This invigorating collection of papers results from a colloquium planned for June 2020 but held in hybrid form in July 2021. The editors are to be congratulated upon getting it to press with such despatch. It is a collection with two themes, collectio and concealment, but so often overlapping that they do not lend themselves to being arranged in two separate parts. In her introductory essay, ‘‘Collecting and Concealing in the Field of the World” (11-38), Sinéad O’Sullivan reflects on different kinds of books in which medieval readers might search for information unknown to them, whether in encyclopaedias or in more focused tools such as grammars, glossaries and books of exegesis, and on how hidden truths could be discovered in other sorts of collections, for example in collections of riddles or in marginal scholia. The thirteen papers are, she points out, case studies to serve as a guide through differing fields that packaged knowledge. Her preview of their contents is a helpful overview of the varied approaches to be encountered. At the end of the collection Ciaran Arthur, “Harvesting Wisdom from Books and the Beauty of the Unknown” (493-503), provides a thought-provoking epilogue. He suggests that today, in a world where information can be retrieved “almost instantaneously” (500) from online resources, medieval reading practices have been inverted, with few readers seeking knowledge from codices or rolls. Medieval readers lived in a world in which memory and its tricks of storage were fostered but with slow reading now rarely practised, the valuable prop of where information appears on the page is largely lost andruminatio is falling into disuse. Arthur’s closing pages reflect on “gathering knowledge to gain wisdom” (493), a fitting conclusion to a book in which, as O’Sullivan carefully notes, “knowledge” refers not to “a specific kind of knowledge (implicit or explicit),” rather denoting “a crucial epistemological goal”: “Significantly, whilst considerable efforts were expended on creating storehouses of learning, the highest knowledge, that is, wisdom, was associated with heavenly rather than earthly matters” (15 n16). Overall, O’Sullivan and Arthur open up an engrossing storehouse of medieval learning in a well-made book that has excellent signposting. At the front of the volume stand, each on a single page, a table of contents, the editors’ acknowledgements, and a list of abbreviations, at the end an index of manuscripts (but no list of illustrations) and a general index. The thirteen papers are by a galaxy of scholars based in as many as eight different countries. Each self-standing paper is headed by an abstract and has at the end its own bibliography. Admirably, the notes are instantly accessible at the foot of pages. Here the papers with illustrations are described first.
In the opening paper by Anna A. Grotans, “Understanding the Scope of Knowledge in Early Medieval St Gall” (39-89), the long continuous records of the history of the abbey of St Gall together with its library holdings serve as representative of the changing ways of classifying knowledge from late Antiquity to the high Middle Ages. St Gall, Grotans argues, led the way in innovation, her essay laying a solid foundation for the papers that follow. For someone like me, working principally on the history of the English language, her narrative is a valuable analysis of developments and continuities in the western world of learning from Augustine, Cassiodorus, and Isidore forwards. Two full-page diagrams in colour, appositely chosen from manuscripts associated with St Gall, illustrate the increasingly complex diagrams devised for the classification of knowledge in the tenth and eleventh centuries: Plate 1. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 9865-9566, fol. 1r (62); Plate 2. St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 817, p. 343 (71).
Mariken Teeuwen, in “The Intertwining of Ancient and Late-Antique Authorities in the Margins of Carolingian Manuscripts” (91-113), includes four colour details: Figs 1 and 2. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS VLF 48, fol. 32r (106) and fol. 79v (planetary diagrams in margin, 107); Fig. 3. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS BPL 88, facing inner margins in fols 5v-6r (108); Fig. 4. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 7200, fol. 11r (108). These illustrate the use of diagrams among explanatory references in the margins of Carolingian manuscripts, visualizations that can go beyond the text in which they are embedded, adding new learning (107).
