Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/822

 8 1 2 Docuniejits factory, no better case has yet been made out for any other definite authorship. Very early in the manuscript history of the book a tradition seems to have arisen ascribing it to Burchard or Brocard of Mount Sion, the author of a celebrated, important, and charm- ing work of pilgrim-travel ; but as to this it is enough to say, here, that no work of a Latin Christian in the later Middle Ages shows a more liberal spirit than this Dcscriptio Terrae Sanctae, while the furious bigotry of the Dircctoriiiiii alone gives it a distinct place in the literature of European expansion at this time. Once only has the Directorium received real attention hitherto, — when in 1719 Quetif printed some extracts from the work, with remarks thereon, in the Scriptores Ordiiiis Pracdicatoruin ;^ Sir Henry Yule's reference to our treatise in Cathay and the Way Thither" is simply and entirely based upon the few short extracts of the Scriptores: while even Quetif, though, here as elsewhere, showing his genius for selection and illustration, never attempts to give a general idea of the whole treatise, much less to reproduce it textually. The latter task, indeed, was no part of his business ; it must be the principal part of the present undertaking. For this edition I have used two of the three existing manu- scripts of the original Latin text, viz., the Paris MS. 5138 Lat. in the Biblotheque Nationale, and the Oxford MS. No. 43 in Magdalen College Library. The former, though a transcript of the seven- teenth century, represents a rather better text than the latter, which is the work of a fifteenth-century scribe, apparently almost, if not quite, innocent of the Latin tongue, and producing his result simply by the copying of a work whose meaning he did not clearly under- stand. In many places I have preferred to give the Oxford scribe the benefit of the doubt ; thus I assume that his manuscript reads Ludouicns although the writing is most plainly Ludoniciis — here, as in hundreds of other cases, the difficulty arising, in all likelihood, from one or more accidental imperfections in the copyist's original. Yet in not a few cases M. (the Magdalen MS.) supplies better readings, and doubtless represents the original more truly, than P. (the Paris text) ; in the latter a revision was evidently intended, and a few corrections have been made in the margin, but this much- needed process of emendation has been very imperfectly performed. As, on the whole, I believe the best method to be that of repro- ducing to the letter the most satisfactory MS. in hand, noticing in foot-page references all variations of inferior MSS. (often of course preferable to the readings of the " standard ") I have tried.