History as a Visual Concept: Peter of Poitiers ' Compendium Historiae

Abstract: This report introduces a project to create a critical edition of Peter of Poitier's work, Compendium historiae in geneologia Christi . Composed at the end of the twelfth century, Peter of Poitier conceived the Compendium as a visual aid for teaching biblical history to theology students. Depicting history as a chart in the form of a genealogical graph, it quickly became ubiquitous in the Latin West. Our renewed effort to locate and appraise manuscript witnesses (to date ca. 300) of the Compendium has revealed its unparalleled formal and contextual breadth. Given the work's graphic features and richly varied manuscript tradition, the edition will appear in digital format. This report describes our editorial strategies in the face of the challenges posed by the Compendium's structural, textual, and pictorial variance and, more generally, the medial and graphic aspects of text in the Middle Ages.