Peritia

This paper presents a commentary on, and amplification of, a recent study of nineteenth-century excavations of St Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral. As well as offering several corrections to that paper, it draws on unpublished letters and local printed sources to describe further associated excavations, and to suggest that Anglican and Roman Catholic responses to these investigations were more complex and less adversarial than there described.

This is the text of a lecture given by Bernhard Bischoff at the London Bibliographical Society, on 19 September 1982, on the occasion of the presentation to him of the Society’s gold medal. It describes Bischoff ’s early career and his experiences as a collaborator, over 30 years, with E. A. Lowe on the work of compiling the great Codices Latini Antiquiores.

Contrary to the traditional interpretation of the Synod of Whitby, which (following Bede) has always regarded Oswiu of Northumbria’s decision as between two ecclesiastical factions, ‘Celtic’ and ‘Roman’, this article suggests that the ‘Roman’ faction itself was split, thus allowing a reappraisal of the synod’s significance.

A single quire at the end of the manuscript St Gall 877 contains a very fragmentary commentary on the Pauline epistles. It can probably be dated to the early ninth century. An examination of the content shows that it is closely related to the commentary found in Munich, BSB, Clm 6235, and that the text of which it is a remnant was known to Sedulius Scottus. The manuscript seems to have gone unnoticed in studies of the Hiberno-Latin biblical commentaries. The present article is intended to rescue this text from the oblivion into which it has fallen, and to draw attention to the contributions it can make towards filling some of the gaps in our knowledge of these texts.

Six manuscripts of Priscian’s Ars are counted among its recensio scotica, as they have variants or Irish glosses or Insular script in common. This article demonstrates, based on a series of samplings from all extant manuscripts of saec. viii‒x/xi, that the Irish group is not as clearly defined as one might expect from the apparatus of the edition. In particular, the main text of MS E turns out to be a hybrid, cobbled together from several sources. One other manuscript, until now neglected in research, Zürich, ZB, C 37, can be associated with the Irish family. This Ars manuscript is identified as the middle part of a former book whose front and rear quires (Leiden, UB, Voss. Lat. F. 67, part iii) contain the Commentariolum of Sedulius Scottus and minor works of Priscian. The variants of its Ars text suggest that the book is a descendant of Sedulius’ Priscian copy. The reconstructed book indicates in all texts that Sedulius utilised Irish as well as continental manuscripts.

The St Gall Priscian codex, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 904, is well known for its rich collection of glosses: as well as c. 3200 symbol glosses, there are more than 9400 verbal glosses, of which more than 3400 contain Old Irish, the remainder being entirely in Latin. However, any simple opposition between Irish and Latin glosses would ignore a much more complex interaction between Irish, Latin, and indeed Greek, in the manuscript. This study aims to characterise the variety of types of language-switching that occur: within individual glosses, more or less encompassed by the term ‘code-switching’, between adjacent glosses, and between related manuscripts. It aims to contribute towards a broader understanding of the relationship between Latin and Irish, and between classical and vernacular languages, in the scholarly culture of the early middle ages.

Columbanus established a number of important monasteries in Merovingian Gaul, Alamannia, and Lombard Italy between ad 591 and his death in Bobbio in ad 615. But what were the factors that lay behind his choice of these sites? Did he play an active role in the foundation process or was he at the whim of his royal patrons, who gave him these lands on which to establish his monasteries? This article proposes that a more complex and dynamic process underlay the choice of these sites, whereby Columbanus and his royal patrons acted in concert to appropriate ancient healing cult sites within a Christian pastoral framework. The commonalities shared by these sites reveal a pastoral element to Columbanus’ establishment of his monasteries. This has important implications for how these sites are interpreted and for understanding Columbanus’ role as a peregrinus and monastic founder on the continent.

The standard interpretations of the history of the Irish on the continent in the seventh century were laid down in the nineteenth century, in the context of the French catholic revival and its enthusiasm for Daniel O’Connell. Little was known of the state of religion and culture in Francia at the time of Columbanus’ arrival. It is, therefore, necessary to reassess the impact of the Irish in the light of our current understanding of the religious and cultural history of Merovingian Francia. The evidence from Anglo-Saxon England provides a useful point of comparison. This first lecture deals with the question of the Irish impact on Merovingian monasticism; the Irish contribution to continental scholarship will be the focus of the second.