to be an organic part of the reading of this manuscript. When we separate it out, we lose something of that experience.