Studies on Nature, Music and Arithmetic in the Circle of Heiric of Auxerre
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This study represents an expanded version of the paper delivered at the conference Maîtres auxerrois du ixe siècle : nouvelles perspectives sur l’école carolingienne d’Auxerre, held 16-17 September 2021. The oral paper comprised a shorter version of the first and third parts of the present study
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- 1 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E., appearing as Epistolae variorum 26, II, ed. E. Dümmler, in E (...)
- 2 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta di nuova attribuzione ad Almanno di Hautvillers », Archives d’histoire (...)
1The work known as the letter A. to E. has been celebrated for its vivid evocation of ninth-century intellectual life1. Mainoldi’s identification of the author A. was a crucial step in dispelling the letter’s most recalcitrant mystery, its authorship2. Through a number of arguments, and most persuasively through pointed comparison with authentic writings, he demonstrates that the letter’s author is Almann of Hautvillers (ca 840-ca 889). In an impassioned essay, Almann bemoans master E.’s absence and aims to elicit from him a reply. But it would be an understatement to call Almann’s letter a simple request. At once, the letter reveals a mind rich in learning and association. The letter is an elevated plea for wisdom, and for the ensuing prospect of divine beholding that will flow from E.’s instruction – if only E. will write back. It is a copious, digressive representation, whose ostentatious erudition touches on the theory of the arts, the careers of Bishop Isaac of Langres (856-880), Teutbertus, a certain bishop L., and John Scottus Eriugena (ca 800-ca 877), as well as on specific issues of meter, canon law, and wall-painting.
- 3 A. Wilmart, « La lettre philosophique d’Almanne et son contexte littéraire », Archives d’histoire d (...)
- 4 Flodoard mentions a lost letter of Hincmar of Reims from after 866, perhaps 868, recalling Almann t (...)
- 5 A. Wilmart, « La lettre philosophique… », op. cit., p. 309-316 ; A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Sain (...)
- 6 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta… », ibid., p. 27 ; A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Saint-Amand… », ibid., (...)
2The identification of A. as Almann brings the letter into the known discourse of the Carolingian intelligentsia. Almann’s birth has typically been placed around the year 840. He was apparently educated at Hautvillers near Reims. Mainoldi has discarded Wilmart’s proposed obit of 889, but offers no other date3. The only secure point in the middle is Almann’s recall to the monastery of Hautvillers after 866 for an entanglement in secular affairs deemed unfitting to the monastic profession4. In the following years, Almann would have written the extant works bearing his name : a life of Saint Memmius, a life of Saint Helena, and a commentary on the liturgy. Wilmart, Poirel and Mainoldi have all documented the profound impression that Eriugena’s thought made on him, and Eriugena is adduced as a metrical authority in the letter from A. to E.5. Mainoldi concurs with earlier scholars in dating Almann’s letter to the first half of the 870s6.
- 7 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta », ibid., p. 21 ; A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Saint-Amand… », ibid., (...)
3Nevertheless, not all of the letter’s difficulties have been resolved. Advancing rather less new evidence, Mainoldi adheres to Van de Vyver’s proposal that the recipient’s initial E. stands for (H)Eiric of Auxerre7. This study will bring fresh evidence to that identification. Moreover, E.’s teacher of music, known only by his first initial as magister A., has also failed to be matched in the wider record. Almann writes :
- 8 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 183, l. 27-29) : Recolo hic siquidem dixisse (...)
To be sure I am recalling here that you said you had learned by listening to the venerable master A. that music consists of the mysteries of numbers. Indeed, that great man said what he judged should be said8.
4Almann had apparently never met magister A., but had heard of him through E.. The identity of this unknown master of the quadrivium would provide a concrete link in a circle comprising E. and Almann – provided that similarities of thought, interest or content – in short, a common conversation – could corroborate such a link.
5The ensuing study proposes to identify a community of scholars active between 849 and 874 that partook of and collectively formed important currents of arithmetical, musical and natural learning. Heiric of Auxerre (841-after 876) serves as the intermediary that connects the circle of interlocutors. The other identifiable characters are the music theorist Aurelian of Réôme (fl. 849/850), probably of a senior generation within this period, and the brilliant younger scholar Almann of Hautvillers. Their common conversation emerges in a body of argument and influence that surfaces in the letter from A. to E., in the scholarly writings of the ninth century, and in the early medieval glosses attached to Bede’s De natura rerum. This study makes three principal arguments : the manuscript Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Vossius lat. 8° 88, which uniquely transmits Almann’s letter to E., preserves evidence for Heiric’s scholarly activity and other scholarship related to Auxerre ; the music scholar designated magister A. in Almann’s letter to E. should be identified as Aurelian of Réôme ; and, Aurelian represents a primitive point in Auxerre-affiliated scientific study through his unrecognized use of glosses on Bede’s De natura rerum. Beyond demarcating a circle of scientific devotees, this study seeks to illuminate a primitive level in the history and constitution of scientific gloss corpora. The student of early medieval glosses is hemmed on every side by the prevailing anonymity of the glossators, and the volume of gloss material has made it difficult to document the exchange and development of specific doctrines. Thus, this study will make a provisional attempt to bring a significant gloss corpus into the ambit of named scholars and their works.
1. Almann of Hautvillers in ms. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Vossius lat. 8° 88
- 9 B. Bischoff, Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wi (...)
6The letter from A. to E. is uniquely preserved in a codicological unit running from folio 2 to 47 in ms. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Vossius lat. 8° 88 (L). This codicological unit has been dated to the last quarter of the ninth century9. A preceding quire, once joined to it as the first quire, now forms folios 91-98 at the end of ms. Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 1424 (V). The contents of the reconstituted membra disiecta are as follows :
L, fol. 17v°-18r° : a Greek – Latin glossary on the powers of soul ;
- 18 Augustine, De dialectica, ed. J. Pinborg, tr. B. D. Jackson, Dordrecht, 1975.
L, fol. 26r°-39v° : Augustine, De dialectica18 ;
L, fol. 42r°-v°, 45r° : unedited commentary on the prologue of Boethius, De institutione arithmetica ;
L, fol. 45v° : blank ;
7I will refer to the reconstructed artifact as the Leiden manuscript (L), because the works that I treat are confined to that element. An anonymous commentary on Boethius’s De arithmetica spans the primitive codex’s rupture into two parts. A single early annotator has left glosses in this commentary, in the glossary on folios 11r°-17v° and in the letter H. to A. on folios 24v°-25v°.
- 22 For the Scholica, see in the first place, M. L. W. Laistner, « Notes on Greek from the Lectures of (...)
- 23 The Nat. rer. glosses are the subject of the last part of this study. V. Petroff has supplemented t (...)
- 24 V. von Büren, « Heiricus [Autissiodorensis]… », op. cit., p. 397.
- 25 Ms. Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 4929.
- 26 V. von Büren, « Heiricus [Autissiodorensis]… », op. cit., p. 396-397.
8Two works in this content list evoke the intellectual involvement of Heiric of Auxerre. First, the glossary (fol. 11r°-17v°) of nearly three hundred terms contains forty-nine entries that appear in the Greek glossary entitled the Scholica graecarum glossarum22. The Scholica seems to have circulated among Auxerre scholars and was used, for instance, by Remigius of Auxerre. Several of its lemmata turn up among the glosses on Bede’s De natura rerum, themselves sometimes associated with Auxerre23. Entries in L’s glossary are also drawn from the so-called Scholia Gronoviana to Cicero’s orations, which are uniquely transmitted in ms. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Vossius lat. 4° 130, in which Heiric may show his scribal hand24. Other entries are drawn from the pseudo-Plautinian comedy Querolus, which Heiric also possessed25. While the glossary in L awaits an exhaustive study, von Büren does not hesitate to identify it as Heiric’s work26.
- 27 A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Saint-Amand… », op. cit., p. 63, n. 12. In fact, the discrepancy of l (...)
- 28 See epistle 21 to Jonas in the forthcoming edition of Lupus of Ferrières by M. I. Allen, Seruatus L (...)
- 29 Heiric of Auxerre, Miracula sancti Germani 2.3, see ed. Waitz, Hanovre, 1881 (MGH, SS 13).
