2013-05-26

Stemma of Boethius

A new tabulation of online Boethius manuscripts which contain his famous stemma, or arbor porphyriana, has just appeared on my website. (Here.) I have not done serious work on Boethius for more than three years, so I spent a couple of days looking again at the sources.

I find it remarkable that so many of these documents can now be seen remotely via the internet: there are no fewer than eight manuscripts accessible, and three of them duplicate the stemma, so we have a total of eleven early medieval drawings to study.

A task remains for any eager reader. I have not heard that the Greek text of Porphyry, or the translations to Latin, Syriac and Arabic (list by Roger Pearse), contain such a diagram. One is reluctant to trust the critical editions, since text scholars generally leave out diagrams. If anyone would care to comb online versions of these, it would be good to have a clear yes-or-no answer about this.

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