Vogel's Grouping of Manuscripts

Cyrille Vogel provided a schematic overview of the transmission of the Descriptio in his 1956 article ‘La Descriptio Ecclesiae Lateranensis du Diacre Jean’. The main objective of Vogel's article is to locate the ‘original’ redaction of the Descriptio. Despite his limiting (and anachronistic) approach, this article constitutes the basis for most modern research on the text. Vogel's characterizations and descriptions of the manuscripts are thus kept to a minimum: the century of production, and indication of the folios that contain the Descriptio. In his article Vogel is not interested in the manuscripts as such, but only in the parts containing the Descriptio. His approach reaches its goal in the construction of the stemma of the text and in the preparations for a critical edition. He intended to edit the text of the Descriptio with full descriptions of the manuscripts used, as well as a more detailed stemma, but did not complete this endeavour before his death. From my perspective on the Descriptio, his main contribution is the precise overview of the different sections of the text, which provides a succinct tracing of the supposed redactions. The article provides an amount of detailed information and his conclusion is schematically summarized (see also Table 2):

Alternative Grouping of Manuscripts

An alternative grouping of manuscripts, presented in Chapter 2, takes provenance into account. This approach reveals four distinct groups of manuscript traditions, here named I–IV. At least five of the manuscripts can be linked to the abbey of St Amand, while the others originated in nearby monasteries.