VULGATE
519
VULGATE
at St. Paul's-without-the-Walls. This is a fine copy
of the Alciiin Bible, with many beautiful illuminated
letters and pages. Probably the best exemplar of this
Bible is the large codex at Zurich, a photographic
copy of which has also been secured together with a
collation of the Octateuch made for the Commission
by the under-Iibrarian, Dr. Werner. A third copy
is the best known of the throe, that at the VanecelHana
Library in Rome. A collation of the Pentateuch of
the last has been made for the Commission by Father
Bellasis of the Oratory; but it has not yet been
photographed, owing to difficulties made by the
custodians. The Commission came to the conclu-
sion that the collation of these three manuscripts
would be sufficient to determine the type of the
coiTections made by Alcuin. These should be of
interest to EngUshmen since for the purpose of his
revision Alcuin sent over to the libraries of England
to obtain the best MS. evidence. The copy of the
.\lcuin Bible at St. Paul's in Rome has a special
interest since in the thirteenth century Bishop
Gradisson of Exeter ordered all the copies of the
Sacred Scriptures in his diocese to be corrected ac-
cording to a copy of the text of that Bible.
Whilst in Italy Dom Quentin went to the monas- tery of La Cara and photographed the interesting Bible of Spanish origin, which has long been in the possession of the monastery there. Most of the text has now also been collated on the MS. by Dom Cot- tereau, who has spent many months at the monastery for that purjjose.
It was su])posed that a good deal of important material was likely to be found in the cathedral and other libraries of Spain; and in the spring of 1909 Dom de Bruj-ne undertook to make a voyage lilleraire for the Commission in that country. His object was to examine the Biblical MSS. known to exist and to see if others could be found. In his report to the Commission he says: "I had an ex- cellent guide in the 'Handschriftenschatz Spaniens' of R. Beer. The two most important laciniw in it relate to the manuscripts of Roda and Urgel. It might well be thought that these two important col- lections had disappeared or been lost. I, however, found them intact or nearly so, the first in the Cathedral of Lerida, kept in a special book-case; the second at Urgel itself. In most of the hbraries of Spain manuscript catalogues sufficiently good are to be found." It may be of interest to give a list of the libraries of Spain which were examined by Dom de Bruyne in the course of his journey. Bar- celona (Archivio de la Corona de Aragon and the cathedral); Vich; Tarragona (Bibl. Provincial and the Seminario); Saragossa (S(5o, N. D. del Pilar, and the university) ; Siguenza; Madrid (Bib. Nacional, Academia de la Historia, Museo archeologico, Archivio historico nacional, university and I3ib. Real); Escurial; Toledo; Leon (cathedral hbrary and that of S. Isidore); Burgos (cathedral, seminary, and Bib. provincial), Urgel, Gerona, and Pampeluna.
Dom de Briiyne thus sums up the results of his journey in Spain: "I have descriptions of all the Bibles, more or less at length, according to their age and importance. Some of the volumes have been collated, either wholly or in part. All the leaves of two Biblical palimpsests (Escurial, R. II, 18, and Leon, cathedral archives, 1.')) have been identified; the text of Baruch, up to this time only known by the Codex Gothicus Legionensis, which had been pub- lished by Hoberg from a copy in the Vatican, made in the sixteenth century, has been collated ujion the MS. at I^on and compared with other independent copies I discovered. At Siguenza I founil a fragment in Arabo-Latin of St. Paul, which has been published in the 'Revnie Biblique' in 1910. The interesting marginal notes of the same Leon Bible, published in part by Verccllone from the Vatican sixteenth-century
copy, were reviewed and completed upon the original
MS.; and I found another independent MS. text of
these notes at Madrid, so that it will now be possible
to give a critical edition of these important frag-
ments." This edition of fragments of the old Latin
text is being prepared by Dom de Bruyne, and wiU in
due course be published in the proposed series of texts
and studies, called the "Collectanea Biblica Latina",
projected by the commission.
The Commission has during the past year been able to add to its collection of collations those of two MSS. possessed by Mr. Pierpont Morgan. He kindly permitted Mr. Hoskier to examine and collate these manuscripts for the Commission. The first is the precious codex known as the "Golden Gospels". S.amuel Berger has said of this volume: "In the im- portant and ancient group of MSS. written in golden letters the oldest is beyond doubt the famous Hamil- ton MS., 251." At the sale of the Hamilton collec- tion in 1S90 this volume was purchased for an Amer- ican gentleman named Thomas Irwin of Oswego. On his death it was purchased by Mr. Pierpont Mor- gan and added to his collection. The collation made for the Commission by Mr. Hoskier has re- cently been pubhshed in a magnificent folio volume with several facsimiles in colour and gold. Mr. Hoskier prefaced it by an ample introduction both pala>ographical and critical. In this same volume is the collation of a fragment of the Gospels also in the possession of Mr. Pierpont Morgan. This frag- ment of seventeen leaves is ^Titten m a remarkably fine uncial hand, and the rest of the MS. is to be found in the "Musee Germanique" of Nuremberg. A collation of this part was made in 1881, and printed by Dombart in the "Zeitschrift fiir Wissenschaftfiche Theologie" (De Codice Cremifanensi MiUenario, Pars I).
The work of collation is necessarily long and tedious. It requires great care and minute observa- tion since nothing is too small to be passed over, for the most insignificant thing may be found to throw fight on a problem or help to identify a manuscript. A few tags of torn-out leaves in a manuscript of St. Paul at Monza have helped to clear up a disputed point of importance. The addition by the hand of a corrector of the Irish symbol for milem (but) in a very old Heptateuch in the Vatican Library is the sole certain indication in the volume that it had passed at one time under Celtic influences, and this has immediately connected it with St.Columban's colony at Bobbio. In the fragments of the old Itala version written on the margins of the Codex Toletanus and in another MS. at Madrid, appears the word mulecula. It is in no dictionary, but it appears in one of the inscriptions at Pompeu: mvla docet mulecvlam. De Rossi conjectured that it was a barbarous Latin word for "fly", and this explanation was accepted until the present time, when, from the Greek of the passages of the old Itala, it evidently means "young mule". Thus the sentence at Pompeii becomes clear.
From time to time theCommis.sion has come across fragments of Bibles in the course of researches in fibraries, which show how precious MSS. have been destroyed. W^hen other and newer texts had been made for the use of some church or monastery there appears to have been little hesitation in using the older copies for binding pur])oses or, for the Bake of the p.archment, obhterating the original WTiting and putting some other text upon it. Thus in the bindings of books at Durham and at Worcester some precious fragments of vers- old Bibles have been found. At Worcester the fragments recovered in this way may not impossibly be leaves of a Bible presented to Worcester by King Etheldred in the tenth century. Perhaps the most curious fragment of a Gospel Book that has come to the Commission's
