Mabillon, Traube, Lowe, and Bischoff : Four Palaeographers

Abstract

The systematic study and classification of Latin scripts is rightly considered to begin with Jean Mabillon, of the Benedictine Congregation of St Maur. For the Maurists in general and Mabillon in particular, history was one of the foundations of religion and piety and indeed essential for a proper Christian life. The study of historical documents was consequently indispensable. With his De re diplomatica (1681) Mabillon produced an innovative treatise breaking totally new ground in the assessment of medieval documents, and, not least, in a correct chronology of Latin scripts. While an approach taking into consideration all aspects of the written documents, not only its script, had already been an essential element of Mabillon’s work, such scholars as Wilhelm Wattenbach in Germany and Léopold Delisle in France pursued forcefully this strain of contextualising research. Ludwig Traube took it methodologically and materially to new heights. Traube’s methodological requirements for both historians and philologists were indeed demanding: not only the knowledge of the source languages and the scripts that the sources had been written in but also an in-depth familiarity with the historical context of these sources and scripts. For Traube, the history of script is no more an auxiliary science but an independent discipline, part of general cultural history. Traube’s meticulous, global, contextualising approach to palaeography and codicology practiced and elaborated on by such disciples of his as Paul Lehmann and Elias Avery Lowe, among others, very soon became the mainstream approach. Lowe (until 1918, Loew) put into practice Traube’s teaching in his Beneventan Script (1914), among others, which is a true biography of a script. He then went on to chart and comment on all known manuscripts in Latin script until A.D. 800 in his Codices Latini Antiquiores (1934–1971). Bernhard Bischoff, who was a disciple of Lehmann’s, went on to apply the same contextualising approach in his work.