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Watermark dating in the Leopold codex

Ian Rumbold and Reinhard Strohm

The editor of D-Mbs Mus. ms. 3154, Thomas Noblitt, has proposed a framework for the watermark (WM) dating of all the gatherings in the manuscript, identifying most of its watermarks (on the basis of watermark drawings by Gerhard Piccard and additional research) and applying these findings to its composite structure.[34] According to Noblitt’s sequence of paper dates, the first section of the codex was compiled between c.1466 and c.1485, and the second, more composite, section between c.1487 and c.1511. (See » Abb. Synopsis.)

            While paper dates should not be confused with actual dates of copying, Piccard’s life-long watermark research has demonstrated that, in this period, paper was usually inscribed within a three-year frame of its manufacture. Of course, there can be exceptions. But the Leopold codex with its 45 different watermarks distributed over 48 gatherings enabled Noblitt to situate many gatherings within sequences of dates, where the order of compilation shadows the chronology of the manufacture of the paper – allowing for the conclusion that the inscription took place within the time-frames outlined by the paper dates. If a batch of different papers was stored unused for a long time, it was likely that they were inscribed in a different order from that of their manufacture, since copyists were not concerned with the watermark dates of their papers. If, however, two or more different papers were inscribed in the same order in which they had originally been manufactured, this probably happened within the three-year framework of their origin – that is to say, the papers were inscribed one by one as they were being acquired. This evidence was the more compelling the more different papers were found to be inscribed in the chronological order of their manufacture: every batch of paper would then serve as terminus ante quem for the inscription of the preceding one.[35]

            The order of the compositions in the Leopold codex, however, does not always follow the chronology of the watermark dates. This is unproblematic in the second section, whose separate gatherings (or groups of gatherings) were in any case arranged in a more arbitrary order after they had all been collected. The first section, however, was mainly created by a single scribe (‘A’), who could in his copying have shadowed the watermark chronology as successive papers became available. Instead, his progress from a group of papers datable c.1466-72 (gatherings 1-4, WM 1-5), to a group of c.1474-77 (gatherings 5-9, WM 6-8),[36] and finally to one of c.1480-85 (gatherings 10-13, WM 10-15) is upset by the re-appearance of older paper (WM 6: 1476) in gatherings 14-17 (» Abb. Synopsis).[37]

[34] See Noblitt 1974 (with table of watermarks, p. 39); Noblitt 1987-96IV, 315-40.

[35] On the methodology, see also Strohm 1983Rifkin 2003. Watermark dating along these lines has also been applied to the Trent codices (» K. Kap. Die Datierung) and the St Emmeram codex (Strohm 1983Rumbold-Wright 2006, 14-19).

[36] WM 4, 9 and 10 deviate from the chronology, but these papers are only individual bifolios (26-27, 75/84, 85/98), added to already existing gatherings. Gathering 8 randomly assembles papers datable between 1477 and 1482, but it was not originally meant to be arranged in this order nor perhaps to be placed here: see Noblitt 1974, 42-43.

[37] On gatherings 14-17 (WM 6 with embedded papers WM 16/17, 1476-78), see Noblitt 1974, 41.