From Networks of Texts to Networks of Genres? On the Classification of Texts in Compilations with a View towards Manuscript Transmission

<p>At the end of the 14th century, Jakob Twinger von K&ouml;nigshofen, a cleric from Strasbourg, composed&nbsp;a chronicle in the vernacular that spread widely &ndash; up to today nearly 130 manuscripts&nbsp;are known that contain the text, wholly or in parts, and that were produced not only in&nbsp;Strasbourg, but as far as Cologne, Augsburg, or Tyrol. About thirty qualify as true copies,&nbsp;while in the big majority of the witnesses, the text is altered in various ways: abbreviated,&nbsp;augmented, updated, corrected, put in a dierent order, and more often than not combined&nbsp;with other texts, either with distinct text boundaries or resulting in new compositions made&nbsp;of several texts.<br> In several manuscripts, a combination of historiographical texts &ndash; chronicles, annals, lists,&nbsp;etc. &ndash; can be observed, leading to the assumption that Twinger&rsquo;s work was preferably copied&nbsp;for historiographical compilations and that its structure facilitated some historiographical&nbsp;activity of the recipients. But this view puts a big weight on the genre of Twinger&rsquo;s work,&nbsp;making it a filter through which all the other texts in a codex are seen. As I have been&nbsp;working on the chronicle transmission, the attribute in common of the known manuscripts&nbsp;is of course the appearance of at least some lines of the Twinger chronicle; but the attempt&nbsp;to look at a single codex as objectively as possible, without giving preference to a particular&nbsp;text, can not only reveal connections between different manuscripts, but also the fluidity&nbsp;and flexibility of medieval texts. The classification of a work as part of a certain genre does&nbsp;not necessarily hold true for its entire transmission, for the manifestation of a distinct text&nbsp;&ndash; what is, on the one hand, a nuisance, but on the other a chance to better understand&nbsp;medieval text transmission, manuscript production and the transfer of knowledge.<br> The co-occurrence of certain texts in several manuscripts hints towards intentional copying&nbsp;processes that are reflecting particular interests not only of one individual scribe or commissioner;&nbsp;multiple occurrences of particular compilations can reveal networks that go unseen&nbsp;if the content of a codex is not regarded as a whole. While a text-based analysis often faces&nbsp;difficulties that result from insufficient manuscript descriptions, a broader view that would&nbsp;compare less particular texts, but more areas of interest or fields of knowledge, has to deal&nbsp;with problems regarding the classification of the single texts: Apart from an inevitable subjectivity,<br> questions about the criteria and levels of classification have to be addressed, while&nbsp;the danger of over- or under-representation is always lurking. Discussing these issues and the&nbsp;applicability and usefulness of the comparison of codices from a kind-of-genre-perspective&nbsp;could be fruitful to develop a better understanding for the transmission of manuscripts, of&nbsp;texts and of knowledge.</p>