The Electronic Scriptum

Work in progress

The texts offered here are meant to be as close as possible to the text found in the copy of Auriol’s Scriptum presented to Pope John XXII, i.e. ms. Vat. Borgh. lat. 329. As is well known to students of Auriol, the text in the Borghese ms is quite a bit superior to that found in the early printed edition of 1596; in addition, in many instances Borghese gives much more accurate references to the sources that Auriol cites than the printed edition does. Thus, the files here offer both a more reliable and a more useful text of Auriol’s work as well as advantages associated with electronic texts and the internet: ease of distribution and ability to search, print, and cut and paste the text.

Lauge O. Nielsen took the initiative to have the entire Scriptum put into electronic form; costs associated with paying a professional to enter the Scriptum into the computer as well as with an initial proofread of the entire text were covered by the Department of Church History and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. With his usual energy, Chris Schabel (CDS) has already collated nearly all of this raw electronic text with the text found in the Borghese manuscript. In the files presented here thus far, Russ Friedman (RLF) entered into the computer the changes required by Schabel’s collation, and imposed a rough punctuation as well as a standardized format. At a later stage of this project, Florian Wöller (FW) has joined the editing team. As mentioned we have kept close to the pure Borghese text. On a few occasions where I could see that there was clearly a problem with the text found in the Borghese ms, I’ve included clearly marked emendations — most often using a variant reading found in the early printed edition of 1596, but now and then offering conjectures of my own. It should be noted that the punctuation is rough: hopefully there aren’t many howlers, but as we work further with the texts, we’ll undoubtedly tweak the punctuation, correct any residual errors, and perhaps offer further emendations. In order to allow for references to line and page numbers, I’ve decided to present the text in Portable Document Format (PDF), so that these remain constant.

We would like to express our gratitude to Gijs Coucke, PhD, who, supported by funding from the University of Leuven’s Research Council, entered corrections into and proofread the following texts (soon to be) found on the Electronic Scriptum: dd. 17,1; 20; 21; 22; 24; 25; 29; 36,1-2; 44; 46.

We will be adding more texts as time permits. In the meantime: all comments on the texts, and especially suggestions for improvements, are welcome! (russell.friedman@hiw.kuleuven.be)

NOTE ON BUYTAERT: an edition of the prologue and first eight distinctions of the Scriptum was published by Eligius Buytaert in 1952-56 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications). The texts found here that overlap with Buytaert’s are the result of a fresh reading of Vat. Borgh. lat. 329 (which was also Buytaert’s sole source) as well as a reconsideration of the text – the texts here correct Buytaert’s occasional errors. I’ve included in these texts Buytaert’s paragraph numbering, but I have decided not to include any line numbering, since scholarly work should continue to refer to Buytaert’s standard edition (noting, where appropriate, that corrections come from the text offered here).

In order to access the texts below you will need the program Adobe Acrobat Reader. A copy of this program can be acquired free of charge HERE (and look for “Get Adobe Reader”).