9Second, the letter from A. to E. on folios 20v°-24v° evidently belongs to a correspondence, of which Almann is one interlocutor and of which Heiric may be the other. Following Almann’s missive, a letter on folios 24v°-25v° presents an apology from H. to A. for failing to respond in a timely way. The two letters have normally been understood as belonging to a common epistolary exchange, where the initial A. supplies at least one identical sender and recipient. To address the discrepancy between the initials E. and H., Van de Vyver proposed that the recipient E. and the writer H. can refer to one and the same (H)Eiricus under different spellings27. Furthermore, the second letter’s language supports the ascription of the initial H. to Heiric. The expression ansam calumniae – the « handle » or « occasion of calumny » –, which seems to originate in Augustine, did not enjoy a wide usage, but conspicuously appears in a letter by Heiric’s teacher Lupus of Ferrières28. Second, the word antelucandum is a rare word, attested only once in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae : namely, in the Querolus, mentioned above for being held in Heiric’s possession. The word stands in Heiric’s Miracula sancti Germani in the same verbal collocation with credidit29. In short, it seems justified to proceed from the position that Heiric is Almann’s correspondent.
- 30 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 185, l. 29) : Debita pandit et hinc operis q (...)
10The annotations in the De arithmetica commentary, in the glossary, and in the letter from Heiric reveal local cross-pollination from the codex’s main works. For instance, on folio 10r° of the De arithmetica commentary, the annotator writes quousque above a correction of quatinus to quatenus. The motivation for the gloss appears to lie in an entry on folio 15v° of the glossary that distinguishes quatenus from quatinus through this definition. In a second instance, the annotator jots in the margin of the De arithmetica commentary : Deus corde, ore et opere colitur (fol. 7v°). In his letter to E., Almann appends verses that contain the same tripartite motif : Debita pandit et hinc / operis quoque cordis et oris30. Thus, the body of annotations in L, derived though they are from diverse sources, reflects the interest that L’s main texts stimulated in a single ninth-century reader.
- 31 K. A. de Meyier, Codices Vossiani Latini, Leyde, 1973-1977, t. 3, p. 159-164.
- 32 See further J. Thompson, « An Early Lemmatic Commentary… », op. cit., p. 126-130.
11Yet the cataloguer of the Leiden codex, de Meyier, tentatively proposed to identify the annotating hand with the main scribe of the letter A. to E.31. We might further ask whether the author of the letter A. to E. and the annotator of the manuscript are one and the same : Almann of Hautvillers. Almann’s erudition resonates with the annotator’s learned interests32. The letter itself reveals an awareness of themes, like the platonic eye and the division of the quadrivium, that arise in the chapters of Boethius’s De arithmetica covered by the codex’s commentary. The identification of annotator and author would also explain why the annotator is conspicuously indifferent to the erudition of the letter from A. to E. The absence of annotations is, after all, all the more remarkable since the annotator tends to highlight rare words of the kind frequent in this letter. Yet not only is the letter copied by the annotator, but the annotator is the letter’s author. Finally, L is the unique witness of a verse-letter by Gottschalk of Orbais to an unknown individual. Since Gottschalk was confined to the Abbey of Hautvillers from 849 until his death (868/869), are we perhaps entitled to ask if this manuscript was not a house copy under Almann’s hand ? Indeed, the lofty spirit of Almann’s letter is reminiscent exactly of the rhetorical elaboration that figures in Gottschalk’s own requests for learned responses. Thus, the codex not would merely reveal a scholarly rapport between Heiric and Almann, but also provide a body of texts that interested Almann, besides Heiric, as mentioned above.
- 33 J. Thompson, « An Early Lemmatic Commentary… », ibid., p. 155, 165-167 and 187.
- 34 J. J. Contreni, « John Scottus, Nutritor, and the Liberal Arts », in A. Guiu (ed.), A Companion to (...)
- 35 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 184, l. 29 and 31).
- 36 See further F. Cinato, Priscien glosé : L’ars grammatica de Priscien vue à travers les gloses carol (...)
12Such scholarly affiliations, elicited here from L’s content, may correspond to a scholarly community that can be reconstructed for the study of Priscian during the 850s and 860s. In an earlier study of the De arithmetica commentary on folios 2r°-10v°, I observed that close analogues for certain doctrines figure in the Priscian commentary ascribed to a certain Isaac and preserved in ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 750533. Contreni has proposed that this commentator, who glossed Priscian before the death of Frotbaldus of Chartres in 858 – or at least penned a gloss naming him before that date – may be identified as Isaac of Langres (856-880), who in turn is mentioned in Almann’s letter to E.34 Heiric left his own glosses on Priscian in ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 7496. One of the further scribes of Heiric’s Priscian names himself Teutbertus. In his letter to E., Almann refers to a certain confidante named Teutbertus35. The overlapping cluster of names may be corroborated by the dissemination of glossed doctrines. According to Cinato one of Heiric’s Priscianic glosses (lupercal/lupercalia) is similar to the glossary entry in L36. Another relative of the gloss on lupercal surfaces in ms. Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, 1094, an abundantly annotated copy of Priscian that represents one of the few ninth-century manuscripts certainly held, at least on the evidence of a tenth-century ex-libris, at Hautvillers. The history of doctrines may reflect, then, a community of learned interest that can be corroborated from the main actors and texts preserved in L and other codices.
13Heiric and Almann stand at the center of the evidence and are accompanied by a few ancillary figures evoked in Almann’s letter. Almann is not merely an identifiable actor in this circle. He furnishes key evidence as an annotator in the margins of L and as an author in the letter to Heiric. At the heart of Almann’s epistolary representation are the doctrines of Heiric’s former teacher magister A. and the power of music to lead to divine knowledge. Almann was scarcely an acquiescent heir to the earlier generation represented by A. For, to accept his representation, he finds himself constrained to oppose A.’s teaching, venerable master though he may be.
2. Magister A. in Almann’s letter to E.
- 37 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta… », op. cit., p. 23.
14Accepting that Almann’s recipient was Heiric, Mainoldi has proposed that magister A. stands for Heiric’s acknowledged teacher (H)Aimo of Auxerre37. But would Almann plausibly qualify Haimo as a teacher of music ? After all, the scholar who makes the most famous claim to musical learning in the mid-ninth century might also satisfy the criterion of a corresponding initial : Aurelian of Réôme.
- 38 M. Glatthaar, « Bernard von Réome und die Datierung der Musica disciplina Aurelians », Revue bénédi (...)
15The only evidence for Aurelian’s life is his treatise Musica disciplina (Mus. disc.). The treatise was written before the end of the ninth century, the time of the earliest manuscript witness, ms. Valenciennes, Médiathèque Simone Veil, 148 (141). Judgments regarding the treatise’s date have spanned from the third decade of the ninth century to the end of the century. Aurelian penned the work while enduring an unexplained punitive expulsion from Réôme, and upon completion requested corrections from his abbot, Bernard, one of the few cantors who merited his respect, apparently for also qualifying as a musicus. The question of Bernard’s identity has been treated in a 2011 article by Michael Glatthaar. Building on the findings of musicologists such as Barbara Haggh-Huglo, M. Glatthaar concludes that the treatise was written in early 849 or 85038.
- 39 M. Glatthaar, « Bernard von Réome… », ibid., p. 380.
- 40 M. Bernhard, « Textkritisches zu Aurelianus Reomensis », Musica Disciplina, 40 (1986), p. 49-61.
16The text’s oldest and main witness, Valenciennes 148, comprises : (1) a prefatory poem naming the author ; (2) a preface addressed to Bernard (praefatio 1-18) ; (3) a table of contents ; (4) the treatise itself (1-20, 22) ; (5) a notice of approbation (20, 23-24) ; (6) an epilogue addressed to brethren cantors, mentioning Bernard (20, 25-26) ; (7) an encomium on the power of music with two miraculous stories (20, 27-46) ; (8) a further dedication to Bernard (20, 46-63). In M. Glatthaar’s reconstruction, Aurelian’s treatise (3-4) was prefaced by a formal preface (1-2) and, upon delivering it to Bernard, it was accompanied by a less formal letter (8) promising devoted loyalty and submitting it for correction ; the corrected version was then joined by a statement of approbation (5), perhaps by Bernard, near the end of the treatise. Following this statement is an explicit (6) stating that the author has collected these materials and that they have been examined by his abbot Bernard, who has just been elevated to an archbishopric. According to M. Glatthaar, all but the postscript (7) may be thought to belong to the original publication, which unfolded over a short span of time and included several epistolary and book elements. M. Glatthaar believes that the postscript was added soon after Aurelian received the treatise back from Bernard with abbatial (nay, now episcopal) approval39. In truth, it may have been added much later. There is, moreover, good reason to suppose a multi-stage recension undertaken by Aurelian himself that would account for unusual features like the separate submission to both Bernard and to cantors40. Thus, the main text would date to 849/850, and it would have been brought together with accumulations in the extant Valenciennes codex before the end of the century.
- 41 B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library », in International Musicological Society Study Group Cantus Planus (...)
- 42 B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library… » op. cit.
- 43 B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library… », ibid., p. 284-285. In addition, the Liber glossarum might stand (...)
