Any manuscript historian can tell you that digging around in the archives is not all fun and games. You don’t always find what you’re looking for. Sometimes, you leave disappointed, with a runny nose and clothes soiled with the dust of ages past.
Yet often enough, you will find far more than you’re looking for – a key to research when you’re least expecting it.
Serendipity in research
This was my experience in Oxford some years ago, ploughing my way through the Bodleian Library’s collections of sermons written by the Church Fathers. I was a doctoral student, working on one of the most important and widely disseminated texts of the Middle Ages, the homiliary of Paul the Deacon.
Commissioned by Charlemagne in the late eighth century for use in his royal chapels, Paul’s collection went on to be used in churches across the Carolingian Empire and, eventually, the whole of Europe. As a resource used during times of prayer, for study, and for preaching, it can tell us about much about the spirituality and religious beliefs of countless generations. The surviving manuscripts often tell us much about the links between particular communities.
As I came across Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud. misc. 157, I had little to guide me, and little reason to expect it would prove significant. Daniela Mairhofer’s Medieval Manuscripts from Würzburg in the Bodleian Library was not yet published, and all I had to go on was a brief description in S.J.P. van Dijk’s in-house handlist of the library’s liturgical manuscripts. There, it described a collection: ‘Secular N. Italy, mid-11th cent.’
I expected little. I found much.
Its script and initials reminded me of many other texts I’d seen while conducting research on the Continent. Within a few minutes, it was clear to me that this was a copy of the homiliary of Paul the Deacon. As I looked closer at the sequence of patristic sermons in MS. Laud Misc. 157, I discovered that this manuscript was not just a little like other copies I’d seen, but precisely like another copy I’d spent considerable time with: Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. perg. 15.
If you study medieval collections (from recipes to canon law to spells), you discover each one is different. There is no such thing as an exact copy – except when there is. Then you know you’re on to something.
Bodleian MS. Laud misc. 157 and the Karlsruhe manuscript share a precise set of deviations from the original structure of Paul the Deacon’s homiliary. These take the form of textual additions from preachers like Eusebius Gallicanus, Leo the Great, and the Venerable Bede. The overlap between the copies is unique among the hundreds of witnesses to Paul the Deacon’s text that I have seen.
The virtues of a manuscript scholar
What does this tell us? Perhaps a few things.
First, diligence is an under-discussed virtue in historical training: so much of what we do requires the patience to go and consult material that may or may not be promising, beautiful, or even comprehensible. We need to foster this virtue.
Second, rare finds are possible. There are unplumbed depths in the archives, but you will only find them if you spend time there. If you are content with editions or translations, you will never experience the unexpected joy of picking up ‘yet another’ dusty, neglected, centuries-old artefact, only to discover it can still speak, still teach, still transform our understanding.
The content arrangement I discovered in both the Oxford and Karlsruhe manuscripts may point to something concrete, not only to a relationship of dependence between the two or to a common textual ancestor. The two manuscripts may have been copied in the same place.
This is important because the Karlsruhe manuscript has never been localized. Even the renowned scholar of Carolingian script, Bernhard Bischoff, suggested only a region: south-west Germany. Since we know that MS. Laud. misc. 157 hails from Würzburg, might Karlsruhe, Aug. perg. 15 have come from there as well?
Only time and research will tell. If I hadn’t come across my rare find, I might never have thought to ask.
About the author
The Rev’d Dr Zachary Guiliano is chaplain and career development research fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and the author of The Homiliary of Paul the Deacon: Religious and Cultural Reform in Carolingian Europe (Turnhout, 2021).