Textual Transmission
The Visio is preserved in only two manuscripts, both of the twelfth century. One is kept in the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main in MS Barth. 67, folios 131r–132r. The other is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, where it is MS lat. 5016, folios 159v–169v.
The first modern edition of the poem, in 1837, was by the German scholar Eberhard Gottlieb Graff, based on the Frankfurt manuscript alone. Jean-François Gadan published an edition in his Collection du bibliophile troyen: recueil de pièces concernant la ville de Troyes ou conservées dans sa bibliothèque (Troyes, 1851), but this was based solely on the Paris manuscript. Philippe Jaffé provided the first modern edition based on both manuscripts, in the Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, volume IV (Berlin, 1867), pages 700–704. Only a few years later a German, Heinrich Gottfried Gengler, provided a second edition from both manuscripts in the Germanische Rechtsdenkmäler (Erlangen, 1875). The most recent edition was made in 1981 by Patrick Geary from the Frankfurt manuscript with alternative readings from the Parisian. He presented it at the end of his paper "Germanic Tradition and Royal Ideology in the Ninth Century: The Visio Karoli Magni".
Read more about this topic: Visio Karoli Magni