The Need for Meaningful Divisions

To analyze the use of temporal markers in the chronicle, we first wanted to see their distribution and where the author might have concentrated them. This meant that first we had to break the text up into manageable, “bite-size” pieces. One of the most obvious ways to divide the text was by folia, but this was unattractive because the breaks between folia are purely arbitrary – they do not tell us anything about subject matter of the chronicle itself. We wanted a division that reflected more natural breaks, so that our analysis of temporal markers could tell us about the relationship between those markers and the meaning of the text.    

Thus our idea of breaking the text into narrative episodes was one largely based on semantics. We were aided, however, by the author’s own indication of where he saw sections beginning and ending, in the form of line breaks often accompanied by a symbol (which we’ll call the terminum) indicating that his thought was concluded. Though the chronicle is not capitulated, wherever we saw a line break, and especially where we saw a line break with the appropriate symbol, we had the idea that this might be the end of a narrative unit. 

This method proved inadequate on its own, though, because the use of the terminum was not consistent throughout the text. We only need to look at the first folio (fol. 5r) to see this inconsistency. With this folio, the chronicle begins with a very laconic list of podestà and the years of their office, each occupying his own line. Some of these descriptions end with a terminum while others do not, for no apparent reason. Thus to rely on this symbol alone to tell us where episodes end would be insufficient, because it is not clear what the author himself uses the termina to signify. 

But what about line breaks themselves? These, too, cannot tell us on their own where narrative units end. The episode we’ve labeled 31, found on fols. 20v-21r, spans three sections demarcated by line breaks and termina. We elected to call this one discreet narrative unit instead of three because the divisions are not demonstrative of changes in subject – the paleographic breaks do not indicate narrative breaks. 

What does indicate the end of Episode 31, and what came to be more than any other single factor our “smoking gun” of episodic transition, was the quasi-formulaic use of a new temporal marker. In Episode 31’s case, this was “Lo dicto anno poi;” throughout the text, the author frequently begins new narrative episodes by resetting the proverbial stage and informing the reader of the year or month, often (though not always) with what we have called temporal markers of self-reference – phrases like “Lo dicto anno,” “Lo stesso anno,” or “Lo scritto anno,” very often accompanied with the word “poi,” or “then.” Crucially, though, this semantic evidence for an episode break never occurs within a line, but always after a line break and frequently after a terminum. 

Episodes: Form and Content

Thus, while we’ve invested references to time with a special kind of deciding power vis-à-vis where new episodes begin, they never operate within a vacuum; our episodic divisions are both paleographically and semantically determined. We have found that while the author’s use of either termina/line breaks or temporal references on its own was insufficient, considering how he used the two in relation to each other has yielded satisfactory results. Where the author breaks a line and makes a new reference to time together, he consistently also begins talking about a new event or theme. This is quite clearly not an accident, either; we believe that where we have found these episodic breaks, the author himself was indicating that he was done talking about one thing, and was going to begin talking about another. This is to say that our divisions, while perhaps synthetic, are by no means arbitrary.

Finally, we have priveleged the term "author" where we might have used "scribe." As discussed in an earlier section, the RRIISS version depends on a different source manuscript than the one held by the British Library, and its contents reflect an earlier layer of scribal intervention in the text. With no comparison manuscripts, we cannot determine whether the termina and line breaks in the BL 10027 represent a authorial decisions or scribal interventions. However, the episodic divisions we have determined do clearly correspond to the sense of the text. Therefore, the reader should be aware that when we use "author" may in fact refer to the collaboration of author and scribe that produced the manuscript wat our disposal; with no way to ascertain where one's contribution ends and the other's begins, we use the term "author."