- 44 Miracula Sancti Germani 1, 2, in Acta Sanctorum Julii, t. 7, Anvers, 1731, p. 258D-F, and in Patrol (...)
- 45 Noted by B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library… », op. cit., p. 287.
17The identification of magister A. as Aurelian is all the more plausible since Aurelian probably possessed contacts with nearby Auxerre41. Although he did not require a large library for his treatise Musica disciplina, several of his key sources would have been to hand at Auxerre42. Particularly telling is the similarity between Musica disciplina 20, 5-9 and the Liber glossarum, which exists in a version abbreviated by Heiric of Auxerre (London, British Library, Harley 2735)43. The most important link to Auxerre, however, appears in Aurelian’s postscript addressed to cantors. In this postscript, Aurelian presents two illustrative miracles of the angels who made themselves manifest on earth. The second of these, dealing with a monk who beholds a choir of angels in the night, figures with variants in the first book of Heiric’s Miracula sancti Germani, finished in 87344. The hagiographical project related to Saint Germain was commissioned by Lothar, son of Charles the Bald, in 864-865, when Lothar held both the abbacies of Saint-Germain at Auxerre and of Saint-Jean at Réôme45. Moreover, it would not be necessary to posit yet another academic sojourn for Heiric to explain a tutelage under Aurelian. In the preface to Abbot Bernard, Aurelian implies that as a result of some unstated disgrace he spent time away from Réôme. In other words, he may have intermittently dwelt at Auxerre, as musicologists have suggested. Heiric, for his part, might have encountered Aurelian at Auxerre before his tutelage (ca 859-862) under Lupus of Ferrières. Almann’s letter seems to evoke, after all, the distant past.
18In an obscure conjunction of thoughts Almann recalls what Heiric had recounted to him of magister A.’s teaching :
- 46 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 183, l. 27-29) : Verum quia humanitas sibi r (...)
However, since humanity responds to itself, if the weight of love is balanced in human beings, scarcely does it bear its absence without the blow of grief. For as number squares with number, and measure with measure, so weight too squares with weight. But quality and quantity do not escape sensible appearance, although they should flourish in the prudent soul. To be sure I am reflecting here that you said you had learned from the venerable teacher A. in lecture that music consists of the mysteries of numbers. Indeed, that great man said what he judged should be said46.
19The ensuing digression treats the mysteries of the liberal arts, the duties of learning and of teaching (discendo/docendo), and the mystical goals of both, namely, the purification of the « Platonic eye » so as to behold God, the creator of all things. While he respects magister A., Almann concludes by resisting him. Music is not a mystery, but a quest, an act of seeking, that culminates in the vision of God :
- 47 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed.Dümmler, p. 184, l. 2-4) : Non est igitur mysterium music (...)
Therefore, music is not a mystery, but « a learned knowledge which considers abstract quantity », through which the mystery of faith is sought, by which it may be believed through the merit of faith, until through the marvelous reward of the faith itself one may see the invisible, immortal and immutable God47.
20Almann dismounts from his elevated reflection by way of the themes of teaching, learning and seeking. He fears that E. will take his eagerness and ethereal ruminations for arrogance :
21He returns to an allegorical reading of Wisdom 11, 21, and its bearing on his plea for E.’s learned attention, actually an act of love : « But if, as I had begun to say, quality and quantity correspond to one another at the level of sense, how much more nonetheless will love underlie sense… ». It is the enclosed digression that reveals the identity of magister A.
- 49 Resp. 6, 4, J. E. Chisholm, The Pseudo-Augustinian Hypomnesticon against the Pelagians and Celestia (...)
22Vague though it appears at first glance, the trigger for Almann’s recollection of magister A. finds an explanation in Aurelian’s own work. An inspired reworking of Wisdom 11, 21, the passage’s first two sentences stand in debt to Augustine or to the pseudo-Augustinian Hypomnesticon49. The concept mensura is paired with qualitas, numerus with quantitas, and pondus with both ratio and amor in Augustine, and here with the latter. As it seems, Almann pursues a loose association inspired by his use of the terms numerus and quantitas and, more importantly, by the contrast he draws between sensibilis and intelligibiliter, before turning to an analysis of the seven arts and their distinctions. This cluster of terms triggers Almann’s recollection of magister A.
- 50 Mus. disc. 8.29 (ed. Gushee, p. 80).
23The dyad sensibilis/intelligibilis figures in Aurelian’s work and thus stands out as an impetus to Almann’s recollection. For it serves as an analytical principle in Aurelian’s classification of the arts. Like Almann’s A., he identifies numbers as central to the art of music : « For they say that all the principles of the musical art consist in numbers50. » This commonplace gives way in both authors to a more considered reflection on the division of the arts. Aurelian assigns the quadrivium to the first group of a threefold classification into natural, moral and rational philosophy. He then defines the principal object of study in each discipline and distinguishes the use of number among the four disciplines :
- 51 Mus. disc. 8, 30-31 (ed. Gushee, p. 80-81) : Naturalis autem disciplina iiii traditur artibus, id e (...)
Natural learning, moreover, is handed down in four arts, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, in which numbers are discussed, or the measurements of the earth, or sounds, or indeed the arrangements of the stars. But the entire power and cause of these things is in numbers. Indeed, arithmetic consists of those numbers that are static and intelligible. Geometry has numbers that are static and sensible. But music has numbers that are intelligible, moving, and that stand in relation to something. Astronomy also concerns a moving and ever sensible order51.
24Aurelian’s analysis of the quadrivium thus occasions Almann’s own reflection and apparent recourse to the classic analysis in Boethius’s De arithmetica :
- 52 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 183, l. 29-34) : Tamen si ita est, minime de (...)
Yet if this is the case, we should not hesitate at all, but rather learn and in so doing teach, grammar consists in the mysteries of letters, dialectic the mysteries of syllogisms that proceed from the general to the specific, rhetoric in the mysteries of arguments, geometry in mysteries of lines, arithmetic in the mysteries of numbers, as they relate not to something, as in music, but as they relate only to themselves, and also astronomy in the mysteries of the stars…52.
25Almann may also recall Aurelian’s analysis at Mus. disc. 8.2-3 of the fundamental components of music, grammar and arithmetic :
- 53 Ed. Gushee, p. 78.
Moreover, tone is the smallest part of music, nevertheless a rule ; just as the smallest part of grammar is a letter, and the smallest part in arithmetic is a unit. And as speech arises from and is governed by letters, and the group of numbers, when multiplied, arises and is governed by units, so every melody is controlled by the line of sounds and tones53.
- 54 Ms. Reims, Bibliothèque Carnegie, 1094 (J. 712), fol. 3v°.
26The theme of naming the irreducible unit (pars minima) of a discipline of study can be traced to Late Antiquity and is also found in an annotation in the Hautvillers copy of Priscian54.
- 55 Isidore’s passage contains echoes of Boethius’s De arithmetica, but is copied from a definition of (...)
27Aurelian’s thought at 8.31 is based on Isidore’s Etymologiae 2.24.15, perhaps over an intermediary source, yet develops into an exacter classification of the arts55. For neither Isidore nor his source Cassiodorus had applied the dyads moving/unmoving and sensible/intelligible to each discipline of the quadrivium uniformly. Aurelian draws inferences, as it appears, from Isidore’s statement at Etymologiae 2.24.14 that abstract quantity entails a separation from matter through the intellect – abstracta enim quantitas dicitur, quam intellectu a materia separantes… tractamus. In this way, Aurelian can describe the abstract arts of arithmetic and music with the adjective intelligibilis. This sentence explains, furthermore, Almann’s initial association of quantitas with intelligibiliter – and in consequence his recollection of magister A.
- 56 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 184, l. 2-4) : Non est igitur mysterium musi (...)
- 57 Aurelian’s closest consideration of this theme appears in the aforementioned addendum of angelic mi (...)
28Although Aurelian does not cite Etymologiae 2.24.14, Almann recognizes magister A.’s source and corrects him through it. Drawing on Isidore, he writes : « Therefore, music is not a mystery, but “a learned knowledge which considers abstract quantity”, through which the mystery of faith is sought…56. » The freshly-adduced passage from Isidore allows Almann to make a more sweeping correction of the master’s thought. For, following Cassiodorus, Isidore had divided philosophia inspectiua into naturalis, doctrinalis and diuina/diuinalis and had assigned the quadrivium to doctrinal philosophy. Aurelian, building from a different tripartite classification of philosophy – naturalis, moralis, rationalis – transmitted likewise by Isidore (Etymologiae 2.24.3) – assigns the quadrivium to natural philosophy. By adducing Aurelian’s own source, Almann succeeds in ennobling and advancing the pursuits of the quadrivium well beyond Aurelian, as he understood him. For Almann, the object of the quadrivium is no less than the vision of God. The main element that lacks for corroborating the identification between A. and Aurelian is a treatment by Aurelian of musica under the theme of mysterium57.
