Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, on the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, fragments of an early manuscript of the text, in Latin, on vellum [Germany, early twelfth century]

9 fragments: 2 strips approximately 85mm. by 20mm. and 7 rectangular pieces, each approximately 42mm. by 25mm., one strip and one rectangle cut from same section of text allowing the reconstruction of 4 lines of a single column (35mm. wide): II:132-33, “Philologie frontem illuc ubi … oculis afflaret honores” and on back “sunt inclytam majestatem … hac regali lectica in”, and showing that the original volume was single-column and pocket-sized (with only approximately 21 lines missing between the lines here), other fragments with text from II:109, 110, 113, 130, and another part of 132, text in a fine late Carolingian hand with a pronounced ct-ligature, recovered from a binding of an sixteenth-century printed book from Leipzig, and hence with stains, cockling and splits

Almost all that is known about the late Antique encyclopedist Martianus Minneus Felix Capella comes from his single surviving work, the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (also known as De septem disciplinis and the Satyricon), and a note by Cassiodorus that he was a native of the town of Madaura, in Roman North Africa (now Souk Ahras, Algeria). The text is an elaborate didactic allegory written in a mixture of prose and verse, setting out the courtship of Mercury (an allegory for intelligence), and his wooing of Wisdom, Divination and the Soul, finally securing Philologia (learning, or ‘love of words’) as his wife. The book was known in the fifth century when another African writer, Fulgentius, composed a work modeled on it, and Gregory of Tours records in the sixth century that the text had been adopted as a model for Latin teaching, becoming a standard manual for students. It survived in a small number of copies to the ninth century which served as the base for the handful of extant Carolingian manuscripts (cf. Winterbottom in Texts and Transmissions, 1983, pp.245-6). The text continued to be used in schools and was popular throughout the Middle Ages, with Leonardi recording 241 extant manuscripts (Aevum, 33, 1959, pp.443-89; 34, 1960, pp.1-99 and 411-524). Despite that, copies or even fragments are extremely rare on the market: the Schoenberg database records none as ever having been offered for sale; and de Ricci, Census, lists none in America.