C. Maier's Use of a Reagent in the Vercelli Book

摘要

It was a central purpose of this paper to discuss to what extent and for what reasons Maier treated the Vercelli Book in accordance with 'state-of-the-art' technology available to him when he used his gall tincture. The consideration of possible explanations for the stains should not be misunderstood as an attempt to exculpate Maier from an invasive and destructive act that violates our modern conception of a manuscript's material integrity. Rather, it is an illustration of his bona fide attitude towards widely propagated and justified methods of manuscript research which he followed during the job in hand at Vercelli. The assumption that Maier tried to provide as complete and faithful a transcript as possible formed the basis for an extensive hypothesis concerning his working procedure which tries to account for his reagent application within a more complete procedural context. Bearing in mind the principal function of a reagent is to be a tool for aiding the transcription of hardly legible portions of text in a manuscript, it seemed natural to assume that upon completing a first preliminary transcript Maier set out to identify those passages in the Vercelli Book which-in terms of legibility-would profit from reagent application. Given his ignorance of Old English it would be misleading, though, to suppose that Maier primarily had his eyes on textual cruces. Instead, on the one hand he concentrated on erasures or otherwise damaged sections in the manuscript, and on the other hand on biblical names with spellings which seemed unusual to him. As a docile pupil of Bluhme he was surely aware of its experimental nature, which necessitated a trial of the reagent in order to assess its effects on the Vercelli Book. It seems plausible to assume that he conducted such trials before he began to apply the chemical to those passages where an enhancement in legibility could be hoped for. Finally, constraints of time and possibly curtailed permission to use the chemical may have motivated him to run through this procedure rather hastily and slovenly, resulting in even more damage to the manuscript. Comparing Maier's transcript-the sum of his efforts-with the manuscript itself and with later critical editions demonstrates the limited success he had in using the reagent. If this is ultimately due to his possible incompetence in applying the gall tincture, or if the Vercelli Book simply proved particularly unreceptive to this kind of treatment, cannot be ascertained at this point. As disappointing as his moderately successful efforts might have been to Maier, later generations of scholars certainly may feel relieved that he abstained from applying his reagent to the Vercelli Book as systematically and ruthlessly as some scholars of the nineteenth century did in other manuscripts. In his desire for perfecting the readability of the Vercelli Book, however, Maier expressed the same scholarly instinct which our modern uses of digital photography and multispectral imaging attempt to satisfy-technologies that not only promise a better understanding of the palaeography of the Vercelli Book, but may in turn also remedy some of Maier's hapless interventions which are now part of the history of this codex.