University of Virginia Library

---

83

IMPROPER TEXTUAL EXEGESIS

It is apparent that Reinle's interpretation of the axial title
of the Church has been undertaken without reference to the
Latinity of the other titles of the Plan and their system of
graphical abbreviations. The Plan, as we have seen,[344] is
furnished with some 340 separate entries of varying length,
the majority in prose, the remainder in verse. The prose is
lucid and not susceptible to misinterpretation at any point.
The verses are often flowery in style, but their syntax and
sense are always clear. There is nothing equivocal about the
distich that defines the interstices between the columns of
the nave arcades (No. 4) or the hexameter that defines the
interstices between the piers of the western Paradise (No.
5). And there is nothing equivocal about the style or syntax
of any of the other titles of the Plan. It is inconceivable
within the total context of these legends that the drafter of
these texts would have framed one of the most crucial lines
of his commentary in so sloppy a manner as to mislead
some seven generations of Latinists into interpreting as a
simple designation of length what he meant to be a ratio of
scale.

If PED̄ had been meant to stand for PEDA, the scribe would
have found himself compelled to make this clear by spelling
the word out—as he had done in title 4 (metire) and title 5
(moderare) where this form is used—in view of the fact that
PED̄ is the traditional abbreviation for PEDUM. By the same
token, he would have had to make it clear that LONGĪT̄
stood for LONGITUDINE, rather than allowing it to be read as
LONGITUDO. And if the capital letters CC were meant to
convey the meaning "two hundred times," rather than the
figure 200, the scribe would have had to make this clear,
since such a use of the letters would have differed distinctly
from their traditional usage. The need for this clarification
would have been the more pressing because clearly all of
the other dimensional titles on the Plan are designations of
simple linear length. No reader of the Plan can fail to notice
that the syntax of the longitudinal title of the Church (No.
1) and the two titles that describe the width of the nave and
the aisles (No. 2 and 3) is identical. Each consists of a
subject (LONGIT[UDO], Latitudo, Latitudo), a prepositional
phrase (AB ORIENTE IN OCCIDENTE[M], interioris templi,
utriusque porticus), and a predicate phrase (PED[UM] .CC.,
pedu[m] xl, pedum xx). The verb est is missing, but is
implicit in the text, and it is, therefore, entirely proper to
translate these respective passages (1, 2, 3, above) as:

What was it that induced Reinle to engage in such arbitrary
textual exegesis? This question takes us to our second
main objection: