The e-codices newsletter provides information about the latest updates, highlights, and activities of our project.
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The e-codices team
In this issue:
On 20 December 2023, e-codices published its last update of the year. The 19 codices placed online include a selection from the Franciscan Convent of Fribourg, a spectacular palimpsested Beneventan survivor from Solothurn, and a range of theological and grammatical works from St. Gall.
The four manuscripts published from the Couvent des Cordeliers in Fribourg represent the intellectual treasury of Franciscan convent in Fribourg in the late middle ages. A dated (1469) copy of Peter of Aquila’s Sentences commentary (Ms. 11) provides the foundations in speculative theology, heavily based on the thought of John Duns Scotus; a nearly complete collection of Sunday sermons (Ms. 50) and a book of exempla (Ms. 83) attests to the friar’s preaching activities. Finally, a miscellany (Ms. 106) brings together papal bulls pertaining to the Franciscan Order, the acts and constitutions produced OFM provincial and general chapter meetings, and interpretative documents, supplying the administrative basis for the privileges and obligations of the Cordeliers. All four manuscripts are accompanied by the latest descriptions from Dörthe Führer and Mikkel Mangold’s Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften des Franziskanerklosters Freiburg, Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2023.
The Staatsarchiv Solothurn preserves unbound leaves of a codex originally assembled in Salerno to document the church’s property. While the twelfth-century codex originally had at least 80 leaves, only 31 survive; of these, 28 have palimpsests of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, dated to the tenth century. How the manuscript came to Switzerland is unclear.
The Abbey Library of St. Gallen regales us once again with a wide range of texts, including theological works for preaching and monastic reflection, a medical miscellany (Cod. Sang. 758), and both speculative and pedagogical grammar texts. Included among these riches is Cod. Sang. 848, the Abbey Library’s copy of the Toledan Tables (Manuscript Sg in Fritz S. Pedersen’s monumental 2002 edition). The table’s instructions, the Canones (pp. 3–44), represent version Cb, which Pedersen (2002, v. 2, p. 337) conjectures is a revision from a previous Latin version (Cc) and not an independent translation.
At the end of December 2023, the sixth issue of Fragmentology appeared.
The e-codices team wishes you a fruitful 2024 and looks forward to bringing out more spectacular content in the coming months!
e-codices
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