Prognostication, Malediction, Memory and the Ordering of Time: The Additions in a Liturgical and Computistical Manuscript from Sens Cathedral

Abstract

A series of marginal notations were added in the tenth century throughout the manuscript that is today divided between Cittá del Vaticano, Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, Reg. lat. 567 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAL 1604. The original content of these books comprises a martyrology, whose marginal additions locate it within the cathedral chapter of Sens, combined with a portion of a mass book, or sacramentary, which offers an ordo for the pre-baptismal scrutinies, set within Lent. Added throughout by various hands, the marginal notes extract from or cite authorities as broad as Pliny the Elder, Macrobius and Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, as well as Bede, Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Wandelbert of Prüm and Isidore of Seville. The manuscript proves the intellectual resources available at Sens in the early medieval period, which is otherwise almost unattested in surviving manuscripts, and gives us precious access to what the canons there read, excerpted and pondered. Some texts may have had a role in the conflicts that engulfed Sens in the later tenth century. We also glimpse a focus on prognostication, and the manuscript offers no less than nine separate marginal texts for telling the future, particularly through dreams. The potential to see the future in dreams is also discussed, with erudite reference to classical texts, in otherwise unknown commentary or teaching texts added to the manuscript. This precious witness to the intellectual atmosphere of a key centre of Western Francia confirms that prognostication was not merely a folk practice in the Early Middle Ages, but rather a learned attempt to understand the world, which went on in dialogue with Christian teaching and classical science.