Download PDF | (The Medieval Mediterranean 61) Charles Barber, David Jenkins - Reading Michael Psellos-Brill Academic Publishers (2006).
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FOREWORD
These papers originated in a workshop held at the University of
Notre Dame in February 2004. That meeting, the first in a series
dedicated to Byzantine Intellectual History, brought together a small
group of scholars from diverse intellectual traditions to discuss how
one might read Michael Psellos (1018–after 1081?). The recent publication of editions of most of the writings produced by Michael
Psellos has both facilitated our discussions of this key intellectual
figure and has encouraged a series of detailed studies.
Furthermore,
one of the outcomes of this workshop has been the development of
a project to publish extensive translations into English of the works
of Michael Psellos. It is to be hoped that this will encourage a wider
readership, who will in time come to read Psellos’s works in the
original Greek, and who will from these encounters learn to understand the value of this engaging and original intellect. Needless to
say, Psellos was a very attractive figure, one who deserves to be
known beyond a small circle of Byzantinists.
He was a courtier,
rhetorician, philosopher, polymath, historian, theologian, letter writer,
poet, and reluctant monk. His intellectual work brought the legacy
of ancient philosophy (largely mediated by neoplatonic commentary)
to bear on problems in Christian theology as well as many other
issues. Indeed, the intellectual range found in these writings will surprise many readers. The present volume is not intended to encompass all of the possibilities inherent in Psellos’ oeuvre. Rather, we
offer readings of his texts from a variety of scholarly perspectives:
literary, art historical, philosophical and historical. While the approaches
on offer are varied, each essay betrays the value of a close reading
of the sources.
The editors would like to thank all the participants in this process.
In particular we would like to thank the Institute for Scholarship in
the Liberal Arts in the College of Arts and Letters and the Medieval
Institute of Notre. Both institutions supported our workshop and
thereby endorsed the continuing value of Byzantine studies at Notre
Dame.
DEALING WITH THE PSELLOS CORPUS:
FROM ALLATIUS TO WESTERINK AND THE
BIBLIOTHECA TEUBNERIANA
John Duffy
Reading Michael Psellos with fresh eyes and along a wider swathe
is a project that becomes increasingly possible and meaningful with
the appearance of more and more critical editions of his numerous
works.
There was no other Byzantine intellectual as many-sided and productive as this renaissance man of the eleventh century. His philomatheia and boundless curiosity led him to explore in writing the
highways and byways of ancient and medieval thought, culture and
literature, from the grand sweep of historical narrative in his Chronographia to the nitty gritty of philology in short treatises, from the
high-flying theories of Plato and Proclus to the lowly properties of
stones, from the revered theology of Gregory of Nazianzos to the
suspect lore of the Chaldaean Oracles, and the list could go on at
length. In the standard history of secular Byzantine literature, by
Herbert Hunger, the largest index entry by far is claimed by Psellos
and the reason is simple: he figures—either as author, presumed
author, or expert witness—, in almost every single genre and subcategory of writing covered in that exhaustive two-volume account.
The sheer quantity of the output, not to mention its transmission
through the centuries in manuscript form, has always posed a serious
bibliographical challenge. The earliest attempt to pull the disparate
strands together and to systematically describe the vast oeuvre of
Psellos was made by the indefatigable and learned Leo Allatius in
the seventeenth century. First published as a short monograph in
1634 his De Psellis et eorum scriptis diatriba, after some preliminary discussion of two other figures said to have the name Michael Psellos,
introduces our man in inevitably extravagant terms as “the teacher
of Michael Ducas, who, having achieved the highest distinction in the Republic of Letters, won such an honorable name
for himself among men of later times that he obliterated the memory of those other Pselli, thanks to the sharpness of his mind, the vastness
of his learning, the depth of his knowledge, the variety of his arguments, the multitude of his writings, and the splendor of his fame.”
