Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, in Latin, in Visigothic minuscule, decorated manuscript on vellum [Visigothic Spain (perhaps Burgos province), tenth century]

Manuscripts in Visigothic minuscule are of great rarity: "Apart from Paris and London, very few libraries in Europe can boast of more than one or two Visigothic manuscripts. The great Bodleian of Oxford has not a single one" (E.A. Lowe); "The Real Academia de la Historia greeted us with the unforgettable sight of early manuscripts laid out side by side on a long table. Our member Martin Schøyen was heard lamenting, 'several manuscripts in Visigothic script! And I have only a single leaf!'" (A. Hobson, Some Memories of Congresses ... of the A.I.B., 2011, p.71)

provenance

Bernard Rosenthal, acquired in 1962; Quaritch, Bookhands III, cat.1088 (1988), no.12; Schøyen MS 73.

text

Smaragdus (fl.809-26) was one of the handful of Charlemagne's court scholars who helped to shape the earliest phases of the Carolingian renaissance. He was previously thought to be Irish, but this was first questioned by Bernhard Bischoff (Celtica 5, 1960). Other scholars followed, noting Smaragdus' use of Visigothic examples in his writing on patronyms (Holtz in Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France, 1983), and knowledge of obscure Spanish texts such as the Sententiae of Taio of Saragossa (Rädle, Studien zu Smaragd, 1974, pp.75-77). It now seems certain that Smaragdus came from Visigothic Spain, and may have been the abbot of Silos. He perhaps fled ahead of the Islamic advance in the late eighth century. As such, he is one of the last witnesses to the lost scholarship and culture of that region. He later served as master of the school of Castillio, a monastery south of Verdun, and died there in 826.

It is clear that Visigothic Spain, and in particular the north-western Burgos province, played an important role in the early copying and dissemination of the writings of Smaragdus. Like the present leaf, three of the earliest manuscripts of the present text are in Visigothic script: Rylands Library, Lat. MS 104 (early tenth-century, from San Pedro de Cardeña: Shailor, 'The Scriptorium of San Pedro de Cardeña', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 61, 1979, p.454); British Library, Add. MS 30055 (early tenth-century, perhaps from Cardeña); and fragments of the ninth and tenth centuries in the archives of the monastery of Silos (Archivo del Monasterio, frg.1 and 5-16, with other leaves from the latter probably in Madrid, Archivo Historico Nacional Clero. Carpeta 1030, num.24).

The text of the present leaf is from his commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict (ch.III: Migne, Pat.Lat. 102, cols.746-48). A bifolium from the prologue of the same volume is Beinecke Library MS 447 (B. Shailor, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, II, 1987, p.398).