- 58 M. Huglo, Les tonaires…, op. cit., p. 47-56 ; but see now Meyer’s remarks in Aurélien de Réome, Mus (...)
- 59 M. Bernhard and M. Ferrari, « Aliquid super quibusdam regulis modulationum. Eine unbekannte musikth (...)
- 60 M. Bernhard and M. Ferrari, « Aliquid super… », ibid., p. 42.
29The passages that correspond to Almann’s description of magister A. figure in chapter 8 of Musica disciplina. Under the title de octo tonis, this chapter begins a distinctive section of the work extending through chapter 19 and occupies an exceptional place in the treatise’s transmission58. A study of chapter 8’s transmission yields three sections appearing in different combinations : sentences 1-21, sentences 22-37, sentences 38-46. The Valenciennes recension, with two later codices, contains the full chapter. Another permutation contains the first and third elements. A third permutation comprising only the first element achieved a circulation that surpassed all the others. The elements that have suggested a resemblance with Almann’s letter stem primarily from the second element. This element of Mus. disc. 8 was adopted virtually unaltered in an epistolary representation to an unknown frater. The editors of this letter Ferrari and Bernhard favor ascribing the letter to Aurelian himself59. They find it, in any case, probable that the chapter is composed of three underlying models60.
- 61 It would be interesting to see if Aurelian’s ideas surface at all in Almann’s unedited treatise on (...)
- 62 On the identity of Manno, see A.-M. Turcan-Verkerk, « Mannon de Saint-Oyen dans l’histoire de la tr (...)
30In summary, the identification of magister A. as Aurelian rests on the following main points : the common initial of Aurelian and of a teacher of music active in the third quarter of the ninth century ; the similarities in analyzing the disciplines ; and the constellation formed of Aurelian, Auxerre, and Heiric, who is the proposed recipient of the letter A. to E. Heiric could have encountered Aurelian at Auxerre. By the time of the letter, Aurelian would have been an established teacher (ille uir magnus). Almann was not acquainted with him directly, but had only heard tell of Aurelian through Heiric61. In any case, Magister Aurelianus would now join the company of other figures named in Almann’s letter : John Scottus Eriugena, Isaac of Langres (856-880), Liudo of Autun (866-874), Manno of Saint Oyen62. Yet once Aurelian joins this circle, his treatise Musica disciplina assumes a new relation to other works under study at Auxerre. The second constitutive element of Mus. disc. 8 is dedicated to expounding the ninth-century’s basic cosmological lore of the zodiac and the planets. This fresh perspective on Aurelian’s relationship to Auxerre scholarship urges for a deeper examination of the principal ninth-century handbook for this lore, Bede’s De natura rerum, the exposition of which has also been claimed for the masters of Auxerre.
3. Magister A. in the Footnotes of « Byrhtferth »
- 63 Mus. disc. 20.25 (ed. Gushee, p. 131). J. P. Ponte, « Aureliani Reomensis, Musica disciplina. A Rev (...)
- 64 N. Phillips, « Classical and Late Latin Sources… », op. cit., p. 103-119. According to Phillips (p. (...)
- 65 C. W. Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha : Scientific Writings Falsely Attributed to Bede, Cornell, 1954, (...)
31Aurelian achieves his name as a compiler of sources – collegi, he himself writes –, and J. P. Ponte, L. Gushee, U. Pizzani, B. Haggh, N. Phillips, A. Morelli and C. Meyer have documented his learning63. The work is heavily indebted to Boethius and Cassiodorus64. In Mus. disc. 8.22-37 Aurelian offers a précis of cosmological lore and treats music’s relationship to the other disciplines of the quadrivium. He presents basic information about the motion of the celestial bodies, the zodiac, the planets and their orbital durations, and their correspondence to music : in short, textbook lore about nature such as is found in Bede’s De natura rerum (Nat. rer.). It is the purpose of the last part of this study to propose not only that Aurelian drew directly or indirectly on Nat. rer., but also that he used texts that can be traced in this work’s tenth-century gloss tradition. Aurelian’s usage, therefore, gives evidence for a stratum of annotation to Nat. rer. that may date to 849/850. It also belongs to an area of scholarly endeavor in which Auxerre scholars have been seen by Jones, Contreni, Petroff and others, as holding a key role65. Thus, a conversation on certain scientific questions was already taking place before the time of Aurelian’s work at the mid-century, and before the emergence of good analogues within the extant material corpus of Nat. rer. commentary for several passages in Mus. disc. Aurelian is a missing figure in the community of scientific interest around Auxerre.
- 66 See the general survey of Carolingian scientific learning in J. J. Contreni, « Counting, Calendars, (...)
- 67 Ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 5543, fol. 77r°. Sto (...)
- 68 For the vernacular glosses, see B. Bauer, « The Celtic Parallel Glosses on Bede’s De natura rerum » (...)
32Bede’s trilogy of scientific works – De natura rerum, De temporibus and De temporum ratione (Temp. rat.) – served as standard works for ninth-century students of the cosmos and of the natural operations of the divine craftsman. The Nat. rer. was taken over wholly in the Aachen seven-book encyclopedia, a collection of learning drawn up between 809 and 811 to answer questions of calendars, computus and cosmology, and likewise in the three-book computus of 81866. By the mid-ninth-century, the commentary tradition of De natura rerum becomes visible. Manuscript Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, 412 contains copies of De natura rerum and De temporum ratione with Heiric’s annotations, many in Tironian notes. One ninth-century glossed copy of Nat. rer. invokes the doctrine of Iohannes (undoubtedly Eriugena) on the theme of Deus artifex and eternal wisdom, and Contreni has asked whether Eriugena might not have commented on Bede’s work67. There is, besides, an ample record of glossed manuscripts, generally in Latin, but also in Irish, Welsh and Breton, that give evidence for the study of this text in the ninth and tenth centuries68.
- 69 F. Lipp, « Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit.
- 70 F. Lipp, « Carolingian Commentaries… », ibid., p. 191-268.
- 71 Operum Venerabilis Bedae, t. 2, ed. Johannes Herwagen, Basel, 1563.
- 72 See J. J. Contreni, « ‘Old Orthodoxies Die Hard’: Herwagen’s Bridferti Ramesiensis Glossae », Perit (...)
- 73 F. Lipp (« Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit., p. 231-239) thought it was possible that Jone’s a (...)
33The most systematic study of early medieval Nat. rer. commentaries was conducted in the unpublished dissertation of Frances Lipp in 196169. The study is preliminary, but foundational. F. Lipp studied six manuscript commentaries of the ninth- or early-tenth-centuries. She later published the extensive glosses of one manuscript, ms. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Phillipps 1831-1832, in Jones’s critical edition of Bede’s work. She also studied three early medieval commentaries that appeared in the Patrologia Latina from the printed editions of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries70. There is no known manuscript basis for these three commentaries, and hence our knowledge of their material disposition relies on the early modern publication71. One of them is ascribed to an incertus auctor ; another to Byrhtferth, monk of Ramsey, Abbo’s pupil in England, who died there around 1020 ; and a third is embedded in the Patrologia within the commentary on Bede’s Temp. rat. ascribed to Byrhtferth. In this last, full passages of Nat. rer. appear along with commentary on the same passages, and they have been redeployed together as explanations for the Temp. rat. F. Lipp identified the Patrologia’s three commentaries under the sigla T, Bn, and Bt. According to F. Lipp, the oldest is probably T and the latest Bt. But she believed that these three commentaries were all versions of the same work, siglum B, which drew on at least three earlier gloss corpora, whose manuscripts she identified. According to the editor of Bede’s works, Charles W. Jones, the commentaries originated in, or at least were held in copy, at Auxerre. They mention, for instance, Haimo and Remigius, but no subsequent authors. One of the common gloss traditions, on which all three commentaries drew, has been associated with Auxerre for its presence in Auxerre manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, NAL 1615 (Lipp’s siglum G) and the related Fleury manuscript Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 1260 (Lipp’s siglum F). In short, they have nothing to do with Byrhtferth and can be assigned to the early tenth century72. F. Lipp, for her part, did not insist on assigning the Nat. rer. commentaries to Auxerre, but allowed that other northern French centers might have had a key hand in their crystallization73. It is, indeed, notable that the scanty annotations on Nat. rer. ascribed to Heiric in ms. Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, 412 evidently did not serve as a source to the Patrologia’s three commentaries.
