Monastic school-book including Cicero's De Amicitia and De Senectute, and Canon Law, in Latin, manuscript on paper

113 leaves (14 blank), 200mm. by 140mm., complete, collation: i^{12, ii8, iii12, iv6, v-viii10, ix8, x10, xi8, xii9 (i a singleton), written space 138mm. by 90mm., c. 29 lines of dark brown ink in a number of late Gothic hands, some decorative extensions of letters on bottom line into lower margin in Cicero texts, spaces left for decorated initials with corresponding guide-initials in margins, some water-damage to base of volume and slight discolouration to edges of first page, else in good condition, contemporary stamped leather binding over wooden boards with fragments of fourteenth-century astrological tables used as pastedowns (now loose inside volume), remnants of metal clasps, and a late medieval parchment tag attached to front board with title "C49 Super decreto", some areas of leather on back now torn away, and leather over spine somewhat deteriorated, but binding strong}

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The present manuscript was clearly produced for use in the monastic school of Wiblingen, on the southern outskirts of Ulm in the second half of the fifteenth century; Fratrum Wiblingensium in probable sixteenth-century hand at the head of fol. 1r.  In 1418, at the request of the archduke of Austria Nicholas of Magen set out with five other monks from the Council of Constance on a reform mission throughout Lower Austria (the so-called 'reform of Melk' after the monastery where it began), and Wiblingen was among the numerous monasteries which embraced this reform, building in the fifteenth century a noted monastic school and scriptorium, in which, it is reported, up to thirty monks worked at the same time, and the library of which in 1757 encompassed a staggering 15,000 volumes.

This manuscript is clearly a product of that reformed scriptorium, and moreover, is a witness to the activities of the school there. It contains two popular school-texts, Cicero's De Amicitia (fols. 1r-19v) and De Senectute (21r-38v) with a supplementary discussion of other ancient philosophical writers such as Philostratus (39r-43r); then after five blank leaves the remainder of the manuscript turns to the subject of its title: Super Decreto, ie. Gratian's Decretum, or canon law. This lengthy final section contains readings predominantly from the Quaestio section of the Decretum, and as on fol. 60v-61r (which contains 2 Causa 3 magistri Gratiani), these discuss hypothetical legal cases, followed by a series of questions designed for teaching purposes. Wiblingen clearly had a significant interest in Canon Law; their extant library-list notes the presence of two volumes of the commentary of Henricus Bohic on the Decretum: Anno 1466. Finit Boinck super 1 decretalium per Conradum Hurter de Meimingen and Anno 1401 ... Finit 5 liber decretalium Boynck per Conradum Hurter (P. Lehmann, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge, 1918, i, 433 & 445; see also S. Krämer, Handschriftenerbe des Deutschen Mittelalters, volume 2, 1989, p.834 where three extant volumes of this commentary are recorded, all now in Weingarten), and among the handful of other extant manuscripts from the monastery is a complete twelfth-century Decretum (ex. Phillipps 1076, now Fitzwilliam Museum McClean Coll. 135: M. R. James, McClean Collection, 1912, pp. 282-3), which was almost certainly used alongside the present volume in the school-room.