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Praha 2008
Academia, 110 00 Praha 1, Václavské nám.
34
ISBN 978-80-200-1618-8
EAN 9788020016188
GA ČR 405/03/0232
K vydání připravila, přeložila, úvodní studií,
poznámkami, výběrem iluminací a rejstříky opatřila Alena Hadravová.
Kniha dvacatera umění (Liber viginti arcium) je polozapomenutým pokladem latinské literatury a jedinou dochovanou středověkou encyklopedií českého autora. Mistr pěti univerzit Pavel Žídek ji sestavil po vzoru velkých západoevropských encyklopedií ve druhé polovině 15. století v Plzni pro krále Jiřího z Poděbrad a shrnul v ní veškerou vzdělanost své doby.
Přinášíme první vydání přírodovědné části encyklopedie, jejíž unikátní rukopis je uložen v Krakově. Edici provází český překlad a komentáře, zařazující látku do kontextu děl od antiky po pozdní středověk. Výrazné shody se slovníky českého mistra Klareta z doby Karla IV. dovolují vyslovit hypotézu, že Žídkův text je možná adaptací dnes neznámé práce, která byla podkladem již pro starší Klaretovo dílo. Také v kontextu dějin evropské literatury zaujímá Žídkova encyklopedie významnější postavení, než se doposud soudilo.
English summary:
The Book of Twenty
Arts by Master Pavel Žídek (Paulerinus)
The
Section on Natural History
This book offers the first edition of the section on natural history in the massive Latin encyclopaedia, Liber viginti arcium (The Book of Twenty Arts), written by Master Pavel Žídek (Paulus de Praga, Paulerinus, about 1422–1471). Although this section represents only a small fragment of the whole work, through it Paulerinus introduced into Bohemia a coherent overview of contemporary zoological and botanical knowledge that had spread throughout Europe during the course of the Middle Ages.
Paulerinus had studied at five European universities: Vienna (where he obtained a degree of Master of Liberal Arts), Padua, Bologna (where he earned doctorates in philosophy, law and medicine, and from where in 1442 he returned home to be ordained a priest in Regensburg), Prague (1443) and Cracow (1451). Presumably he favored medicine in these studies, as can be judged from the attention he devoted to that art in his treatises. Although born into a Jewish family (his name Žídek means „little Jew“ in Czech), Paulerinus became acquainted with the Hussite faith, and during his studies at Vienna converted to catholicism. After some disagreements with the Masters of Prague University, he left Bohemia and spent the years from 1451 to 1454 in Wrocław and Cracow. He quarreled with the Italian adversary of Hussites, Giovanni Capistrano (1386–1456), and in 1452 escaped with difficulty from a jail in Wrocław and left Silesia. After a short stay in Prague he moved to Cracow, where he was arrested again and in 1454 was released to Bohemia by Cardinal Sbignev Oleśnicki. Taking shelter in catholic Pilsen (1455), he spent a decade in retirement writing his extended encyclopaedia Liber viginti arcium, dedicated to King George of Poděbrady. Žídek sought the King’s favour and tried to enter his court. By the end of his life (after 1466) he had made some progress with the King, but did not manage to improve his impoverished living conditions. He waited in vain for the position of canon at St. Vitus in Prague or bishop at Litomyšl. During these years Paulerinus wrote in Czech an advice manual entitled Správovna for George of Poděbrady. Apparently he wrote also several other works no longer extant – a collection of Latin fables and two additional versions of his huge encyclopaedia, the Vinculatorium minus and the Vinculatorium maius.
The Liber viginti arcium is preserved in a unique parchment manuscript from the fifteenth century. Soon after Paulerinus’s death the manuscript found its way to Poland, during the rule of King Wladislaw II Jagellonian, where it was brought by a student, Jan Wels of Poznań. Today the codex is preserved in the Jagellonian Library in Cracow (Ms. 257). No other copies of the manuscript are known to have circulated. The treatise contains 359 folios. With its massive size (60 × 40 cm) and weight (21 kilograms), it is the largest book found in Jagellonian Library, despite not being completely preserved. The beginning of the work (the part on grammar) is missing – today’s folio 1r was preceded by some lost sheets. Also the final five „arts“ are missing at the end. In between, a large portion of the section on arithmetic and the complete section on geometry are missing from the introductory septem artes liberales (seven liberal arts) and there are gaps at about fourteen other places of the codex. The part on the seven liberal arts is followed by discussion of the four elements (ignis, aer, aqua, terra) and the zoological species living in them (birds, fish and land animals). These passages (ff. 172rb–177vb, 178rb–180rb and 190rb–193va) are edited here. Descriptions of geography, stones, minerals, metals and most of the plants, all referred to by Paulerinus on f. 180v, are missing. The only preserved part of botany is a short explanation of trees (arborarium). These folios (ff. 193va–194vb) dealing with dendrology are also included in this edition. The very extended discussion of medicine, the eleventh art that remained Paulerinus’s lifelong interest, starts on f. 195r. Unfortunately, again several folia are missing here. Starting from f. 255r we can follow the fifteenth art, law, and the volume ends with canon law. All together, there are preserved at least fragments of fourteen of the total of twenty arts or fields of knowledge. It is difficult to date exactly when the volume was damaged; however, several notes in a contemporary hand suggest that some folia were probably lost already in the fifteenth century. The treatise is written by two scribes: ff. 1r–33v are probably Paulerinus’s autograph, presumably a fragment of his otherwise lost Vinculatorium maius. The remainder of the volume, ff. 34r–359v, is in the hand of Paulus de Novo Castro, Paulerinus’s pupil and assistant.