Kees Dekker, “Collecting Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Vocabularius Sancti Galli” (255-313), presents an analytic account of the contents of St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 913, a late eighth-century composite manuscript in three booklets written in Germany in a script with Anglo-Saxon traits (259). Measuring 17.4 x 9 cm and made up of offcuts in quires of 8 leaves, St Gall 913 is small enough to be termed a pocket book (256)--or maybe three pocket books that have long been bound together. There are six colour plates: pp. 127, 5 (263), 148, 149 (264) and pp. 180, and 181 (265). Dekker argues for an underlying principle of collectio for each of the three parts: a longish text followed by related information. Thus, booklet I’s pp. 5-148 open with Jerome,Ep. 53, Ad Paulinum, mostly followed by wide-ranging encyclopaedic excerpts, and booklet II’s pp. 149-180 with the popular Joca monachorum followed by the sort of snippets that often appear in question-and-answer dialogues. The long item at the beginning of the two quires that make up booklet III’s pp. 181–205, generally called the Vocabularius Sancti Galli, gives the manuscript the name by which the whole is known. The vernacular glosses of this topical glossary were probably translated from Old English into Old High German (260). Fragments of an alphabetical glossary follow and finally some Aldhelm glosses. An Appendix (292-303) complements Dekker’s discussion of St Gall 913, its Table further subdividing the forty-one items of Joseph P. McGowan, “451. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek MS 913”, inManuscripts in Switzerland, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 20 (Tempe, 2012). Ninety notes to the Table, incorporating McGowan’s suggestions, give references to what is known about sources and analogues (unfortunately ten notes referring back to Dekker’s discussion have page references for an earlier pagination of the article).
John J. Contreni’s “Hic continentur ista: Collecting and Concealing in an Early Ninth-Century Instruction-Reader (Laon, Bibliothèque municipale “Suzanne Martinet,” MS 265)” (357-407) is on a manuscript that got to Laon by the third quarter of the ninth century where it “belonged to three generations of cathedral personnel” (366). The first appendix (387) provides a clear summary of the manuscript’s eight parts and identifies eighteen contributing scribal hands. The second appendix (388-401) gives a full overview of the contents. Contreni categorizes the compilation as a book for teachers rather than for rural priests, an “example of what instruction readers looked like before the Carolingian reform program got fully underway” (386). There are two colour plates: fol. 1v, an index provided by a scribe named Martin Hiberniensis who added similar lists to other Laon manuscripts (361); and fol. 122v, illustrating the cancellation of a text that came to be considered heretical and is not included in the contents listed by Martin (383).
In his “Graphic Ciphers and the Early Medieval Practices of Collectio and Concealment” (409-438) Ildar Garipzanov discusses two kinds of ciphers, “monograms and occult signs commonly known as caracteres” (409), across the period c.750 to c.1000. Frequently the ciphers encode names. After outlining their use back in the classical world with Fig 1. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. lat. 2154, fol. 1r (411), Garipzanov shows how in the early medieval period ciphers were deployed both for display and to conceal, discussing examples from diplomas and coinage as well as codices. Fig. 2 (412) gives the full page from which the images on the book’s front and back covers are taken (Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 59, fol. 181v), a decorative page, “written with the clear aim of impressing a learned abbess” (413) and making use of many tricks an ingenious scribe could play: concealing and displaying names, drawing on multiple alphabets and incorporating in the overall design palindromes for contemplation. Images also discussed are: Fig. 3. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. lat. 438, fol. 31v (414); Fig. 4. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Nouv. Acq. lat. 1589, fol. 10r (416); Fig. 5. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 8672, fol. 9r (419); Fig. 6. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS clm 14495, fol. 41v (421); Fig. 7. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 5359, fol. 146v (426); Fig. 8. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 6880, detail from fol. 106r (429); Fig. 9. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Acc. no. 80.AM.53 (gold amulet, 430); Fig. 10. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 6880, detail from fol. 100v (431); Fig. 11. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts, Inv. no. 62.21.A. (magical gem, 431) and Fig. 12. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 6880, detail from fol. 122v (433).
Similarly visual in thrust although without images from manuscripts, David Ganz’s succinct “Latin Shorthand and Latin Learning” (155-172) discusses the ubiquitous use of shorthand from the ancient world of the Roman Empire through to the eleventh century, emphasizing that its role was not to conceal but to take down dictation, to record speech and to save space. Shorthand was also widely used in annotation and in drypoint glosses (164). Some stenographers are known by name, for example Tiro, who worked for Cicero and Seneca, and Adémar of Chabannes, “the last scholar who regularly used Tironian notes” (167). Ganz provides a masterly survey of Merovingian and Carolingian manuscripts that contain shorthand, usefully grouping them where possible according to origin. If the manuscripts listed are available online, asterisks stand before pressmarks, enabling readers to access them easily. Ganz distinguishes some instances of shorthand that are “not tironian” and points to some that “remain undeciphered” (157). And some extant Psalters are written in Tironian notes, their probable use “to teach notaries” (162).