- 74 This passage was edited and studied by C. Meyer, « La théorie des symphoniae selon Macrobe et sa di (...)
- 75 The oldest witness of this wandering Macrobian excerpt is a manuscript probably from the Loire ambi (...)
34Although Aurelian’s editor L. Gushee noted a possible source for 8.26 in Nat. rer. 13, the dependence is underscored by a textual analogue that appears in an early-twelfth-century musical miscellany from Saint Emmeram’s Abbey in Regensburg, ms. München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14965a74. This analogue does not have the same text as the Valenciennes recension, but is rather a self-standing passage with verbatim textual overlap and a similar thematic development. In the Saint Emmeram codex the text follows an excerpt from the second book of Macrobius’s Commentary on the Somnium Scipionis concerning the symphonic intervals75. Nearly every word of the text has a parallel in the eighth chapter of Aurelian’s Musica disciplina in its Valenciennes recension, as the underlined sentences in the following table make clear.
- 76 cod., Ioh<annem ?> Meyer (C. Meyer, « La théorie des symphoniae… », p. 196).
|
Aurelian, Musica disciplina 8.22-28 (p. 79-80) |
München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14965a, isolated passage (here transcribed completely) |
|
22. Quod autem octo sint caelestes motus uidentur imitari. Tradunt namque philosophi superiorem esse circulum caeli qui zodiacus nuncupatur, id est signifer, et alio nomine aplanes apellatur, id est sine errore, eoquod recto cursu feratur, hoc est dextro (ab oriente uidelicet in occidentem) ; quod oculi probant totumque ambitum suum in xxiiii horis finiri. |
Quod autem octo sunt caelestes motus uidentur imitari, quia astrorum motus octo sunt, |
|
23. Que xii signis bine singulis deputantur, quorum nomina sunt : Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces. |
|
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24. Subter hunc autem circulum septem sidera sunt que planete, id est erratice, eo quod contrarie superiori motu ferantur, id est sinistro (scilicet a occidente in orientem), sicut in crescente seu descrescente luna satis apparet. |
uidelicet septem planetae, id est erratice, |
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25. Planetarum quoque uocabula sunt haec : Saturnus, Iupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercurius, Luna, que sicut amplitudine circuitus ita temporum differunt quantitate. |
id est Saturnus, Iupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercurius, Luna, Aplanos id est zodiacus, id est signifer, superior uidelicet circus caeli, |
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26. Nam Saturnus XXX annis peragit zodiacum, Iupiter XII, Mars II, Sol I, Mercurius CCCXXVIIII diebus, Venus CCCXLVIII diebus. |
Saturnus XXXm annis peragit zodyacum, Iupiter XIIm, Mars duobus, Sol uno anno, id est CCC.LXV diebus et quadrante, id est sex horis, Venus CCC.XXIIII diebus, nouissima luna XXVII diebus et tercia diei parte signiferum conficit. |
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27. Notandum sane quod numquam de duodecim signis amplius quam sex simul cerni queant, ita ut ex his uno oriente, mox alter occidat, sic que fit ut nouem sibi per totam noctem succedentia uideantur, reliquis tribus non apparentibus illud ubi sol est, et quod solem uel sequitur uel praecedit, commorantem in uno quoque xxx diebus et x semis horis. |
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28. Igitur isti astrorum motus VIII sunt, uidelicet VII errantium et illius qui dicitur aplanes, quos omnes dicunt dulcissimam cantus armoniam, id est consonantiam efficere ; quam eciam dominus in ea responsione, quam de turbine fecit ad sanctum Iob, concentum caeli nominat. |
Isti astrorum motus et duodecim signorum dulcissimam cantus armoniam, id est consonantiam, dicuntur efficere. Quam eciam dominus in ea responsione, quam de turbine fecit ad sanctum Iob76, concentum caeli nominat. |
- 77 Compare Nat. rer. 13 (ed. Jones, p. 205, l. 9-10) : nouissima luna XXVII diebus et tertia diei part (...)
- 78 K. Springsfeld, Alkuins Einfluß auf die Komputistik zur Zeit Karls des Großen, Stuttgart, 2002, p. (...)
- 79 I exclude a clever reader who could recognize and supplement from the source.
35The parallel development of the passages and the remarkable recurrence to Job 38, 37 make a historical relationship incontrovertible. The Munich passage overlaps with Mus. disc. 8.22, 25, 26 and 28, but omits § 27 and much of the development from the phrase tradunt namque philosophi at § 22 to § 24. Whereas the authentic text at § 26 is so general as to resist source identification, the Munich passage corroborates the Bedan source by supplying the rest of the original phrase from Nat. rer. 13 : nouissima luna XXVII diebus et tercia diei parte signiferum conficit77. It is again faithful to the Bedan, and ultimately Plinian, source by omitting the planet Mercury. In fact, Aurelian’s supplementary indication of 329 days for Mercury instead of the usual 339 does show a parallel in the Annalis libellus of 79378. The Munich passage could not depend on Aurelian’s truncated citation79. Either Aurelian held the isolated Munich passage in an earlier stage of transmission, or the two have a common source.
- 80 Aurélien de Réôme, Musica disciplina, p. 74.
- 81 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon 3 [ed. Jeauneau, Turnhout, 2000 (Corpus Christianorum, Conti (...)
36The uncommon scriptural intervention Job 38, 37 probably belonged to a contemporary discussion on the harmony of the spheres or the celestial state. Aurelian mentions it earlier in Mus. disc. 3.5, and echoes in the ninth-century literature evoke a lively discourse80. John Scottus Eriugena employed the verse in defense of the harmony of the spheres in book three of the Periphyseon (ca 862-866)81. He implies that the theme had been the subject of discussion :
- 82 John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon 3 (ed. Jeauneau, p. 44, l. 1230-1245 ; PL, t. 122, col. 648C) : (...)
For in this this, their meaning varies, with some claiming that mutable things will come to a standstill, while others claim the natural motion of the elements will not cease ; the former following what is written, « All things will be quiet » (2 Chron. 14,7), and understanding by it the standstill of changeable things, while the others understand « Who will make the harmony of heaven sleep ? » (Job 38,37) of the eternal motion of mutable things82.
- 83 See the manuscript description in Gushee’s edition of Mus. disc., p. 30-34, and now by C. Meyer in (...)
- 84 Sidera errantia : quibus procella tenebrarum seruata est in aeternum.
- 85 F. Lipp, « The Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit., p. 250. The anonymous Irish text was edited b (...)
- 86 PL, t. 90, col. 328D, incorporated into the commentary for Temp. rat. 8. F. Lipp, « The Carolingian (...)
- 87 PL, t. 90, col. 209AB (Coelum in dextrum… cursum suum amittunt) ; compare col. 327D-328B ; F. Lipp, (...)
37The verse from Job surfaces again in a full reworking of Mus. disc. 8.1-19.80 in ms. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. misc. 212, fol. 40r°-52r°83. This anonymous text version in a north Italian manuscript from around 1400 transmits significant deviations from the Valenciennes recension. It not only cites Job 38, 37, but also offers a scriptural reply from Jude 1, 13 in an allegory of the planets as heretics : « wandering stars, to whom the storm of darkness is reserved for ever84 ». The allegory probably passed through Bede’s commentary on Jude from an anonymous Irish exegete of the late seventh century : sic sunt haeretici, qui lucem ueritatis promittentes, nunquam in eodem statu docendi perdurant85. Despite the Oxford manuscript’s late date, the content remains compatible with a mid-ninth-century context. It would be easy to dismiss it as an adaptation – an interesting but irrelevant scriptural intervention – if the same verse did not appear as a gloss in the commentary on Nat. rer. 12 known as Bt. F. Lipp’s search uncovered no source for this passage, nor any other deployment in the manuscript commentaries of Nat. rer. known to her86. Since Aurelian does not draw directly on exegesis in his musical treatise, it is probably correct to emphasize the gloss’s similarity to the commentary Bt rather than to the Bedan source. A possible localization in Nat. rer. 12 would be corroborated by the similarities in Mus. disc. 8.24 with the pseudo-Byrhtferth’s commentary Bn on Nat. rer. 12 in a passage reappearing in Bt87. Aurelian probably received and adapted the allegory of Jude 1, 13 in its cosmological setting from a gloss on Nat. rer. 12.
38As for the « authentic » Valenciennes recension of Mus. disc., 8.27 and most of 8.22-24 do not figure in the analogues furnished by the Munich and Oxford codices. § 22-24 relate to a different domain of Auxerre learning (Macrobius) and I leave it aside here. § 27, which I will address, again documents the presence in Aurelian’s library of a glossed Nat. rer.
