Scrineum Rivista

Preface

Michele Baitieri — 2025-01-30

Preface

Early Medieval Minuscule Texts as a Subject of Study: Tentative Taxonomy, Codicological Contexts, and Related Social Practices

Ildar Garipzanov — 2025-01-30

This paper overviews early medieval textual additions, defined as minuscule texts, to Latin manuscripts produced before c. 900; when appropriate, it draws parallels with Petrucci’s discussion of early medieval ‘occasional microtexts’ (microtesti avventizi). The overview is based on the corpus of early medieval minuscule texts assembled by the MINiTEXTS project and currently comprising more than 4000 entries. Thereafter, the paper outlines two typologies of early medieval minuscule texts: one based on their placement within the diachronic stratigraphy of a manuscript, as well as their other codicological features, and the other structured by their textual contents. The essay argues that the appearance in the margins of early medieval manuscripts was closely related with concurrent social, economic, religious, and cultural practices. The latter point is exemplified with three case studies of minuscule texts and their broader historical contexts.

Minitexts as Informal Written Interventions: The Case of Cambridge University Library Kk.5.16, Vat. reg. lat. 1127 and Namur MS 11

Rosamond McKitterick — 2025-01-30

This paper offers three case studies on ‘minitexts’ added to eighth- and ninth-century manuscripts and suggests that such informal interventions need to be recognized as part of a communication process between readers, scribes and their books in early medieval culture. The additions, comprising a vernacular poem, canon law, epistolary and homiletic material and kinglists suggest an association of ideas between main text and added minitexts. Yet they also expose a variety of sources for the minitexts, from a written record of oral memory, a summary of one aspect of a well-established texts as in the case of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, and the reproduction of papal rulings which were part of another widely-circulated collection of canon law, to some interesting chronological summaries which appear to reflect a reader’s engagement with the entire codex in which the minitext was inserted. They indicate too how much we can learn in general about early medieval intellectual culture from pursuing both the engagements with knowledge represented in readers’ additions to their manuscripts, and the questions they raise.

What Has Magic to Do with Prayer? Unorthodox Minitexts in vade mecum Prayerbooks for Priests

Yitzhak Hen — 2025-01-30

In recent years, a growing number of studies of smaller, simpler and much tattered liturgical manuscripts that were produced for the use of missionaries, priests of small churches and itinerant preachers, have contributed immensely to our understanding of early medieval liturgy, and of what pastoral care really consisted of in the early medieval West. Many of these vade mecum handbooks for priests also contain some small, unorthodox texts of magical nature. Notwithstanding the fact that throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages such texts and the worldview they represented were repeatedly questioned, denounced and condemned by Christian authorities and policy makers, they were copied into, or attached to, Christian handbooks for priests. This paper looks at a few examples of such texts, and attempts to explain their presence in liturgical codices by referring to the nature of magic and magical practices in the early medieval West.

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

Arthur Westwell — 2025-01-30

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.

Liturgical Minitexts as Clues to the History of a Manuscript: The Case of Vercelli

Gionata Brusa — 2025-01-30

There are more than forty manuscripts in the Vercelli Chapter Library that can be dated before the tenth century. Some of them are of local origin, others were produced in North Italy, others are of either Frankish or German provenance. These differences in production offer evidence for relationships that linked the bishops of Vercelli, mainly during the tenth and early eleventh centuries, with high-ranking ecclesiastical figures from beyond the Alps. Over the centuries several of these manuscripts received either annotations, or pen trials, often linked to the liturgical sphere and provided with musical notation (e.g. verses from the Psalter or short chants sung during the Mass or the Office). These minitexts can reveal a great deal to us: through the analysis of their content, such as their handwriting, textual variants, and musical notations, it is possible to formulate new hypotheses about the provenance of selected manuscripts among the Vercelli group, their history, and the route that brought them to Vercelli.

An Unknown Tenth-Century Martyrs’ Trope Collection

Giulio Minniti — 2025-01-30

On the blank space of the recto side of a folio in a ninth-century Frankish manuscript now Paris, BnF Lat. 2846, a mid-tenth-century scribe entered a set of troped mass chants — an introit, an offertory and a communio — to be used in Martyrs’ masses. Not much later to judge by the script, two more scribes added yet more annotated troped introits on the verso of the same folio. Of the five trope sets adjoined to the five chants, one is now completely erased and illegible, another is found in two older sources, but, as this article shows, three of the trope sets are present here about half a century earlier than in the previously known sources. The comparison of this early source of tropes against those edited in the Corpus Troporum series, combined with the paleographic and philological analysis of its contents, and the evaluation of its relationship with perishable and poorly understood trope libelli, reveals the importance of this previously unnoticed minitext for the early history of tropes.

The Beginning of Time at the Edge of the World: Visigothic Minitexts in Autun, Bibliothèque Municipale, S 129

Sam Ottewill-Soulsby — 2025-01-30

The disruption caused by the Arab Conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 made the already poorly sourced northeastern fringe of the Visigothic world harder to see. This was a complex multiethnic and multifaith zone on the border with the Frankish kingdoms. Fortunately, surviving in Autun, Bibliothèque municipale, S 129 (107) are a large number of minitexts written in the late seventh-early eighth centuries in the vicinity of Urgell. These texts, ranging from psalms and legal formulae to poetry and computus, provide an extraordinary window onto the period. Taken together, they offer compelling evidence for a complex and intellectually involved world sat between the Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms.

Diplomatic Script and Pen Trials: The Case of Carolingian Lyon

Michele Baitieri — 2025-01-30

The scriptorium of Lyon represents a well-known case of uninterrupted learning throughout the early Middle Ages. Starting with the pivotal works of Tafel and Lowe, manuscript studies have greatly broadened our knowledge of this privileged writing centre. While further research is still needed to fully understand its Carolingian scriptorium, a substantial number of manuscripts have been convincingly located in ninth-century Lyon. This article looks at a handful of such manuscripts which contain pen trials written in diplomatic script, and specifically those executed in the elongated letters deployed in coeval royal and imperial diplomas. By discussing both pen trials and diplomatic evidence from Carolingian Lyon, the article uncovers the existence of a flourishing chancery milieu, and thus sheds new light on the cultural and political history of that learning centre during the second half of the ninth century.

Drama tibi primae depango laudis usyae: A Poetic Voice from the School of St Gall

Bernhard Hollick — 2025-01-30

Medieval scribes and scholars filled empty spaces in their manuscripts with different kinds of minuscule texts. Not all of them served as direct commentary on the main text. But even when they did not, they were added often with clear intent, as can be seen with an anonymous poem written around the year 1000 or shortly after in one volume of the «Small Hartmut-Bible» (London, British Library, Add. MS 11852, fol. 118^v). At first glance, the poem appears to be not much more than an elegiac colophon to the Pauline Epistles. But closer analysis reveals a consistent theoretical basis: the verses establish a link between the manuscript and predominant attitudes towards epistemology and theology in the school of St Gall. This paper will explore the content of the poem and will explain how it reflects the thought of Notker III and his pupil and successor Ekkehard IV. It will also shed light on the development and spread of ideas in the school milieu of a major Benedictine monastery.