Teaching is, of course, central to the acquisition of knowledge. Evina Stein’s “Early Medieval Catechetic Collections Containing Material from theEtymologiae and the Place of Isidore of Seville in Carolingian Correctio” (315-56) opens with an account of St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 879, a small “personal handbook” (315), only 44 folios long, that brings together such essential information as descriptions of the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the mass and baptism and clerical grades with Isidorean materials. Pointing out that such manuscripts were once ubiquitous, Stein first identifies and analyses four Carolingian catechetical collections that recast Isidorean materials for the instruction of and use by priests (320-40). Still extant in medieval manuscripts are: De catholica ecclesia et eius ministris et de baptismatis officio (at least fourteen); Collectio unde (at least twelve); Pauca de fide catholica et de officiis ecclesiasticis (four from the ninth and tenth centuries and one incomplete twelfth-century manuscript); and theinterrogationes et responsiones embedded in the first 104 folios of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12444, i.e. the compilation known as the Collectio Sangermanensis, parts of which have been identified in seven other manuscripts. Such manuscripts, she points out, probably provided the immediate source from which Isidorean information was often cited. The Appendix (348-51) gives pressmarks together with a few details such as pertinent folios and dates, not only for the four groups analysed and the question-and-answer sections of the Collectio Sangermanensis but also for three similar collections extant in multiple copies and for six surviving in single manuscripts.
Educational tools come in many guises, not least in interlined glosses, in margins and as self-standing glossaries. Franck Cinato’s “Critical Cumulation? How Glossaries were Constituted in the Early Middle Ages (6th-8th Centuries)” (173-200) examines the origins and growth of glossaries. His principal focus is on three glossaries, the Abba and Abavus (both versions) and a third called Ambrosia. Rather than look for ultimate sources, Cinato explains three approaches behind their making: stacking (built block by block, say with A groups followed by further A group or with groups organized by two letters, say BA, then BE, and so on, where alphabetical order had got to two letters); integration (assimilation of a smaller glossary into a large one); and distribution (where greater reorganization results in the incorporation of new materials into an alphabetized whole. In addition, he accepts “as an absolute rule that under normal conditions the alphabetical order of a glossary is irreversible” (176). Three tables are central. The first provides pressmarks and dates for his corpus of eight glossaries, all included in Georg Goetz’sCorpus Glossariorum Latinorum (Leipzig, 1888-1923); the earliest manuscript, Leiden, Unversiteitsbibliotheek, MS BPL 67F, placed at the head, is “the base witness.” The second table shows the distribution of nine contributing glossaries within the eight manuscripts, the third identifying where contributing glosses from the nine occur in the eight manuscripts. The final part of the paper (179-196) centres on Abba and Abavus,their main circulationin Italy and northeastern France, and on Ambrosia, its two fragmentary witnesses perhaps from Benediktbeuern and Freising. Detailed evidence for stacking, sifting and recasting of batches from an early “ancient pool” is presented, demonstrating the complexities and intricate problems presented by lexicographical compilations. The three columns of his Appendix (198) list the abbreviations used for glossaries, the fuller titles to which they refer and other names by which they are known (Aptet and Arma seem to have dropped out of the list).
Patrizia Lendinara, in “Unveiling the Sources of the Glosses to the Third Book of the Bella Parisiacae Urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés” (201-228), draws on her deep knowledge of the text and its ten manuscripts. Whereas the first two books are on the Siege of Paris, the third deals out advice to a young cleric and is more densely packed with learned and rare words; ghost words and sloppy forms are part of the mix. The interlined glosses may provide more meanings than needed in context; seemingly Abbo was dishing out instruction larded with word enrichment. About half of the words in the 115 lines of Book 3 have glosses in all the manuscripts, and these, Lendinara argues, were added by Abbo himself as part of the book’s design. She identifies sources consulted by Abbo, in particular a version of the Liber glossarum [LG] for about 160 words, many of them from the letters A, B, and C, and of the Scholica Graecarum glossarum [SGG]for at least another forty, suggesting he had access also to other widely used reference works. Significantly, she has found no accumulation of glosses during manuscript transmission. Illustrative citations make clear the closeness of the glosses to entries in the LG and SGG. Lendinara recommends further exploration of Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Ripoll 74, pt IV, not fully published, in which she has discovered counterparts to a number of Abbo’s glosses.