39Mus. disc. 8.27 is almost fully reproduced word for word up to the word praecedit in pseudo-Byrhtferth’s glosses on Bede’s Temp. rat. :
- 88 PL, t. 90, col. 363B. For the oldest record, see Operum Venerabilis Bedae, t. 2, ed. Johannes Herwa (...)
Notandum sane, quod numquam de duodecim signis amplius quam sex simul cerni queant, ita ut ex his uno oriente, mox alter occidat, sicque fit ut novem sibi per totam noctem succedentia videantur, reliquis tribus non apparentibus illud ubi sol est, et quod solem vel sequitur vel praecedit88.
40Indeed, Aurelian nearly betrays his dependence on a glossed copy with the annotator’s jargon notandum quod. A closer examination of the text shows, furthermore, that this passage probably belongs to a commentary on Nat. rer. rather than the Temp. rat., to which the 1563 publication once and for all assigned it.
41Designated by F. Lipp B-DTR, pseudo-Byrhtferth’s commentary on Temp. rat. is much longer than the main work itself and synthesizes the accumulated annotations of decades of study. F. Lipp recognized this gathering of lore and articulated the main components. B-DTR deploys long excerpts of Nat. rer. with its supplementary glosses as commentary on Temp. rat.. As F. Lipp explains, the Nat. rer. lemma, sometimes nearly an entire chapter, is first given in each case and is then followed by its proper commentary until the Temp. rat. glosses resume. F. Lipp’s commentary Bt is a reconstruction created by extracting relevant passages from B-DTR. Thus, it does not constrain the evidence, conveyed as it is through the sixteenth-century edition and then through Migne, to reattribute the passage from B-DTR to Bt, that is, to shift its dependent context from Temp. rat. to Nat. rer.
- 89 Macrobius’s Commentary on Scipio’s Dream was an important source for the topics of Bedan cosmology.
- 90 PL, t. 90, col. 361AB.
- 91 PL, t. 90, col. 234D : Lacteus circulum zodiacum… feruntur, intersecet. See Macrobius, Somn. 1, 12, (...)
42Appearing in context, the sentence notandum sane quod... praecedit is not clearly attached to either of Bede’s works. It is neither linked conspicuously to the local Temp. rat., nor does it begin with a citation from Nat. rer. In the present context of B-DTR, it is framed before and after by glosses naming Macrobius as a source89. These Macrobian passages are preceded by a number of further glosses as well as the first lines of Nat. rer. 16 and almost all of 17. These parts of Nat. rer. were folded together with their related commentary into B-DTR and constitute part of F. Lipp’s Bt90. As it turns out, Nat. rer. 16-18 supplies an apt context for the passage notandum... diebus. The Macrobian passage that follows it also stands as an explanation for Nat. rer. 18 in pseudo-Byrhtferth’s commentary on Nat. rer. (Lipp’s Bn)91. Moreover, Nat. rer. 17 offers a verbal correspondence to Aurelian’s seemingly original conclusion of Mus. disc. 8.27 :
- 92 Bede, Nat. rer. 17 (ed. Jones, p. 209-210, l. 17-19). Compare Temp. rat. 11 (ed. Jones, p. 316, l. (...)
Singulis autem signis xxx partes ternae uero decades putantur (variant : deputantur), eo quod sol xxx diebus et decem semis horis illa percurrat, a medio mensis, id est XV Calendarum die, semper incipiens92.
- 93 PL, t. 90, col. 234C.
- 94 Ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, NAL 1615, fol. 131r° ; Cit (...)
43Nat. rer. 17 enumerates the twelve zodiac, like Mus. disc. 8.23, and summarizes them in a sentence employing, just like Aurelian, the verb deputantur. Bn’s gloss on Bede’s sentence – triginta dierum et decem semis horarum moras facit – accounts, in the expression moras facit, for the appearance of the verb commorantem in Mus. disc. 8.27 and in B-DTR93. The ensuing gloss in Bn starts similarly concludes by resuming the Bedan lemma, a medio semper mense incipiens. The final Bn-gloss is the precipitation of the two ninth-century copies of Nat. rer. whose glosses have been related to Auxerre : x semis horis] i. x horas et dimidia ; illa] signa, percurrat], in unumquodque signum (whole lemma om. Vat. 1260), quia unumquodque signum medietatem unius mensis et alterius similiter medietatem mensis (mensis om. Vat. 1260) occupat a medio semper mense incipiens. Yet the two codices fail to transmit Aurelian’s sentence Notandum...praecedit94.
44In other words, the sentence at Mus. disc. § 27 probably originated in a commentary on Nat. rer. 16-18. This Nat. rer. commentary would have been known in some form to Aurelian, was modified in the form known as Bt, and finally deployed from this original context for a commentary on Temp. rat.
45To sum up the last part of the argument, let me make three observations. First, the dialogue between scriptural passages and the natural sciences or natural philosophy was undoubtedly livelier in the ninth century than the sources betray. The examples of Job 38, 37 and Jude 1, 13 evoke development and response, and Eriugena alludes to disagreements. Second, Aurelian’s dependence on a particular source, a glossed Nat. rer., becomes clear only through a comparative study of the several permutations of Mus. disc. 8. The fact that these permutations collectively point to an underlying glossed Nat. rer. may impinge on evaluations of the Valenciennes recension and of the other versions of Mus. disc. Finally, if the Nat. rer. commentaries printed in the Patrologia took shape in the early tenth century as Jones, F. Lipp and others have supposed, Aurelian seems to have intervened at a primitive stage of the commentary tradition. His work may date to 849/850, but the multiple permutations of texts and independent circulation of parts permit other dates and other channels of currency. The alternative versions on which this study has relied testify to an ongoing history of source incorporation from Nat. rer. across the several extant versions.
- 95 Ms. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Vossius lat. 8° 88, fol. 8v°.
- 96 See V. Petroff, « Carolingian School Texts… », op. cit., for the use by Remigius of Auxerre.
46The circle of scholarly interest depicted here also displays continuity. While Aurelian might have consulted a Nat. rer. commentary as early as 849, the annotator after ca 870 in the Leiden codex, perhaps Almann himself, may have had a copy of Nat. rer. at hand as well. Now and then in the De arithmetica commentary, the annotator’s remarks bespeak an underlying source in Bede and related glosses. The remarkable gloss by L’s annotator Deus natura dicitur, quod cuncta nasci faciat – « God is called nature because he makes all things come to be » – evokes the thought world of John Scottus Eriugena95. The deus/natura theme goes back to Isidore of Seville, and elaborations occurred after Eriugena in different contexts96. The same text was reworked in an elaborated annotation in the T commentary of Bede’s Nat. rer., regarded by F. Lipp as the oldest of the three commentaries preserved in the Patrologia :
- 97 PL, t. 90, col. 187BC. Cited in J. J. Contreni, « John Scottus and Bede », in J. McEvoy and M. Dunn (...)
Quicquid est siue uisibile siue inuisibile, sensibile seu intelligibile, creans siue creatum, natura dicitur. Ergo generale nomen est natura omnium rerum et earum quae sunt et earum quae non sunt. Illa autem non esse dicuntur, quae nec sentiri nec intelligi possunt, sed quod ita sunt, ut omnem cognitionem corporis et mentis transcendent. Duobus namque modis natura dicitur. Deus itaque natura dicitur, quod cuncta nasci faciat. Omnis etiam creatura natura uocatur, eo quod nascatur97.
- 98 V. Petroff, « Carolingian School Texts… », op. cit.
- 99 Isidore, Etymologiae 11.1.1.
- 100 Such a study is in preparation by Pierre-Yves Lambert and Jacopo Bisagni. See further D. Barbet-Mas (...)
- 101 F. Lipp, « The Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit., p. 13.
47Just over twenty years ago, V. Petroff concluded that this commentary was best associated with Remigius or a scholar around him, someone in any case in a position to be influenced by Eriugena’s thinking98. Knowing that there was no manuscript authority, I thought, nevertheless, that I might discover primitive variants of the gloss. So far, ms. Angers, Bibliothèque municipale, 477, comes closest to giving a version of the gloss, if it does not simply reproduce the gloss’s own plausible source, Isidore’s Etymologies : Natura dicta eo quod aliquid nasci faciat ; gignendi enim et faciendi potens ; hanc quidam deum esse dixerunt a quo omnia creata sunt atque existunt99. This manuscript carries an annus praesens of 897 and contains a vast corpus of glosses in the Breton and Latin languages that awaits an exhaustive study100. F. Lipp’s limited sampling of the Angers codex turned up six glosses corresponding to glosses contained only in the Auxerre-related manuscripts Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, NAL 1615, and Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 1260101. Neither of these manuscripts contains the gloss Deus natura dicitur. In fact, according to F. Lipp, T’s glosses on Bede’s verse preface and Nat. rer. 1 are unique, while the remaining glosses have identifiable sources or analogues in other glossed manuscripts. It means, nevertheless, that all three of the Nat. rer. commentaries printed in the Patrologia (T, Bn, Bt) contain elements that can be traced to the circle of scholars identified here with Aurelian and Almann and united by Almann’s plausible interlocutor in the letter to E., Heiric of Auxerre.