Dubbing him “omnium polugrafw&tatov” Allatius goes on to list
and describe, in greater or lesser detail of considerable interest, the
series of sixteenth and seventeenth century editions (most with Latin
translations) of writings ascribed to Psellos, followed by an accounting of further works culled from earlier bibliographical sources and
library catalogs, and then, to complete the process, a report on at
least ninety additional items that Allatius himself had come across
in various manuscript collections. And even after all of this he had
to admit that his record was not complete. But he would have been
greatly surprised to learn how wide of the mark he was in some
instances. For example, he estimated the epistolary output of Psellos
to be “around thirty-three” items; the actual number of extant genuine letters is over five hundred.
For three and a half centuries after the time of Allatius there were
no further attempts to generate a universal bibliography for the prodigious Psellos.
The nearest thing in spirit was the useful index (with
work titles, opening and closing words) of the several hundred pieces
of Pselliana preserved in the hugely important Paris manuscript of
the thirteenth century, Parisinus graecus 1182. It was compiled by
Constantine Sathas and printed as part of his introduction to an edition, from that manuscript, of orations, letters and other unedited
works of the Byzantine polymath. Sathas himself, commenting on
the efforts of Allatius, acknowledged that the number of known writings had grown so large by the latter part of the nineteenth century,
that a description and expert analysis of them would require a special
study and would take many years to complete.
Happily such a study has finally been carried out and has just
appeared in print.
A Canadian scholar, Paul Moore, after more than
twenty years of dedication to the task, has produced a catalogue raisonné
of the many hundreds of texts and opuscula attributed to Psellos.
Called appropriately Iter Psellianum, the new research tool provides
for each item, in addition to the basic identifying information—work
title, incipit and desinit—, not only a full listing of the manuscript witnesses, but also all printed editions and translations, as well as a
complete record of the relevant scholarship in each case up to the
year 2000. A bibliography of Psellos, in the broadest sense, is now
for the first time a reality.
But what about a modern critical edition of the writings? If a
description of the corpus and its transmission proved to be such a
daunting undertaking, it is not difficult to appreciate why no one
person single-handedly, however courageous and industrious, ever
managed to present to the world the full Psellos edited according to
even minimally acceptable scholarly standards. Leaving out of the
picture the large number of printed editions of single items or small
collections that appeared between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, it is possible to point to only a very few attempts to make
available under one cover significant groups of works.
The first of
these, in essence a reprint undertaking, was a volume of the Patrologia
Graeca series (no. 122), published in Paris in the 1860’s by J. P.
Migne. The largest share of the volume (which contained also some
of the historical works of George Cedrenus and John Scylitzes)—
around six hundred and fifty columns with Greek texts, Latin translations and notes—, is devoted to reproducing a number of Psellos
treatises from earlier editions, arranged into the four broad subject
categories of theology, law, philosophy and history. The title page
announces both comprehensiveness and novelty: Michaelis Pselli opera
quae reperiri potuerunt omnia nunc primum in unum collecta. However, despite
the extravagant claims of the enterprising Frenchman, made in the
immediate vicinity of Allatius’ tabulations which he also reprints, the
twenty-five texts that he offers (and those by no means free of spuria)
turn out to be in retrospect a mere fraction of the total oeuvre.
Again, to take the letters as an easy example, Migne makes available a dozen and not all of the twelve are genuine.
Another milestone was reached later in the nineteenth century
when Constantine Sathas, already mentioned, used the entire fifth
volume of his Mesaionike Bibliotheke to print a large amount of Psellos
material preserved in the Parisinus graecus 1182. From that collection
he made available fourteen orations of various kinds, over two hundred of the letters, and a small group of shorter miscellaneous treatises. Though it was not a critical edition in any real sense, it was
a major accomplishment and performed a great service for Psellos
studies for many years.
A significant step forward, and one more in line with modern
scholarly expectations, was achieved by the publication of the two
volumes of Scripta minora that appeared under the names of E. Kurtz
and F. Drexl in the late thirties and early forties of the last century.