In contrast, a lengthy accumulation across time of dense glossing and annotation lies behind the Consolatio manuscripts discussed by Rosalind C. Love in “‘But What Polybius the Greek Physician Says is More Correct’: Sources of Knowledge in the Glosses to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy at Tenth-Century Canterbury” (229-254). Love selects a sizeable subset from the full transcriptions she edited with Malcolm Godden and Rohini Jayatilaka of eighty Consolatio manuscripts surviving from before 1100, choosing to focus on just over a sixth that are known to have been used or written in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries and in particular on two collections that may reflect collaboration c.1000 between Abingdon and Canterbury in which Ælfric is a “looming presence” and his pupil Ælfric Bata may have been a glossator (231). Describing them as having the feel of “being intended as scholarly editions” (232), Love brings alive their value, even though they make little attempt to separate true from inaccurate information (233). The interrelationships are so fluid as to make it impossible to identify a specific source for the new materials being fed in. Here were collections of scholia where one could find out who Alcibiades was or what were the labours of Hercules or how Phaeton perished, much as like as not digested ultimately from Fulgentius. In a satisfying conclusion, Love traces out how the scholia were shaped to address contemporary concerns (251).
Teaching can take root more easily when sugared. The collection includes three papers on texts that share knowledge through casting didactic materials in new literary frameworks. In “Philology and Mercury after the Wedding: Truth and Fiction in Three Didactic Works” (115-153), Michael W. Herren brings together Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, the Epitomae and Epistolae of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus and the anonymousCosmographia attributed to Aethicus Isterand purporting to have been abridged by Jerome. These authors of the fifth to eighth centuries from North Africa to Ireland and somewhere between were comfortable enough in their own skins to poke fun at their inheritance from the classical past. Arguing that their works, all prosimetra, were designed to encourage discussion and a critical response as well as to entertain, Herren deftly shows how learning at play can purposively mislead and subvert. What is true and what fiction is concealed, hazardous reading unless among those themselves sufficiently confident in the seven liberal arts to suss out how untrustworthy these three works are--but deeply educational when probed and discussed.
Andy Orchard’s “Building a Splendid Library: The Background and Context of the Bibliotheca magnifica” (439-466) focuses on the Bibliotheca magnifica de sapientia, a sequence of twelve poems in elegiac couplets, ninety-four lines in total, in Cambridge, University Library MS Gg. 5. 35, fols 423v/29-425r/30 (provenance St Augustine’s, Canterbury; the last item of the mid-eleventh-century manuscript’s third booklet (fols 425v-431v) were filled by a fourteenth-century scribe whose work continues at fol. 444v.) The poems, riddles with answers supplied in red, have strong links with the riddling tradition of the pre-Viking age; they are, Orchard argues, materials “to be memorized, remembered, recalled, and ruminated upon” (463). Orchard’s exposition of the whole sequence includes new editions and translations of the poems, superseding J. A. Giles, Anecdota Bedae, Lanfranci, et aliorum (London, 1851), 50-53. For an online version of the Bibliotheca, see < https://clasp.ell.ox.ac.uk/db-latest/poem/N.BibliothecaMag.Aenig >.
The initial survey of St Gall’s history and manuscripts by Grotans began in the learned world of Rome; the final essay takes us to the northern reaches of the western world, to the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus whose early thirteenth-century Gesta Danorum in sixteen books draws together ancient myths and legends followed by remembered history of kings and Viking leaders up to the end of the twelfth century. In this last case study, Michael James Clarke, “Medieval Scholarship and Intertextuality: A Case Study of Saxo Grammaticus on the Giants” (467-492), examines the giants of Saxo’sGesta “through the lens of a problem of biblical interpretation and a web of allusions to the Latin auctores” (473). Saxo probably “studied at one of the cathedral schools of continental Europe” (470) and was an inheritor therefore of knowledge handed down through centuries. His giants are slippery creatures that defy simple categorization. With a fascinating array of detail and a sifting of resonances from Boethius, Ovid,Martianus Capella and all manner of possible sources, Clarke teases out how the Norse giants take on multiple roles, for example shapeshifters, sorcerers, magi. For Clarke, the Norse giants are set “into a framework based on exegetical study of Genesis across a potentially endless range of other texts” (487).
So many rewarding reads. Such a wealth of detail and new information. This is an authoritative collection, to consult, to return to and to treasure.