4. Conclusion
48This study has presented evidence revealing the interests of a connected group of scholars in the classification of the disciplines and of zodiacal and planetary motions. The evidence emerges in the scholarly letter from Almann to E., in Aurelian’s musical treatise Musica disciplina, and in commentaries on Bede’s De natura rerum. Heiric is the intermediate figure : Almann evidently reacts to Heiric’s representation of Aurelian’s teaching. Aurelian had, Almann claims, misunderstood the profounder purpose of the arts as a quest at once platonic and Christian. One wonders whether Almann’s intellectual master Eriugena had deepened this generation gap. If Bede’s Nat. rer. furnished a common handbook for all the scholars named here, the gloss tradition that they received, and undoubtedly formed, made it a shifting foundation. A deeper comparison of the surviving permutations of Aurelian’s treatise points to a dependence on the gloss traditions of Bede’s Nat. rer. known as T, Bn, and Bt, whether direct or mediated. After all, Aurelian may have contributed to, or may have merely received, these glosses. Although he plausibly had a glossed copy of Nat. rer. on his desk, as I have presumed throughout this essay, glosses readily moved across Bede, Macrobius, Boethius, and others – a feature of early medieval transmission that excludes certainty about the source. Almann, for one, shows how a gloss on God and nature in Nat. rer. could be deployed in the study of Boethius’s De arithmetica. If an exhaustive knowledge of the impact of Bede’s Nat. rer. and its active reception in anonymous glosses is still remote, this study places on either side of Heiric of Auxerre two known writers who depended on it in some fashion.
Notes
1 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E., appearing as Epistolae variorum 26, II, ed. E. Dümmler, in Epistolae Karolini Aevi, t. 4, Berlin, 1925 (MGH, Ep. 6), p. 182-186.
2 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta di nuova attribuzione ad Almanno di Hautvillers », Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 76 (2009), p. 7-28.
3 A. Wilmart, « La lettre philosophique d’Almanne et son contexte littéraire », Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 3 (1928), p. 285-320, at 319.
4 Flodoard mentions a lost letter of Hincmar of Reims from after 866, perhaps 868, recalling Almann to his abbey. Flodoardus, Historia Remensis Ecclesiae, 3.28, in Flodoard von Reims, Die Geschichte der Reimser Kirche, ed. M. Stratmann, Hanovre, 1998 (MGH SS, 36), p. 357, l. 9-14.
5 A. Wilmart, « La lettre philosophique… », op. cit., p. 309-316 ; A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Saint-Amand, écolâtre, et l’invention du Nombre d’or », in Mélanges Auguste Pelzer. Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale de la scholastique médiévale offertes à Auguste Pelzer à l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire, Louvain, 1947, p. 61-79, at p. 63 n. 12 ; D. Poirel, « Un poème inédit d’Almanne de Hautvillers », Revue d’histoire des textes, 24 (1994), p. 275-290 ; E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta… », op. cit., p. 20.
6 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta… », ibid., p. 27 ; A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Saint-Amand… », ibid., p. 63 n. 12.
7 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta », ibid., p. 21 ; A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Saint-Amand… », ibid., p. 63 n. 12.
8 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 183, l. 27-29) : Recolo hic siquidem dixisse uos, auditu comperisse ab uenerabili A. magistro, in mysteriis numerorum constare musicam. Dixit quidem ille uir magnus, quod adiudicauit dicendum.
9 B. Bischoff, Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen), t. 2 (Laon-Paderborn), Wiesbaden, 2004, p. 66 (n° 2255 : « Frankreich, ix./x. Jh. oder x. Jh., Anfang »).
10 This poem stands as n° 486 in Anthologia latina, siue poesis latinae supplementum, ed. A. Riese, Leipzig, 1894-19062, t. 2, p. 29-37. See also [Remmius Favinus,] Gedicht über Gewichts- und Masseinheiten (Carmen de ponderibus et mensuris), ed. and tr. K. Geus, Oberhaid, 2007.
11 For the text, see Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, ed. K. Zeumer, Hanovre, 1886 (MGH, Leges 5), p. 557-558, n° 11.
12 J. Thompson, « An Early Lemmatic Commentary on Boethius’s De institutione arithmetica », Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 87 (2020), p. 115-200.
13 Marius Plotius Sacerdos, Artium grammaticarum libri tres 3, 1, ed. H. Keil, Scriptores artis metricae, in Grammatici Latini, t. 6, Leipzig, 1867, p. 415.546, at p. 499, l. 24-25.
14 Partially edited in Corpus glossariorum Latinorum, vol. 5, ed. G. Goetz, Leipzig 1894, p. 657-660. V. von Büren thinks that it should be ascribed to Heiric of Auxerre. V. von Büren, « Heiricus [Autissiodorensis] mon. », in M.-H. Jullien (dir.), Clavis scriptorum latinorum Medii Aevi. Auctores Galliae, 735-987, t. 3, Turnhout, 2010, p. 375-405, at p. 396-397 (HEIR 17). According to von Büren, forty-nine entries overlap with those of the Scholica Graecarum glossarum in ms. Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 215, fol. 122-126.
15 Edited in F. Rädle, « Gottschalks Gedicht an seinen letzten Freund », in S. Krämer and M. Bernhard (ed.), Scire litteras. Forschungen zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben, Munich, 1988, p. 316-325.
16 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E., appearing as Epistolae variorum 26, II, ed. E. Dümmler, in Epistolae Karolini Aevi, t. 4, Berlin, 1925 (MGH, Ep. 6), p. 182-186.
17 Epistola ad A., appearing as Epistolae variorum 26, III, ed. E. Dümmler, in Epistolae Karolini Aevi, t. 4, Berlin, 1925 (MGH, Ep. 6), p. 186-187.
18 Augustine, De dialectica, ed. J. Pinborg, tr. B. D. Jackson, Dordrecht, 1975.
19 Edited as appendix 1 of H. Hagen, Scholia Bernensia ad Vergili Bucolica atque Georgica, Leipzig, 1867, p. 984-987.
20 Edited in C. Jeudy, « La tradition manuscrite du De aspiratione attribué au grammairien Phocas », in G. Cambier (ed.), Hommages à André Boutemy, Bruxelles, 1976, p. 197-215, at 212-215. Only after this edition did the editor become aware of L, which represents by far the oldest witness of this work.
21 According to C. Jeudy, this passage is a précis of Priscianus grammaticus Caesariensis, Institutionum grammaticarum libri I-XVIII, 7, 11, 55-72, ed. M. Hertz, in H. Keil (ed.), Grammatici latini, t. 2-3, Leipzig, 1855, p. 331-349. C. Jeudy, « Note sur le ms. Voss. lat. 8°88 de la Bibl. univ. de Leyde », Scriptorium, 31 (1977), p. 356.
22 For the Scholica, see in the first place, M. L. W. Laistner, « Notes on Greek from the Lectures of a Ninth Century Monastery Teacher », Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 7 (1923), p. 421-456. See also Id., « Martianus Capella and His Ninth Century Commentators », Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 9 (1925), p. 130-138 ; Id., « Rivipullensis 74 and the Scholica of Martin of Laon », in Mélanges Mandonnet : études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale du Moyen Âge, Paris, 1930, t. 2, p. 31-35.
23 The Nat. rer. glosses are the subject of the last part of this study. V. Petroff has supplemented the dossier of parallels between the Nat. rer. glosses and the Scholica begun long ago by M. L. W. Laistner. Yet as F. Lipp observes, the appearance of these lemmata in tenth-century Nat. rer. glosses probably goes directly back to earlier gloss commentaries rather than the Scholica. M. L. W. Laistner, « Martianus Capella… », ibid., p. 136-137 ; V. Petroff, « Carolingian School Texts : Glosses from the Circle of John Scottus and Remigius of Auxerre », in P. P. Gaidenko and V. V. Petroff (ed.), Philosophy of Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Moscou, 1999, p. 233-292 ; F. Lipp, « Carolingian Commentaries on Bede’s De natura rerum », PhD Diss., Yale University, 1961, p. 237.
