Identifying the model of a copy: the case of Colmar’s Biblical fragments
Résumé
Beside the codicological and paleographic analysis that can help us to locate and date a copy, some elements in the text itself, may also serve as markers. For the Bible, the presence of pertinent variants is clearly an indication of the model employed by the scribe. Nevertheless, one must be careful and distinguish between different types of variants which tell us about how the copyist was working: those already present in the model or models employed, the scribal errors and the variants introduced at a later stage, either when vocalizing or rereading the text with another witness. When trying to reconstruct a Pentateuch whose numerous fragments are glued on the board of Colmar’s and Strasbourg’s incunabula, I tried to link the textual tradition they contain to some of the manuscripts described by Kennicott and De Rossi and it is this work that will be presented in this article.