In most paragraphs or „items“ of the encyclopaedia, the initials are missing; the current edited section on natural history contains no initials. In all but two cases (items 36. [ ]orincal and 57. [ ]rocomar), we have been able to determine the missing initials.
In two places the scribe writing the Latin text added in the margins Old Czech translations of the described terms. One deals with artisans; on ff. 186v–189v there appear marginal translations of the titles of artisans and numerous interlinear glosses on their products and tools. The other occurs in the description of animals and trees on f. 173r and ff. 175r–180r. For philological reasons, it is useful to publish these two parts of the encyclopaedia in order to investigate the relations between the Latin and Old Czech terminology.
The provenance of the codex has been quite extraordinary. For a long time the content of Paulerinus’s encyclopaedia was little known, presumably because after the volume reached Cracow, a suspicion arose that it was a book of magic sorcerery formerly belonging to the Polish Faust named Twardowski who had lived in the sixteenth century. This fear, probably prompted by the spectacular size of the manuscript, was enhanced by the fact that a large part at the bottom of folio 150r is covered by a dark spot assumed to be a devil’s fingerprint. Thus, paradoxically, a book compiling the knowledge of previous generations became associated with an irrational dread, so that by the eighteenth (rationalist) century it was stored under a heavy stone! One of the first readers to again looked into the codex was the Polish scholar Josef Muczkowski, who excerpted some Old Czech glosses for use in the Czech–German dictionary by Josef Jungmann.
Paulerinus’s explanations of animals and trees are often not original. He drew from many sources handed down from antiquity during the entire Middle Ages. The main source of inspiration and knowledge on natural history is represented by Aristotle’s De animalibus [our mark: Arist]. However, in the Middle Ages this work circulated not in its original Greek but only in Latin translations. The Greek forms of names of different animals and their influence on the evolution of the Latin terminology in natural sciences have been studied in Bohemia by Bohumil Ryba, among others. Paulerinus’s antique sources also include Pliny’s Naturalis historia, Lucan’s Pharsalia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hyginus’s Fabulae, etc. The tradition of stories about animals was also influenced by the late antique compilation Collectanea rerum memorabilium by Solin and others.
Other important and influential sources of knowledge on the animals in the Middle Ages included the Bible and dependent works by the Church Fathers (e.g. Ambrosius’s Hexaemeron and the encyclopaedia, De universo libri, by /H/rabanus Maurus). Following the account in Genesis, birds were created on the fifth day of Creation, and quadrupeds and snakes on the sixth day. Another genre dealing with animals in the Middle Ages are the bestiaries developed from Physiologus, an anonymous Greek collection of stories on several tens of animals, mostly of biblical origin. This collection circulated for many centuries in numerous Latin versions throughout Western Europe. The manuscripts Theobaldus [Theob] (PL 171) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1511, f. 4–104 [Ash 1511] (edition, German translation and facsimile Unterkircher 1986) have been used as representative bestiaries for comparison in the present work. It is common for bestiaries, after describing the nature and behavior of each animal, to comment allegorically on related Christian moral principles (cf. e.g. Aviarium by Hugo de Folieto /Hugues de Fouilloy/, c. 1130–1140).
