A Newly Discovered Prologue of AD 699 to the Easter Table of Victorius of Aquitaine in an unknown Sirmond Manuscript

A computistical manuscript from St Gall of c. ad 900, in the Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek, Bremen, is identified as one of a group (the Sirmond group) which contain material collected and studied in seventh- and early eighth-century Ireland. Intriguingly, this codex contains an unknown treatise of ad 699 which originally served as prologue to an altered version of the Easter table of Victorius of Aquitaine. This article presents arguments for an Irish provenance of this prologue, a critical edition, and a translation. It discusses its significance for the study of Irish intellectual culture at the turn from the seventh to the eighth century. Additionally, the Bremen codex transmits fragments of a prologue to the Supputatio Romana, the Easter reckoning followed in Rome between the third and the fifth centuries, some being identical with a passage in the fourth-century Cologne Prologue.