Here for the first time was an edition based on the main manuscript witnesses, complete with two sets of apparatus (variant readings and
intertextual references), and provided with rich sets of indices. The
first volume (1936) offered some fifty-two texts of prose and verse,
comprising orations and a variety of shorter writings, and many of
these for the first time. The companion volume (1942) brought to
light over two hundred previously unpublished letters, along with
some sixty more that had been printed by earlier scholars other than
Sathas.
Then, after Kurtz-Drexl, came the Westerink era.
Michael Psellos was looming large in the thoughts of L. G. Westerink
at the beginning of 1972. The personal file that he labeled “Psellus
Correspondence” has for its first item a letter written in February
of that year to Günther Christian Hansen at the German Academy
of Sciences in East Berlin, the editor of the Teubner series of Greek
and Latin authors, and himself an outstanding philologist. Here the
mind-boggling idea of a collected edition of Psellos is proposed in
one paragraph of a dozen lines, all calm, polite and in impeccably
idiomatic German.
The opening sentence simply states, “In the last
number of years I have turned my attention increasingly to Byzantine
literature and recently I have also resurrected the old plan for a
complete Psellos edition.”
The mention of the “old plan” must mean that L. G. W. had
already some years before this broached the subject with Hansen or
his predecessor. But that would not have been, by a long shot, the
beginning of the story. One of the indications that the “plan” went
deep into the past is to be found in a short letter that L. G. W.
wrote, also in February 1972, to Hans-Georg Beck, the leading
German Byzantinist of the day. It was an enquiry about the possible
fate of the papers of E. Kurtz and begins with the statement that,
some thirty years previously, he had been informed by F. Drexl that
he (Drexl) had still enough material for at least a third volume of
Scripta minora. Since Drexl had died soon afterwards, Westerink was
now wondering what might have become of that material. What the
episode clearly shows is that sometime in the early forties L. G. W.
had written to Drexl to ask if there were more of the minor writings
of Psellos to come out in print.
That is precisely the period in which
Westerink, then in his native Holland, was himself working on the
edition of Psellos’ De omnifaria doctrina, a critical text and introduction eventually accepted for the degree of D. Litt. at the University
of Nijmegen in 1948 and published in the same year.
The De omnifaria doctrina, however, was just the tip of the iceberg,
when it came to the young scholar’s interest in Psellos. There are
good reasons to believe that throughout the 1940’s (and possibly
before that) L. G. W. was laying the groundwork for a major assault
on large sections of the Psellan corpus. The evidence, surviving among
his papers, is in two forms. The first is his personal annotated copies
of the Patrologia Graeca vol. 122 and of Sathas Mesaionike Bibliotheke
vol. 5. The Migne is particularly interesting, because it was first
unbound, then a blank sheet of good quality paper was inserted
before every page of the Psellos texts, and finally the whole was
rebound. The notes in pencil and pen on those intercalated leaves
in the hand of L. G. W. (variant readings, corrections, emendations,
intertextual references) attest to a long-standing preoccupation with
the complete range of printed Psellos texts. The second form of evidence is a series of notebooks, in Dutch and Latin, each one devoted
to a different aspect of Psellos research, such as “Bibliography”,
“Manuscripts”, “Testimonia”, “The Letters”.
In addition to these
there are also many handwritten transcriptions of unedited texts,
some of which would eventually make their way into the hands of
the Psellos team of editors.
Which brings us back to 1972. By this time L. G. W. had been
at the State University of New York at Buffalo for seven years in
his first professorial appointment and, having just completed the second installment of the Scripta Minora of Arethas for the Teubner
series, he was now deeply committed to several other multi-volume
editing tasks, including the Epistulae and Amphilochia of Photios and
the Théologie Platonicienne of Proclus. We may assume that, on the
verge of his sixtieth birthday and unwilling to let go of a project
that had been sometimes to the fore and sometimes in the back of
his mind for half a lifetime, he decided to take the plunge and to
assemble a group of younger scholars to share the labor of producing a collected Psellos edition.