Unlike most bestiaries, however, Paulerinus’s treatise does not include Christian parables and moral precepts. It corresponds rather to the genre of encyclopaedias which were another source of natural knowledge in the Middle Ages. For a comparison with Paulerinus’s text, the following encyclopaedias have been chosen: Etymologiae by Isidorus Hispalensis (560/570–636) [IH], Subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum libri novem by Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) [Hild], De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus (c. 1190–1250) [BA], Liber de natura rerum by Thomas Cantipratensis (c. 1201–1270/1272) [TC], Speculum naturale by Vincentius Bellovacensis (c. 1190–1264) [VB], and De animalibus by Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) [AM]. This comparison reveals that the Paulerinus’s text undoubtedly depends on, among others, the encyclopaedia of Thomas Cantipratensis. However, it bears an even closer relation with the lexical work of a Czech scholar, Master Bartholomaeus of Chlumec (Bartoloměj z Chlumce, Claretus de Solencia, Klaret, c. 1320–1370). Claretus earned the degree of Master of Liberal Arts at Prague University and later led the cathedral school of St. Vitus in Prague. The following Claretus Latin–Czech dictionaries, written mostly in leonine hexameter, are essential for the comparison with Paulerinus’s text on the natural sciences: Bohemarius [ClarBoh] from about 1355 and Glossarius [ClarGl] from years 1359–1364. These dictionaries are in fact Latin–Czech indices or lists of items from medieval encyclopaedias, especially their sections on nature, of which Thomas’s Cantipratensis is one. Important also is Claretus’s didactic description of nature, Physiologiarius or Ortulus phisologie (Garden of physiology) [ClarPhys], from the period before 1366. Claretus managed to finish only the explanation on birds, despite having intended to write on fish, quadrupeds, snakes, trees and herbs (following the chronology of the Creation of the world).
Claretus lived and worked during the rule of the Emperor Charles IV, about one hundred years before Paulerinus. Paulerinus’s admiration for this historical period, reflected in his attention to Claretus, has been recognized at other occasions by previous generations of Czech historians. In his Správovna, Paulerinus clearly argued that the situation in Bohemia under the reign of Charles IV was the ideal; he effusively praised Charles IV, but completely condemned his son Wenceslas IV, during whose rule the Hussite movement arose.
It is obvious that Paulerinus could not base his extensive text solely on the index of Claretus’s dictionaries. Given the wide scope and huge extent of his encyclopaedia, Paulerinus could not have time enough to compose a completely original text, complementing Claretus’s titles by his own explanations or even elaborating the individual items. Such work, after all, was not to be expected from an encyclopaedist. Hence, Paulerinus’s content is not very original, but depends heavily on his predecessors. On the other hand, the Book of Twenty Arts is not a direct version of the encyclopaedia by Thomas Cantipratensis or any other above mentioned work. It thus seems likely that some other text, unknown to us or possibly even lost today, may have served as a common source for both the excerpts to Claretus’s dictionaries as well as to Paulerinus’s more extensive copy. That is, Paulerinus may have preserved, more or less, the form of an older text that Claretus a century earlier had known and used.
The natural history of the encyclopaedia by Pavel Žídek (Paulerinus) represents in Czech literature the oldest known complex compilation of this subject that dated back to antiquity and circulated throughout the Middle Ages in different texts by western authors including Thomas Cantipratensis or Albertus Magnus. The relation of these sources to the Paulerinus’s encyclopaedia can be seen from the statistics of common items given in the Tables in Chapter on pp. 77 - 86. It is obvious that the vast majority of Paulerinus’s items was adapted from common sources; however, some of the ideas do appear to be unprecedented. Several items also contain some details revealing the Czech origin. For instance voice of the bird [M]enula („green plover“) is compared to the Czech word „knihy“ (i.e. books) in item 113. Claretus wrote that bird sings „libros, libros“, despite this Latin translation does not resemble the bird’s voice. This case supports the hypothesis of a common source for both Paulerinus and Claretus, presumably of Czech origin. Other local Czech additions can be found in items 284 and 308, where the appearance of corresponding fish in the river Vltava in Prague and in the Morava river, respectively, are mentioned (the later even as an endemic species).
Although the manuscript of Paulerinus’s Book of Twenty Arts was intended for the King and was spectacular and obviously expensive due to its size, the codex is not decorated by any illumination. However, the zoological and botanical sections of the encyclopaedias reflected in Paulerinus’s work were often accompanied by illustrations of considerable importance for understanding the texts. In order to provide readers of the present edition with information on visual imagination connected with the topic in the Middle Ages, two types of examples of artists’ views are added here. The Czech translation of Žídek’s text is supplemented with miniatures from Jacob van Maerlant, Der naturen bloeme, c. 1350, preserved in The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), ms. KA 16. Another series of illuminations is included in the endnotes. The purpose of these two series is different. While the uniform style of the former evokes the characteristic flavour and rhythmical order of a medieval encyclopaedia and shows the limitations of then available visual information, the later series intended for study of the art of illumination enables to compare the styles in different sources of both Czech and foreign provenance for a limited number of selected particularly interesting subjects.
