The Sibyl and Her Scribes

Manuscripts and Interpretation of the Latin Sibylla Tiburtina c. 1050–1500

Anke Holdenried

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754633754
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351881951
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Sibylla Tiburtina is a Latin prophecy attributed to a prophetess from classical antiquity. It concludes with an account of the End of History, involving the coming of the Antichrist and his battle with a Last World Emperor. Approximately 100 manuscripts, written between the mid-11th and the 16th centuries, survive which testify to the Tiburtina's immense popularity in the medieval West; as such the Tiburtina is a key text for understanding medieval apocalypticism and occupies an important place in the intellectual history of the Middle Ages. However, studies of the manuscripts and the history of the text have been largely neglected, in comparison with other similar works, so little is currently known about who copied and read the prophecy. Dr Holdenried's research fills this gap. This study is based on an examination of all surviving manuscripts and includes an analysis of the textual material which accompanies the Tiburtina, a survey of titles and annotations, as well as research on variant texts (including several hitherto unknown). Modern historiography regards the Tiburtina solely as a vehicle for expressing contemporary political concerns triggered by crises thought to herald the End of the World. This book provides a much more varied picture and offers a new approach to the Tiburtina by placing it, for the first time, in the context of medieval traditions which saw Sibylline prophecy as independent, non-Christian evidence of Christ's life and as confirmation of His divinity. As is shown, these traditions had a major impact on the reception of the Tiburtina. The book concludes with a repertory of the manuscripts, together with brief outlines of individual textual traditions as represented in groups of manuscripts, which will constitute a valuable reference source for other scholars.

Part I
Approaches to the Tiburtina

Chapter 1
The Tiburtina in the Context of Editorial Concerns

Scholars currently regard the Tiburtina as a piece of political propaganda dressed up as prophecy. They have yet to appreciate that this view is too limited and should more appropriately be called the ‘editorial view’. In other words, the current picture of the Tiburtina is a monochrome one, resting entirely on the work of editors who only considered a fraction of the surviving manuscript evidence.¹ Certain biases in Sackur’s seminal nineteenth-century edition of the Tiburtina have obscured evidence of the non-political concerns of its medieval readers. Hence, below, this study of the Tiburtina and its medieval audience starts with a detailed consideration of the editorial process. Besides filling a gap in the historiography, this close-up also serves as the point of departure for the new approaches to the manuscript tradition which are outlined in the following chapters.

The Sibylla Tiburtina and its Editors

The foundations of the Tiburtina’s editorial history were laid by Ernst Sackur, who provided the first critical edition of the text in 1898.² Today the version of the Tiburtina which he edited is still regarded as the standard text.³ Furthermore, all subsequent editors have followed his method of dating surviving copies, which is why the focus here is upon his edition. Although Sackur’s editorial work has stood the test of time, the discovery of new manuscript evidence has led to revision of some of his findings. For instance, Sackur erroneously believed that his text constituted the first (or oldest) medieval version of the Latin text. It is now clear, though, that Sackur’s text is not the oldest medieval version, but only the second of at least four Latin versions, all of which date from the eleventh century.⁴ I have argued in favour of considering a further variant, the so-called Bedan recension, as a distinct fifth version, though most textual critics of the Tiburtina currently distinguish the following Latin versions of the Tiburtina:⁵

• Version I (Ottonian Sibyl) – this version came into being when the original Latin translation was reworked around the year 1000 (during the time of the Ottonian emperors).⁶ This version introduces a long vaticinium ex eventu, listing rulers of northern Italy (henceforth regnal list I).⁷ It closes with a negative portrait of Otto III (d. 1002) whose reign is prophesied to last no more than five years (see Table 1.1). This version of the text is no longer extant.
• Version II (Sackur’s text) – a reworking of c. 1030 of version I with a new list of monarchs (henceforce regnal list II) to bring it up to date. This is the text edited by Ernst Sackur. His work showed that regnal list II was not simply copied by subsequent scribes but altered further to keep it up to date (see Table 1.2).
• Version III (Cumaean Sibyl) – a third form of the prophecy of c. 1090. This text no longer refers to the Tiburtine Sibyl, but attributes the prophecy instead to the Sibyl of Cumae. The text also omits two thirds of the narrative and consists solely of the Last Emperor prophecy, to which more material is added to create an anti-imperial prophecy. This text has been edited by Carl Erdmann, who believed that the author of the Cumaean Sibyl was a follower of countess Matilda of Tuscany (d. 1115).⁸ Matilda, who had inherited the lands of Boniface II, duke of Tuscany, supported the papal party during the investiture struggle, and she bequeathed all her dominions to the papacy. Erdmann’s conclusions were endorsed by Paul J. Alexander.⁹ Recently, however, the Cumaean Sibyl’s bias towards Matilda and the papal party has been disputed. Hannes Möhring argues that the text does not date from c. 1090 and was written instead by 1039 (and thus before the death of Boniface II of Tuscany in 1052). Nevertheless Möhring, too, regards the Cumaean Sibyl as a piece of political partisanship, expressing Lombard objections to Ottonian-Salian rule.¹⁰
• Version IV – another reworking of the Ottonian Sibyl from c. 1100. This reworking incorporates some elements from the Cumaean Sibyl but also reflects other traditions (such as Pseudo-Methodius) and appears to have been produced in southern Germany or Austria. Bernard McGinn has provided a one manuscript edition of this version.¹¹

This picture of the textual history of the Latin Tiburtina, although still far from complete, would not exist without the contribution made by Paul J. Alexander, the editor of the sixth-century Greek text of the prophecy. Alexander distinguished the following Latin versions:¹²

