Le Juvénal des Carolingiens à la lumière du Ms Cambridge King’s College 52

Since the nineteenth century, Heiric ‘of Auxerre’, as he is usually called, has been credited with a commentary on Juvenal’s Satires attributed in some late manuscripts to a Cornutus. No earlier manuscript evidence has ever been found for Heiric’s authorship. The manuscript that is now Cambridge King’s College 52, privately owned until 1954 and ignored by all editors of Juvenal, furnishes the oldest testimony for the Nicaean subscription and contains one of the richest sets of glosses in the ninth-century manuscripts. On paleographical grounds it can be considered a product of the scriptorium of Hincmar of Rheims, and its text belongs to Knoche’s lambda family, held to go back to Antiquity. Its marginal commentary, copied along with the text, contains, in condensed form, most of the information found in the vulgate ‘Cornutus commentary’. Some of the glosses, added later, can be attributed to the hand of Heiric. Most of this material also appears in the vulgate commentary. The King’s manuscript makes it possible to recognize the Carolingian contribution to what is mostly a late-antique commentary. Thus, it advances our understanding of the Carolingian approach to Roman satire, which in fact seems quite limited and largely concerned with prosody.