Incipit Index of Latin Texts

Over one million incipits covering Latin Literature from its origins to the Renaissance

The database contains over 1,000,000 incipits covering Latin literature from the Pre-classical Age to the Renaissance. It is aimed at all those scholars and libraries interested in the writers, texts and manuscripts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is an inevitable tool when studying or publishing a particular text or to make an inventory of manuscripts.

The utility of collections of incipits

Those who are interested in the writers, texts and manuscripts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages know how difficult it is to identify a particular work encountered by chance in a manuscript, or, when studying or publishing a particular text, to make an inventory of all the manuscripts in which it appears. These difficulties arise primarily from the manner in which literary works circulated prior to the invention of printing. Before Gutenberg, the text had a life of its own, independent of its author, and was modified from copy to copy. It is not only the text that changed; titles might vary and authorial attributions could shift. There was a tendency to ‘lend only to the rich’, and Ovid, Saint Augustine and Saint Bernard found themselves credited with a host of apocrypha. The incipit or first words of a work thus remain the surest means of designating it unambiguously. In a sense, the incipit, by virtue of its invariability, is the identity card of the text. Standing apart from the diversity of attributions and titles, the incipit guarantees the presence of a particular text.

THE COLLECTION OF INCIPITS:

The collection of incipits at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (Paris)

Since its foundation in 1937, the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes had compiled several card files of incipits using a wide range of sources including direct descriptions of manuscripts, library catalogues, collections of texts and specialized bibliography. The oldest, most voluminous and most frequently consulted of these card files covers the whole of Latin literature from its origins in the Pre-classical Age to the Renaissance and at presently contains some 400,000 entries.

For each incipit, references are given to an identification: an author’s name and a title of a work, one or several manuscripts containing the text and to a bibliographical reference, catalogue, study, edition, etc., when the entry comes from a bibliographical source. In the future, IRHT will integrate other collections of incipits in the Latin Section: the collection of incipits cross-referenced to textual editions, the thematic collection of incipits of sermons and poetic texts, the collection of explicits, etc.

The collection of incipits at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (Collegeville, MN, USA)

Since its founding in 1965, the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (HMML) has sent teams of researchers and technicians to film more than 25 million pages from nearly 90,000 volumes in libraries and archives throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Today, HMML represents one of the largest and most comprehensive archives of medieval and Renaissance sources in the world. Over the past 30 years, the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library has assembled a card file of more than 400,000 Latin incipits, making this the largest collection in the United States and one of the largest collections in the world.

The most recent release of In Principio contains all 400.000 incipits from the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library. With a concentration of manuscripts from Austria, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Malta, HMML’s records have proved to be geographically and topically complementary to those of IRHT.

The collection of incipits of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits (Paris)

The file-catalogue of incipits from the Latin catalogue of the Département des Manuscrits of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has been built up over the past fiftymany years from a vast array of bibliographical sources in order to assist the work of the cataloguers of the Fonds latin. It also contains a large number of incipits drawn directly from the Latin manuscripts in the department’s own hands. While this cannot be said to have been done systematically – except for a project in the 1950s to identify incipits from the Supplément latin collection – it does reflect the specific interests of the librarians. The entire card-catalogue from the BnF will be completely input by the end of 2006.

Collections from other institutiones and individual scholars

In Principio also includes incipits from those other institutiones and individual scholars that are willing to collaborate. Prof. Dr. Klaus Reinhardt, Director of the Cusanus Institute in Trier, assisted by Dr. Tilo Altenburg, has graciously transferred to the database 40,000 registrations records of from the valuable Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi, (Matriti, 1950-1980) whose indexes of which he himself developed the indexes with Friedriech Stegmüller. He was aided in this work by his assistant Dr. Tilo Altenburg. In Principio also is also grateful to Dr. Thomas Mathiesen, director of the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, for allowing to include data from the Thesaurus. By the end of 2006, all the incipits from the texts published in the Corpus Christianorum will be integrated in the database with the help of Sr. Wilma Fitzgerald (Seattle).

Key features

• 1,000,000 records from three major institutions and libraries, supplemented with a growing number of individual collections
• approximately 25,000 new entries on-stream each year
• updates once a year for the CD-ROM and twice a year for the Online, sprin and autumn
• search screen that is identical for the online and the CD-ROM publication
• a search screen providing guidance for searching by offering ten search fields that enable precise searching
• multilingual search interface

In Principio is also available on CD-ROM.

For more information, please contact us at brepolis@brepols.net