• w1 = Sackur’s text
• w2 = Bern Bongarsiana A.9, s.XI/II
• w3 = München clm 17742, s.XII
• w4 = Newberry Library Chicago f6 (Ry.3), fols. 198r–202v, s.XII (formerly Cod. Lambacensis membr. LXXVII)
• w5 = as w4, fols. 220r–224r

Considering the connection between these Latin versions and their relationship with the sixth-century Greek text, Alexander concluded that there existed in the fourth century an early version of the Tiburtine Sibyl’s prophecy (Σ), now lost, from which both the extant Greek and Latin versions are descended. It is worth noting that the extant sixth-century Greek version does not refer to the figure of the last Roman Emperor, the rex Romanorum who will come to Jerusalem to surrender his rule over Christians to God before the coming of Antichrist and the Last Judgement. Alexander remarked that ‘it is doubtful whether the passage about him was translated from a Greek original or added by the first Latin translator or on a later occasion’.¹³ We can state with certainty, though, that the last Roman Emperor had been incorporated into the Latin text at the latest by c. 1000 when the oldest medieval Tiburtina (the Ottonian Sibyl) was composed.

According to Alexander, the lost fourth-century Greek text (Σ) must have been written during the reign of Theodosius the Great (378–90), probably in the Greek language and in the Eastern part of the Empire.¹⁴ It formed the basis of a (lost) Latin version (wA). There is some debate as to how soon after the composition of the Greek original this Latin version was produced, but scholars agree that it was before the interpolation of the initials of the names of medieval rulers.¹⁵ At some point in Italy in the late tenth or early eleventh century this first Latin version was expanded to include a list of Lombard and German rulers, resulting in the medieval Latin version wb (no longer extant), which was the common source for the Latin versions w1 and w2 as well as of wC, the parent of versions w3, w4 and w5.¹⁶ To visualise the relationship between the Greek and Latin versions Alexander devised a stemma.¹⁷ The annotations added to it show the correspondences between Alexander’s versions w1–w5 and McGinn’s version I–IV (see Figure 1.1). They also indicate that wC’s rendering of the interpretation of the fourth sun (the Sibylline Gospel) is much closer to the sixth-century Greek model than is that of Sackur’s text w1.¹⁸ Although this is evident from the inclusion of wC’s descendants (w3, w4, w5) in the critical apparatus of the Greek text, the original stemma does not make it visible. It is worth recording, however, because from this follows another observation, namely that the Ottonian version (wb), from which wC is descended, must also preserve the Sibylline Gospel of the Greek model (henceforth ‘Greek’ Sibylline Gospel). In turn this means that Sackur’s text (w1), which is also a descendant of wb, not only presents an updated form of wb’s regnal list, but also a complete recasting of wb’s ‘Greek’ Sibylline Gospel. This observation will be revisited in Chapter 7.

Today the Latin version of the Sibylla Tiburtina is mainly known through Ernst Sackur’s critical edition of 1898. In late nineteenth-century Germany historians became increasingly interested in the use of the Last Emperor motif in texts such as Pseudo-Methodius’s Revelationes, Adso’s De Ortu et Tempore Antichristi, and the Sibylla Tiburtina as they began to search for the roots of the medieval ‘Kaisersage’,¹⁹ which required a clearer textual history of these works.²⁰

However, some of the groundwork on the Tiburtina’s textual development had already been laid by others before Sackur. It is worth looking in detail at how Sackur built on this work to highlight the significance which the nineteenth-century editors attributed to the list of medieval rulers inserted in the concluding eschatological section of the Tiburtine prophecy. There follows a detailed consideration of Sackur’s editorial methods, followed by a critical appraisal of his approach. My contention is that the current view of the Sibylla Tiburtina as political prophecy would have been less tenacious if nineteenth-century editorial concerns with determining the text’s date had not focused on the Last Emperor motif at the expense of other important interpolations.

Textual Scholarship Prior to Sackur’s 1898 Edition

Initially the Sibylla Tiburtina was attributed to Bede. A Latin text was first printed in Basel in 1563 amongst the works of Bede and subsequently reprinted amongst the spuria of this author in Migne’s Patrologia Latina.²¹ To judge by the initials in its regnal list, its origins date from the reign of Emperor Henry VI (1190–97) (see Table 1.2). This text was eventually superseded by Sackur’s edition, which refers to the Migne text as the ‘Bedan recension’ (Bedasche Redaktion) and categorises it as a later reworking (c. 1190) of the critically edited text.²²

The next Latin text of the Sibylla Tiburtina to be made available in print was a fragment which Rudolf Usinger, a professor at the University of Kiel, published in 1870. Usinger recognised, in a fairly short text attributed to the Sibyl of Cumae in codex Bern Biblioteca Bongarsiana A.9 (now classified as w2), an excerpt from the much longer Sibylla Tiburtina printed by Migne amo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions Used
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Approaches to the Tiburtina
• Part II: The Tiburtina in the Context of its Medium of Transmission
• Part III: The Impact of the Christological Tradition of Sibylline Prophecy
• Part IV: Manuscripts
• Appendix A: Excluded Manuscripts
• Appendix B: The Insular Transmission of the Tiburtina
• Appendix C: Version IV Manuscripts
• Appendix D: Sibylline Prophecy in De Civitate Dei and Vos inquam
• Abbreviated Literature Cited in the Conspectus
• Bibliography
• Index of Manuscripts Cited
• Index