Determining sources for Nicholas Trevet's commentary on Livy

This project uses modern scientific methodologies, based on phylogenetic analysis, to examine mediaeval Latin texts and answer key questions about the manuscripts in which they are found. Traditional methods of examining these texts require hundreds of hours of painstaking examination and double-checking of raw data contained in manuscripts and published editions—it is anticipated that this method of analysis will reduce this time considerably.

Livyʼs History of Rome is a seminal historical work from the ancient world, and its text has been studied intensively, but the English mediaeval scholar Nicholas Trevet wrote an influential Latin commentary on Livy which has never been published. There are fundamental scholarly questions about Trevetʼs sources and the subsequent influence of his commentary which have been impossible to address because of the absence of a modern critical edition of this work. As a first step in a new examination, the team aims to look at Trevet’s sources.

Trevet followed a set practice of the period, citing words of the work which he was explaining in an abbreviated form known as lemmata. These lemmata offer us an important window into Trevetʼs manuscript sources. The project sets out to identify the manuscript sources for the lemmata as precisely as we can using published material for Livy. Knowing what general family of manuscript he used can give us more precise information on where he wrote his own commentary and when, key pieces of information for understanding the audience of his study which are still unknown.

Specific problems complicate this investigation. The information on textual variants contained in editions of Livy is highly condensed using traditional methods of manuscript analysis. This needs to be unpacked before it can be plotted against sample data derived directly from the manuscripts by the CI. The other main problem which requires attention is the way in which Trevet frequently exploited the flexibility of Latin word order to restructure the text derived from Livy.

It is anticipated that the expertise provided by MDAP in data analysis, software development to aid in textual analysis, and the digital humanities will considerably shorten and simplify the examination of this material.