- 31
Compendium of early medieval Christian writers, including Gregory the Great, Dialogi, and Gennadius of Marseilles, De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [north-eastern France (perhaps Lorraine or Alsace), eleventh century]
Description
- Vellum
Provenance
provenence
1. Written and decorated in a Benedictine monastery in north-eastern France in the eleventh century: "Sancti Benedicti eximii patris nostri" in hand of main rubricator on fol.19v.
2. Evidently from the library of the monastery of St-Michel sur Meurthe, outside Saint DiƩ, in Lorraine: eighteenth-century ex libris on fol.1r, "Benedictinorum S.Michaelis in Lotaringia"; with a thirteenth-century copy of a land grant for a church in Aivicort (probably nearby Avricourt) at the end of the text on fol. 206v.
3. Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872); his MS.4493; acquired in Nuremberg by Longman for Phillipps; bought by the Robinsons with the residue of the collection in 1947, and thence privately to Kraus in 1977; his cat.153, no.6.
4. Bergendal MS.55; bought by Joseph Pope from Kraus in January 1983: Bergendal catalogue no.55; Stoneman, 'Guide', p.188.
Catalogue Note
text
This is a classic Romanesque copy of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (c.540-604). The text was probably written in 593, three years after its author's elevation to the papacy, and sets out its subject matter as "the life and miracles of the Italian Fathers and the eternity of souls", in particular that of St. Benedict, Gregory's near-contemporary. It is composed in the form of a dialogue between Gregory and Peter the Deacon, and offers an unparalleled picture of religious life in Italy during the tumultuous sixth century. This saw the final collapse of the power structures of the ancient world and the birth of the Middle Ages in the crucible of Gothic dominion over Italy and the invasion of the Lombards, a "barbarous and cruel nation", who wreaked such devastation that many thought that "the end of all flesh was come".
This is followed by a lengthy extract of the De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus (on church doctrine) by Gennadius of Marseilles (d. c.496), better known for his continuation of Jerome's De viris illustribus. This text begins here on fol.100r, and includes chapters 1-17 and 19-21 of a total 88. The Historia Eremitica of Rufinus of Aquileia (d.410) follows on fol.103r, as does a life of St. Giles on fol.199v.