When the response of the Teubner Verlag to the proposal came
back it was encouraging and Westerink quickly put together for the
publisher a provisional plan for Michaelis Pselli Opera which divided
the materials according to subject matter into fourteen volumes. Over
the course of the next five years things moved slowly but surely on
several fronts. It became known, for instance, that two European
scholars had independent intentions to edit parts of the corpus and
L. G. W., lente festinans and polite as always, took the trouble to clarify the situation before assigning some of the volumes for the
new series. In the meantime, for those works involving no possible
conflict of interest, he began to approach potential editors in the
United States and Canada. This process too took time. Some invitees after reflection decided that, despite the merits of the undertaking, they could not participate, and so it became necessary to
look further afield. Others, in view of existing scholarly obligations,
had to wait before they could make a definite commitment.
Finally,
by 1977, a group of seven editors had signed on to prepare a volume each, and the project was officially announced in the course of
that year in the leading Byzantine journals.
This is the English version of the original announcement as prepared by Westerink:
Teubner Texts of Psellus
Editions of some major groups of writings of Michael Psellus are being
prepared for the Bibliotheca Teubneriana (edited for the Akademie
der Wissenschaften der DDR by Dr. G. Chr. Hansen, Berlin). Whether
the project can, and should, eventually be expanded into a complete
collected edition will be a matter for later consideration. For the present the following volumes are in a more or less advanced stage of
planning or preparation:
Orationes hagiographicae (Elizabeth Fisher, Washington).
Orationes funebres (K. Snipes, Chapel Hill, N. C.).
Orationes panegyricae; orationes forenses (including documents)
(G. T. Dennis, Washington).
Oratoria minora (A. R. Littlewood, London, Ontario).
Commentarius in librum De interpretatione ( J. Whittaker, St. John’s
Newfoundland).
Tractatus philosophici ( J. M. Duffy and D. J. O’Meara, Washington).
Poemata didactica (L. G. Westerink, Buffalo).
The format will be the usual one of the series: a definitive critical text
with full indices for each volume.
The project does not attempt to
supersede existing editions with translation or commentary or make
future publications of this kind superfluous. Since, however, Psellus’
extant work totals over four thousand Teubner pages, only a few hundred of which have been properly indexed, it is felt that this is the
only way to make this vast body of writing accessible for the purposes
of history, theology, philosophy and lexicography.
One can see reflected here characteristic trademarks of the project’s
leader, beginning with the realistic note of caution about a possible
expansion towards a full collection. The closing paragraph echoes the core of his philosophy of editing Byzantine literature in general
and the works of Psellos in particular. The best statement of those
principles appeared a few years previously in an essay on “L’édition
des textes byzantins,” which formed the Avant-Propos to his 1973
book Nicétas Magistros: Lettres d’un exilé. It was a stirring apologia for
the strict application of traditional philological methods to medieval
Greek literature, founded on the reasoning that, if we want to use
Byzantine texts for any kind of historical purpose, we must prepare
critical editions based on the complete fund of extant manuscripts.
To illustrate and drive home the point he brings the essay to a close
by citing the case of the correspondence of Psellos, “The edition of
Psellos’ letters by Kurtz-Drexl, however valuable, does not provide
information on the material variants (in particular, the names of the
addressees) that separate the Italian manuscripts, used by Kurtz, from
the Parisinus graecus 1182 as edited by Sathas. All of these issues—
the state of the text, authenticity, connection with historical facts—,
can only be resolved with the help of all the available manuscript
witnesses. In short, no edition will be truly useful unless it takes into
account the entire tradition.” Statements of principle in Westerink’s
case were backed by years of experience and practice in text editing and their application was on very early display in the exemplary
1948 text of the De omnifaria doctrina. In that “complete critical edition”,
as he called it in the introduction, he emerged from the jungle of
manuscripts to establish convincingly and for the first time the four
distinct redactions of the work that Psellos had issued at different
times in his career.
For Teubner each editor, including the leader, signed a separate
contract and the project went into motion, guided at every phase to
the extent necessary by L. G. W. His role in the early stages saw
him issue, in the interests of consistency, a set of guidelines in addition to the Teubner inhouse rules.
