The contemporary disciplines of identification (which we will refer to generically as philological disciplines) recognize four methods of authentication. We will see, case by case, that the criteria available to medieval culture were far more vague.
5.2.1. Authentication at the Level of the Material Support of the Text
We have physicochemical methods for determining the period of fabrication and the quality of the material support (parchment, paper, canvas, wood, etc.). Nowadays these methods are considered sufficiently scientific, and therefore intersubjectively verifiable, but the medieval scholar almost never had the opportunity to encounter original documents in their original language (even the translators were working from manuscripts at a considerable remove from their archetypes), and all they knew of past civilizations were seriously contaminated ruins. Christianity discovers history (the sequence creation-original sin-redemption-parousia), but not historiography. It knows the past solely through the information handed down by tradition. The legal opinions handed down in the High Middle Ages ascertaining the counterfeit nature of the documents produced by one of the litigating parties confine themselves at best to a discussion of the authenticity of the seal. Remi of Trèves asks Gerbert d’Aurillac (the future pope Sylvester II) to send him one of his leather armillary spheres, and Gerbert (an enthusiast of the classical authors) asks for a copy of Statius’s Achilleid in exchange. Remi sends it to him; but the Achilleid was left unfinished by its author. Gerbert is unaware of this and accuses Remi of sending him a defective manuscript and, to punish him, sends him an inferior painted wooden sphere. Gerbert had no accredited sources for knowing the physical conditions of the original manuscript (see Havet 1889: 983–997 and Gilson 1952: 228–229).
The cautionary tale of the reception and translations of the Corpus Dionysianum is an episode worthy of reflection. When Byzantine emperor Michael II the Stammerer sent it as a gift to Frankish king Louis the Pious in 827 as the work of a disciple of Saint Paul who was the first bishop of Paris, no one thought to question its authenticity. The testimony of the donor, the prestige of the alleged author, the interest of the text—all were sufficient guarantees. Scotus Eriugena had doubts about the identity of Paul’s disciple and the first bishop of Paris, but not about the venerable age of the text.
5.2.2. Authentication at the Level of Textual Manifestation
The form of the document must be in keeping with the rules of formation of the period to which it is attributed. The first example of philological analysis based on the form of the expression was provided in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo Valla (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, XIII), when he demonstrated that the use of certain linguistic expressions in Latin was completely implausible at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. Isaac Casaubon (De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes, XIV) proved that the Corpus Hermeticum was not a Greek translation of an ancient Egyptian text, because it did not contain a single trace of Egyptian idiomatic expressions. Modern philologists have shown that the Hermetic Asclepius was not translated, as was once believed, by Marius Victorinus, because in all his writings Victorinus always put the conjunction etenim at the beginning of the sentence, whereas in the Asclepius the word occurs in the second position twenty-one times out of twenty-five.
According to the semiosic system, recourse is made to paleographic, epigraphic, lexicographic, grammatical, iconographic, and stylistic and other criteria. These methods are today judged sufficiently scientific, even when based on conjecture. The Middle Ages had no paleographic criteria, and its lexicographic, grammatical, and stylistic criteria were fairly vague. Men like Augustine and Abelard, and eventually scholars like Thomas Aquinas, recognized the problem of establishing the reliability of a text on the basis of its linguistic features. But, apropos of the text of the Bible, Augustine, who had small Greek and less Hebrew, in the pages where he discusses the technique of emendatio, advises at most to compare the various Latin translations with each other, in order to make a conjecture, taking account of the differences, about the “correct” reading of the text. He is looking for a “good” text, not the original text, and he rejects the idea of checking the Hebrew version because he believes it has been manipulated by the Jews: hence, not only does he not go back to the presumed original, he mistrusts it. Better a translation inspired by God that an original corrupted by a malicious intent (De doctrina christiana 2, 11–14).
As Marrou (1958) remarks, none of his commentaries presupposes a preliminary effort to establish a critical text. There is no analysis of the manuscript tradition. Saint Augustine is content to compare the largest possible number of manuscripts and to take into consideration the largest possible number of variants.
When Saint Jerome’s translation ex hebraeo conflicts with that of the Septuagint, Augustine tends to suspect Jerome’s translation, because he considers the Septuagint divinely inspired. He never chooses the Vulgate over the Septuagint. In the De civitate Dei (15, 10–11), in calculating the age of Methuselah, the text of the Septuagint (but not the Vulgate) is contradictory, since it has Methuselah die after the Flood, but Augustine refrains from committing himself, suggesting the hypothesis of a correction introduced by the perfidious Jews to undermine the confidence of Christians vis-à-vis the Septuagint version. It is curious that Augustine should think that the Hebrew original might be corrupt (a useful suspicion on the part of a philologist), while he is not overly concerned over the corruptness of the translations, convinced that he can resolve the issues with a bland comparative approach, in which the last word will be uttered not by philology but by a righteous will to interpret and fidelity to traditional knowledge (see Marrou 1958: 432–434).
Bede and other authors analyze the rhetorical figures of Holy Scripture, but they are ignorant of the Hebrew original, and the language they are analyzing is that of a translation. It is not until the thirteenth century that an effort will be made to return to the Hebrew original with the help of converted Jews (see Chenu 1950: 117–125 and 206).
In any case, etymological practice has much to teach us about the weakness of medieval philology, whether the etymologies in question be those of Isidore of Seville or Virgil of Toulouse. Medieval etymology has nothing to do with the history of the lexicon. It is philosophical, theological, moral, or poetic. Every medieval etymology is, from the etymological point of view, a fake.
As for their insensitivity to language, the case of the thirteenth-century Modistae (see Chapter 7) is exemplary: all of their speculative grammar is an example of philological highhandedness. They attempt to elaborate a general theory of language on the basis of a single language, Latin. They do not believe that other languages displaying other grammatical (and therefore mental) structures exist. They identify modus essendi and modus significandi. Their ethnocentric impermeability is equal only to that of those twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon linguists who construct theories of linguistic universals on the basic of a single language, English.
True, the Abelard of Sic et non invites us to beware of words used in an unusual sense, of the corrupt state of a text as a sign of a work’s inauthenticity, but the practice will remain imprecise, at least down to Petrarch and the proto-humanists.8
5.2.3. Authentication at the Level of Content
In this case we must decide whether the categories, the taxonomies, the styles of argument, the iconographic configurations, and similar phenomena can be traced back to the cultural universe to which the document is attributed. Even for the modern period such criteria are highly conjectural in nature, though they appeal to relatively accepted notions with regard to the “worldview” typical of a given historical period.
Medieval intellectuals had some idea of content screening; at least during the Scholastic period, they attempted to verify whether a text attributed to a certain author displayed modes of thought in keeping with the cultural universe to which the author belonged. Abelard advises his readers to beware of passages in which the author cites only other people’s opinions, often contradictory, in which the words have a different meaning depending on the author cited. Like Augustine in the De doctrina christiana, Abelard recommends checking the context. But this contextual principle is invalidated by his next recommendation: to give greater weight, in doubtful cases, to the most qualified authority.
Thomas Aquinas takes up the criterion of textual and historical contextuality, giving precedence to usage over the lexicographical meaning; and implicit in this criterion is that the usage be that of the period referred to (Summa Theologiae I, 29, 2 ad 1). Thomas concentrates on the modus loquendi, that is, on
