Pembroke College : Commentary on the Pauline Epistles, IX-XVIII

Hrabanus Maurus

Pembroke College

Thanks to dedication inscriptions written across the end of one quire and the beginning of another, we know that the manuscript was donated to Reims Cathedral by its archbishop, Hincmar: these read 'Hincmarus archiepiscopus dedit sanctae mariae remensi' ('Archbishop Hincmar gave [this] to Saint Mary of Reims' - the cathedral being thus dedicated to the Virgin Mary). Hincmar served as archbishop between 845 and 882, which enables us to date the production of the manuscript to within this 37-year period. The survival of manuscripts whose production is dated or is datable is of great value to palaeographers, since it makes possible a more precise understanding of the chronology of the evolution in styles of medieval handwriting.The interest of this manuscript to students of codicology, furthermore, is how clearly it illustrates the archetypical model of medieval book production in a monastic context. In order to make a book in the medieval period, one first had to obtain another copy from somewhere: this is known as the exemplar. The source of the exemplar for this manuscript is not known, nor is it known to have survived. However, it was most likely disbound and its quires divided into portions and shared among a team of scribes. These scribes were then provided with blank quires of parchment and tasked with making a copy, each working concurrently with the others and thereby speeding up the pace of production. The evidence for this may be found in a series of inscriptions at the beginning and ends of quires, presumably made by the head of the cathedral scriptorium who was co-ordinating the work, and which name the monks responsible for the copying each of these sections: first Iotsmar, then Salmon, Hrannigil, Bernard, Hrotald, Haimon, Adelrad and finally Ausold. Although all of the scribes are writing in the same style of handwriting - Caroline minuscule - their hands all differ slightly from one another, as may be seen most clearly at the transition from one scribe's stint to the next. Once their work was completed, the quires were gathered together and bound. Thomson (supplement, 2022) has suggested that the partial erasure of 'dedit Sanctae Mariae Remensi' on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(15);return false;'>1r</a> indicates that 'at least a leaf [is] missing from before Quire 1'. However, the preceding part of that inscription, 'Hincmar archiepiscopus', where it occurs elsewhere in the manuscript does so on the verso of the last leaf of the preceding quire - so it is unlikely that whatever leaf originally bore the first half of the inscription was ever structurally part of the first quire of this manuscript. The evidence in the rest of the manuscript points to the quires having been made up as a batch, and the dedication added in a similar manner, before any copying took place: this is illustrated by the loss of the second half of the inscription where the first leaf of Quire 2 has been cancelled but the text continues uninterrupted (see ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(30);return false;'>8v-9r</a>). Given that this volume contains only Books IX-XVIII of Hrabanus Maurus's Commentary, one might more reasonably deduce that the preceding part of the inscription was found on the closing leaf of the preceding quire, presumably the last in an accompanying volume that bore Hrabanus's Commentary on Books I-VIII and which has been lost or remains unidentified. The partial erasure of the inscription on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(15);return false;'>1r</a> might be explained by the change in ownership in the manuscript: the removal of 'dedit' and 'Remensi' reduced the inscription from the dedication of this manuscript to a more general declaration of piety by invoking the name of the Virgin Mary. The first of the two stubs that remain after Quire 1 is most likely attached to the remains of the pastedown (now f. i recto); the second is the aforementioned cancelled leaf in Quire 2. We know that the manuscript was later in the possession of Ely Cathedral from inscriptions at the front and back of the manuscript, as well as a pressmark on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(15);return false;'>1r</a> that resembles a large letter I. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge speculated that this manuscript might have been one of several brought from Reims to England by Grimbald of Saint-Bertin (c. 820s-901), however, as Pam Robinson notes, there is no evidence for this in the manuscript.Dr James Freeman Medieval Manuscripts Specialist Cambridge University Library