These laid out, in precise and
sensible detail, advice for the handling of diverse facets of the work,
from the establishment of sigla for designating the enormous number of text witnesses to be used—many of them common to several
of the volumes—, to the creation of three sets of indices (citations,
names, and words), a feature of the enterprise that he had always
emphasized. For the text itself he suggested the following modus
operandi, “If divergences between manuscripts exceed the measure
of normal copyists’ errors, the probability is that we have to do with a revision by (or commissioned by) Psellos himself. In these cases it
is best not to mix the versions, but to base the text on one recension (obvious errors excepted), relegating the others to the apparatus
criticus.”
It was far more time consuming and costly to secure the material base of the project.
If each volume was to present a “definitive
critical text”, as promised in the original announcement, that meant
that every witness for every work had to be located and a film or
photocopy purchased. Over the course of several years, often aided
by a mutually beneficial exchange of information with P. Moore as
he gathered materials for Iter Psellianum, L. G. W. issued a series of
lists to the editors, and by the time the last one was prepared the
number of manuscripts had passed the 500 mark. Fortunately at his
home institution he had been appointed to the endowed Andrew
Raymond Chair of Classics in 1975 and now had available special
funds for research expenses. Countless requests were sent out from
Buffalo to libraries in Europe and elsewhere, a process that was timeconsuming, often frustrating, but occasionally also affording moments
or episodes of light relief.
Once, when an order for parts of fifteen manuscripts was submitted to a German library, it elicited a counter-request from the
Leiter der Handschriftenabteilung for an explanation, “because of
the unusual size of the order.” L. G. W. wrote back to say that the
copies were necessary for an edition of Psellos, and as for the size
of the request, the only excuse he could offer for himself was “dass
Psellos nun einmal zuviel geschrieben hat und zuviel abgeschrieben
worden ist.” He might have added a pertinent cultural gloss, one of
his own sentences from the 1973 Avant-Propos essay, “Le chemin
vers la gloire littéraire, à Byzance, c’était la polymathie et la polygraphie,” but that would have spoiled the fun.
At another stage he was trying to obtain copies from one of the
Patriarchal libraries in the East and wrote a highly respectful letter
to His Beatitude requesting permission for the photography to be
done.
Shortly thereafter, through the gracious librarian, he was
informed that the 164 postcard size photos in question would cost
$164. The check for the amount was duly sent, but nine months
later, because nothing had happened, he had to write again to ask
if the money had been received, and if not, he was prepared to set
the matter right. Finally, the following charming missive, in the hand of the librarian, arrived in Buffalo, as if from a different world and
another age:
Greetings!
Today I am glad to communicate, once more, a few thoughts with
you on the subject of one hundred and sixty four post cards depicting texts from manuscripts you eagerly have requested, almost two
years ago, from the Patriarchal Library’s Department of Manuscripts!
Asked yesterday by His Eminence the Metropolitan of—, who has just
arrived from His annual vacation, to be at His office in a relatively
short time after His notification, I presented myself before the Vicar
General (of His Beatitude the Patriarch) with due respect. I waited
somehow perplexed until the time came when the Exarch of the—
Patriarchate got away with His blessing.
I found myself in front of His
Eminence. After a brief discussion we had on matters of Patriarchal
policy and its Institute’s status, He suddenly looked radiant. He casually presented the long wanted cheque of one hundred and sixty four
US dollars (N.Y. Bank, July 30, 19—, no. 41642312). I looked at my
watch. It was almost 11 o’clock. I can now carry on.
No further detail. Oliver Wendell Holmes said: “Logic is logic, that’s
all I say” at the very end of “The Deacon’s Masterpiece.” I take this
opportunity to add my sad comment: “Research is research,” i.e. it
has to be done systematically, and in due time, not in two years as it
is understood here in—.
With very good wishes, I am Sir
yours sincerely
——.
