Ɵ Early Medieval Penitential, in Latin, manuscript on parchment [France/Low Countries, 11th century]

Ɵ Fragments of an otherwise unrecorded Early Medieval Penitential collection, evidently including an early draft of Burchard of Worms' Corrector sive Medicus, or an earlier source used by him, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment[probably north eastern France or Low Countries, first decades of the eleventh century] Two large cuttings from the bottom halves of leaves, with a further cutting of the bottom half of a single column and three smaller fragments, with remains of double column of approximately 20 lines of two sizes of a fine and rounded Carolingian minuscule showing the earliest signs of Romanesque developments, with an occasional et-ligature used integrally within words and a consistently strong st-ligature, capitals touched in red, bright and almost iridescent red rubrics, simple red initials set off in margins (including a 'q' whose tail curves to the left), commentary in margins set within delicate shapes of connected squares, a circle (only partly surviving) and a keyhole-like structure, reused in a later binding, with losses to tops of bifolia, stains and small holes, small patches of offset from other small cuttings from same parent manuscript, and reverses of leaves somewhat scuffed and illegible in places, small pieces of tape used to repair splits, the largest pieces 230 by 140mm.; all mounted in modern conservation paper and bound in cloth covered binding An important early witness to an apparently otherwise lost penitential, much deserving of future study Provenance:1. Written probably in north eastern France or the adjacent Low Countries, and cut up and reused on a binding of a printed book there at the close of the Middle Ages.2. Re-emerging in a private American collection, that partly dispersed by Quaritch, London, in 1993.3. Schøyen Collection, London and Oslo, their MS 1768, acquired from Quaritch in December 1993. Text:The fragments here correspond closely, but not perfectly, to the nineteenth book of the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (c. 950-1025), also known as the Corrector or Medicus. His Decretum was an early attempt to collect together existing Canon Law, and its nineteenth and twentieth books are most probably free-standing texts that were added to the original collection by Burchard. It is not clear if the Corrector was a composition of his, or that of another earlier anonymous writer. It reworks the penitential subject matter and the format of the Libri de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis of Regino of Prüm (d. 915), and part of this has drawn significant scholarly attention as advice is given to stamping out paganism, witchcraft, the worship of supernatural spirits and unorthodox sexual practises. The only editions are the editio princeps of 1548, and that in Migne Patrologia Latina, 140, and it should be noted that more text in those falls between the leaves of the bifolia here than could be accommodated in a normal gathering. That said both editions have received criticism (G. Fransen, 'Le Décret de Burchard de Worms. Valeur du texte de l'édition', Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistisch e Abteilung, 63, 1977), and a future study of manuscripts may show variants explaining this. Here the two bifolia are the outermost leaves from two adjacent gatherings, with their undamaged faces originally the outermost sides of those bifolia. The text of the second leaf of the first bifolium opens with 4 lines unrecorded in the current editions of Burchard's work, with an explicit that states this was an epistle of some form. It continues with the capitula list of the work, with the first two here as in Burchard's edited work, but then another nine which do correspond. It should be noted that the incipit of these capitula calls this "Libri Primi", yet it is book XIX in the edited text, and there are only about eleven capitula here, while there are 101 in the printed edition. The last 7 lines of the reverse of this leaf contain the opening of ch. 1of Burchard's text (from "Ebdomoda priori ante ...quam caput [jeju]nii", PL 140, col. 949). The first leaf of this bifolium opens with short extracts from penitential materials, one of which is found in Burchard's text (PL 140, col. 1007, ch. 122, that from the "Penitencia Romano"), but then the text moves to ch. 29 of Burchard's text ("Diversitas culparum ...", this text reworked from Augustine and hence the rubric here and in the editions of Burchard's work noting that author, see PL 140, col. 985). This chapter then carries on without break in the text to the end of this page and onto the second leaf of the following bifolium, filling the undamaged page of that leaf and completing the chapter in the initial line on its damaged side. On the damaged side the text can be read using UV light, and it jumps over ch. 30 to continue with ch. 31 (opening "Mensurum autem temporis ..."), which fills the rest of that page. The initial leaf of the second bifolium and the third and final leaf with a single column of text then contain a series of extracts from other earlier penitential materials, similar to the additions found at the end of a number of manuscripts of Burchard's work (see for comparison, the editio princeps and British Library, MS Addit. 11,440, following fol. 36r: digitised and available online), but not easily identifiable among those. It has been proposed that the Corrector was composed c. 1008 (L. Kery, Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400-1140): A Bibliographical Guide to the Manuscripts and Literature, 1999, pp. 133-35), about the same period in which this manuscript was copied. Here we have enough of chs. 1 and 29 of Burchard's text to show that a substantial part of that work was in the parent manuscript, and there are indications that the capitula and short extracts incorporated in the work appeared in form in this parent manuscript unlike that of the editio princeps or the Patrologia Latina edition. This may well have been an early variant of the work perhaps an early draft by Burchard himself, or if Burchard merely adapted it from another now anonymous source, the sole witness to this older lost work. Close comparisons for the hand here, albeit in a slightly more developed form, can be found in a historical and cosmological miscellany made in Paris in the mid-eleventh century, now BnF. ms. lat. 12117 (reproduced in Pen and Parchment, 2009, no. 20), a Gospel book, made in western France in the mid-eleventh century, now Stockholm, Nationalmuseum B 1927 (C. Nordenfalk, Bokmålningar, 1979, no. 3).