Manuscript
The manuscript containing the Sequence is a collection of sermons by Gregory of Nazianzus. It is first mentioned in a 12th century catalog of the library of Saint-Amand Abbey, although the production of the manuscript has been dated to the early 9th century. It is not known with certainty where it was produced. B. Bischoff suggests that it came from a scriptorium in (Lower) Lotharingia, but not from Saint-Amand itself, given its style of construction and the handwriting, which cannot be matched to other manuscripts produced there during the same period.
The manuscript is less significant for its original content, however, than for the empty pages at the end that later scribes filled in with additional texts. These include:
- the top half of f141: a 14-line Latin poem about Saint Eulalia (Cantica uirginis eulalie)
- the top half of f141v: the Sequence of Saint Eulalia" in vernacular Romance
- from the bottom of f141v to the top of f143: the Ludwigslied (Rithmus teutonicus), written in a variety of Old High German.
The Sequence and the Ludwigslied are written in the same hand, and since the preamble of the Ludwigslied mentions the death of Louis III, both additions to the manuscript are dated to 882 or soon thereafter. Again, it cannot be established with certainty where these additions were made, whether at Saint-Amand or elsewhere.
When Jean Mabillon visited Saint-Amand Abbey in 1672, he made a hasty copy of the Ludwigslied, but neither he nor his hosts seem to have recognized the significance of the Sequence immediately preceding it. When Mabillon and the historian Johannes Schilter attempted to obtain a better transcription of the Ludwigslied in 1693, the monks of the abbey were unable to locate the manuscript. It remained lost throughout the 18th century, until the entire contents of the abbey library were confiscated and transferred to Valenciennes in 1792, by order of the revolutionary government. In September 1837, Hoffmann von Fallersleben visited the library of Valenciennes with the intention of unearthing the lost text of the Ludwigslied. According to his account, it only took him one afternoon to find the manuscript and to realize that it contained another important text, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.
Read more about this topic: Sequence Of Saint Eulalia
Famous quotes containing the word manuscript:
“This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound off with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening.... It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which the word “beauteous” was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as “life’s page,” was up to the usual average.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.”
—Golo Mann (b. 1909)
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)