During the years in which the early volumes were in preparation
L. G. W. was always quietly in the background and at the ready to
supply manuscript materials, offer advice, or write letters of support
when individual editors applied for leaves or fellowship time to work
on Psellos, but he never hovered over the project, as that was not his
style. I have described elsewhere his way of relating to doctoral students under his supervision and the passage may be appropriately
repeated here: “In keeping with his general mode of dealing with students and collaborators, Westerink gave a long leash to dissertation
writers; never intrusive, he was always there when needed. Perhaps
there were occasions when a bit of prodding was called for and might
have been beneficial, but that would have amounted to pressure and
it was not in his nature to apply it.
Once installments of work were
submitted to him, they came back usually with surprising speed, the
margins decked out with neatly pencilled and lightly written scholia;
there was no wasting of time or space; corrections big and small were pointed out in a matter-of-fact manner; hints for further exploration
were politely given, and in the case of texts, emendations were modestly proposed and concisely supported. The tone of the whole exercise was one of efficiency and helpfulness.”1 The Psellos project was
handled in the same spirit.
By the time that the first volume of the new Teubner edition appeared
in 1985 Westerink had already reached retirement age, but it was
retirement in name only, as his work on multiple undertakings continued unabated. In that year he was not only preparing his own
volume of the Poemata, but was also taking care of a recent windfall
for the Psellos collection. Following the premature death of Fr. Paul
Gautier, a leading Psellos expert among the Assumptionist Fathers
in Paris, a portion of his Nachlass was sent to L. G. W. for his
inspection. It was an almost completed edition of 114 pieces of exegesis (in a sense, lecture notes) on Gregory of Nazianzus, from the
Parisinus graecus 1182 and never before published. Westerink of course
was familiar with these and had always wanted to see them in a
volume of theological writings, but had not assigned them to anyone, since he knew of Gautier’s interest. Seizing the opportunity he
quickly contacted Teubner and reached agreement for their inclusion in the series as Theologica I.
He himself, in typical fashion, not
only revised and prepared the work for printing but also composed
a short Latin introduction for each item, a general preface, and a
set of indices to complete the volume, which appeared in 1989. By
the summer of that year he had also finished and submitted to the
printer his own edition of the Poemata. With that off his hands he
immediately turned his mind to a second volume of Theologica to
take care of the remaining treatises and pieces of exegesis on subjects other than Gregory of Nazianzos. He had long been searching
for someone to undertake this, but seeing the chances not improving, he now took the initiative himself in the overall interest of the
project. In one of the last pieces of correspondence from Teubner,
dated May 6, 1989, the editor of the series responded to the news,
“We are very happy that you have decided yourself to take care of the Theologica II volume.
I think that not only the publisher and the
editorial staff of the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, but also many colleagues
both now and in the future will be grateful to you for it.” In its
way it was a fitting tribute and emblematic of a special relationship
of mutual respect that had developed over the course of the twenty
years in which Westerink had published ten volumes of Arethas,
Olympiodorus, Photios and Psellos in that distinguished series under
the courteous and ever helpful eye of G. Chr. Hansen.
Little did either side suspect that the relationship was soon to end.
Less than nine months later L. G. Westerink passed away suddenly,
after a brief illness, in January 1990. At the time of his death there
was left in his typewriter (he had recently acquired a computer, but
had not yet begun using it for texts) a page of Psellos that was destined for the Theologica II volume already well underway.
For the modern phase of work on Psellos this essay has been
largely about L. G. Westerink and not at all about the editors of
the individual volumes in the series. That is a subject for a later
time perhaps and a different teller.
Two other members of the original group, H. K. Snipes and J. Whittaker, suffered untimely deaths,
and new editors have since joined the effort. The project continues
to make progress, but whether it “can, and should, eventually be
expanded into a complete collected edition”, as L. G. W. remarked
in 1977, is still not settled. What is clear, however, is that the expedition that set out to scale Psellos in the 1970’s could not have
reached as far as it has without the scholarly courage, leadership
and dedication of Leendert G. Westerink.
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