Introductory remarks to the palaeographical atlas

On early MMDC-manuscripts

Dutch public collections are not especially rich in books of the late antiquity or the early middle ages. The oldest fragmentary folio of a Latin parchment codex, containing the Sententes by the 2nd/3rd-century jurist Julius Paul,

is written in an early half-uncial dating from the 4th century; its origin is uncertain, but the fragment was presumably found in Egypt. Other remains of very early manuscripts are three bifolia of a 5th/6th-century chronicle,

a bifolium from the 6th century with minor prophets from the Old Testament,

and two leaves with Origen's Homilies on Leviticus

from the second half of that century; all these fragments are written in Italian (half-)uncial, and were preserved by coincidence at the Benedictine abbey of Fleury-Saint Benoît. The first complete codex, written in uncial, is the famous Leiden Herbary,

which might even date from the 6th century and which was most likely written in Italy as well. On Dutch soil this is all that has come down to the present age from the period before c. 600.

The 7th century is represented by no more than one or two items. Two leaves of Gregory of Tours' History of the Francs survive as fly-leafs in a 9th-century codex;

and twelve folios containing part of a gospel lectionary from around the year 700 are bound to­gether with the equally famous Utrecht Psalter.

Again the uncial in this era is predominant, as both manuscripts are written in this script. But now the birthplaces show more diversity: France and England (Wearmouth-Jarrow), respectively.

From the 8th century onwards the stream of scripts flows more abundantly. About fifteen (fragmentary) manuscripts can be ascribed to the century that witnessed the emergence of Caroline minuscule. Nearly all of them were produced in 8th-century France: only one booklet, a fragment of Natural history by Pliny the Elder, was apparently made in Northern England;

another book - with songs, prayers, a glossary and other minor texts - probably came from the abbey of Sankt Gallen in modern Switzerland,

the same region that accounts for an exemplar of Fredegar's Chronicle, dated around 800.

Some 130 codices, comprising an estimate of more than four times as many discernable texts, are datable to the 9th century.

We have to wait until the 11th century for the first manuscripts written in the Northern Netherlands to pop up in MMDC, while some of the earliest Dutch books – or objects recognizable as such – are kept in foreign libraries nowadays. Nevertheless we find in Dutch public collections the Lifes of Saint Martin probably written in Utrecht around 1050,

and a paraphrase by Willeram of Ebersberg of the Song of Songs copied in the Benedictine abbey of Egmond around 1100.

A copy of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job possibly originates from Utrecht in the late 11th century;

at least it was owned by the Benedictines of Saint Paul's abbey in Utrecht later in the middle ages. A magnificent 12th-century book with a commentary by Florus Diaconus on the Pauline epistles

has the same provenance. The 12th century offers a few more remnants of Dutch scribal activity, such as a Collectarius

and a Martyrology accompanied by annals of the Utrechtchapter of Saint Mary.

 

Literature:

• Bernhard Bischoff, Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters. Berlin, 1979.
• J.P. Gumbert, The Dutch and their books in the manuscript age. London, 1990.

Scripts

[capitalis]			capitalis quadrata			capitalis rustica
uncial
half-uncial
littera prae-carolina
littera carolina
[regional scripts]	Visigothic script			Insular script		Beneventan script
littera prae-gothica
littera notula
littera cursiva		littera cursiva (A)			littera cursiva (C)		littera cursiva (A/C)
littera cursiva (Anglicana)					littera cursiva (Bourguignonne)
littera textualis		littera textualis (Italiana)			littera textualia (E)		littera textualis (Y)
littera hybrida
littera humanistica			littera humanistica cursiva			littera humanistica textualis

Read more