24 V. von Büren, « Heiricus [Autissiodorensis]… », op. cit., p. 397.
25 Ms. Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 4929.
26 V. von Büren, « Heiricus [Autissiodorensis]… », op. cit., p. 396-397.
27 A. Van de Vyver, « Hucbald de Saint-Amand… », op. cit., p. 63, n. 12. In fact, the discrepancy of letters is not as great a problem as it has been made. Almann enjoyed Greek vocabulary and may have employed a playful Greek spelling of Heiric’s name. See further V. von Büren, « Heiricus [Autissiodorensis]… », ibid., p. 389-390.
28 See epistle 21 to Jonas in the forthcoming edition of Lupus of Ferrières by M. I. Allen, Seruatus Lupus, Liber epistolarum, Turnhout, forthcoming (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 289).
29 Heiric of Auxerre, Miracula sancti Germani 2.3, see ed. Waitz, Hanovre, 1881 (MGH, SS 13).
30 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 185, l. 29) : Debita pandit et hinc operis quoque cordis et oris.
31 K. A. de Meyier, Codices Vossiani Latini, Leyde, 1973-1977, t. 3, p. 159-164.
32 See further J. Thompson, « An Early Lemmatic Commentary… », op. cit., p. 126-130.
33 J. Thompson, « An Early Lemmatic Commentary… », ibid., p. 155, 165-167 and 187.
34 J. J. Contreni, « John Scottus, Nutritor, and the Liberal Arts », in A. Guiu (ed.), A Companion to John Scottus Eriugena, Leyde, 2020, p. 31-63, at 50-51. Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E., around 182.
35 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 184, l. 29 and 31).
36 See further F. Cinato, Priscien glosé : L’ars grammatica de Priscien vue à travers les gloses carolingiennes, Turnhout, 2016 (Studia Artistarum, 41), p. 567-570. While Gottschalk was incarcerated at Hautvillers for his doctrinal position on predestination, his grammatical accomplishments may urge for a comparison between Reims 1094 and his own reception of Priscian.
37 E. Mainoldi, « Una proposta… », op. cit., p. 23.
38 M. Glatthaar, « Bernard von Réome und die Datierung der Musica disciplina Aurelians », Revue bénédictine, 121 (2011), p. 357-381 ; B. Haggh, « Traktat Musica disciplina Aureliana Reomensis : proweniencja I datowanie [Music disciplina Aureliani Reomensis and the Problem of the Date and Origin of the Treatise] », Muzyka [Journal of the Institute of Musicology, Polish Academy of Sciences], 45 (2000), p. 25-78. This date is followed in the most recent edition and translation by Aurélien de Réome, Musica disciplina, ed. S. Nishimagi, trans. C. Meyer, Turnhout, 2021, p. 7-8.
39 M. Glatthaar, « Bernard von Réome… », ibid., p. 380.
40 M. Bernhard, « Textkritisches zu Aurelianus Reomensis », Musica Disciplina, 40 (1986), p. 49-61.
41 B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library », in International Musicological Society Study Group Cantus Planus : Papers read at the ninth meeting, Budapest, 1998, p. 271-300 ; B. Haggh, « Traktat Musica disciplina… », op. cit., p. 32-47.
42 B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library… » op. cit.
43 B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library… », ibid., p. 284-285. In addition, the Liber glossarum might stand behind the etymologies proposed at Mus. 8, 12-14 and 8, 16-19 [ed. L. Gushee, Aurelianus Reomensis, Musica Disciplina, Rome, 1975 (Corpus scriptorum de musica, 21), p. 79]. Yet several of these etymologies have parallels in permutations of de octo tonis that, following Huglo’s conclusions, would precede Aurelian’s work. M. Huglo, Les tonaires. Inventaire, analyse, comparaison, Paris, 1971, p. 47-56.
44 Miracula Sancti Germani 1, 2, in Acta Sanctorum Julii, t. 7, Anvers, 1731, p. 258D-F, and in Patrologia Latina, t. 124, col. 1215B-1216B ; and now Aurélien de Réome, Musica disciplina, p. 346-348. For the date of Heiric’s hagiographical work, see V. von Büren, « Heiricus [Autissiodorensis]… », op. cit., p. 398-399. See further P. Janin, « Heiric d’Auxerre et les Gesta pontificum Autissiodorensium », Francia, 4 (1976), p. 89-105. B. Haggh thinks Aurelian’s version was modeled on Heiric’s in a later addition to the work. M. Bernhard opts for giving the two versions a common source, and a dossier of pious anecdotes held at Auxerre cannot be ruled out. M. Bernhard, « Textkritisches… », op. cit., p. 60. See also M. Glatthaar, « Bernard von Réome », op. cit., p. 378-380.
45 Noted by B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library… », op. cit., p. 287.
46 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 183, l. 27-29) : Verum quia humanitas sibi respondet, si aequatur in hominibus pondus amoris, difficile tolerat eius absentiam sine ictu doloris. Ut enim quadratur numerus numero et mensura mensurae, ita et pondus ponderi. Non autem effugit sensibilem speciem qualitas et quantitas, licet intelligibiliter uigere debeant in animo prudenti. Recolo hic siquidem dixisse uos, auditu comperisse ab uenerabili A. magistro, in mysteriis numerorum constare musicam. Dixit quidem ille uir magnus, quod adiudicauit dicendum.
47 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed.Dümmler, p. 184, l. 2-4) : Non est igitur mysterium musica, sed « doctrinalis scientia quae abstractam desiderat quantitatem », per quam quaeritur mysterium fidei, quo credatur per fidei meritum, donec uideatur per ipsius fidei mirabile praemium inuisibilis, immortalis et incommutabilis Deus.
48 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 184, l. 6-8) : Hoc autem dico, Deus scit, non docere affectans, qui nichil sum, sed discere cupiens in quod libentissime promtus sum, neque pertinaciter refellens, sed humiliter quaerens.
49 Resp. 6, 4, J. E. Chisholm, The Pseudo-Augustinian Hypomnesticon against the Pelagians and Celestians, Fribourg, 1967-1980, t. 2, p. 197, l. 133-141. The Hypomnesticon had been attributed to Augustine, and the attribution was vigorously discredited in the course of the predestination contest of the 850s. It was known at Reims and Hautvillers. For authorship, see ibid., t. 1, p. 41-129, with p. 41-48 concerning the ninth-century reception.
50 Mus. disc. 8.29 (ed. Gushee, p. 80).
51 Mus. disc. 8, 30-31 (ed. Gushee, p. 80-81) : Naturalis autem disciplina iiii traditur artibus, id est arithmetica, geometrica, musica, astronomia, in quibus uel de numeris disputatur, uel terrae mensuris, uel sonis, uel certe stellarum dispositionibus ; sed earum uis et causa omnis in numeris est. Arithmetica quippe de illis constat numeris qui stabiles sunt et intelligibiles. Geometrica uero stabiles et sensibiles habet numeros. Musica autem equae intelligibiles, mobiles tamen, et ad aliquid pertinentes. Astronomia quoque mobili, et semper sensibili ratione uersatur. For the moving orders of astronomy and unmoving one of geometry, see also Boethius, De institutione arithmetica 1.1 [ed. G. Friedlein, Leipzig, 1867, p. 9, l. 4-6].
52 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 183, l. 29-34) : Tamen si ita est, minime debemus ambigere, immo discere sicque docere, et grammaticam in mysteriis litterarum et dialecticam in mysteriis argumentorum et geometricam in mysteriis linearum et arithmetricam in mysteriis numerorum non ad aliquid, ut in musica, relatorum, sed ad se tantum, necnon et astrologiam in mysteriis astrorum.
53 Ed. Gushee, p. 78.
54 Ms. Reims, Bibliothèque Carnegie, 1094 (J. 712), fol. 3v°.
55 Isidore’s passage contains echoes of Boethius’s De arithmetica, but is copied from a definition of doctrinalis in Cassiodorus’s, Institutes, 2.3.6 (ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1961, p. 111). Similar statements also appear in Cassiodorus at 2.3.21 (p. 130) to explain the Latin rendering doctrinalis for mathematica ; 2, praef., 4 (p. 92) to define mathematica (omitting the word doctrinalis). Aurelian’s ordering of the arts follows Isidore (arithmetic – geometry – music – astronomy) rather than Cassiodorus (arithmetic – music – geometry – astronomy).
56 Almann of Hautvillers, Epistola ad E. (ed. Dümmler, p. 184, l. 2-4) : Non est igitur mysterium musica, sed « doctrinalis scientia quae abstractam desiderat quantitatem », per quam quaeritur mysterium fidei.
57 Aurelian’s closest consideration of this theme appears in the aforementioned addendum of angelic miracles at Mus. disc. 20.31-45 (ed. Gushee, p. 132-34). Does this Auxerre-influenced passage point to a particular question over music as mysterium arising in that setting ?
58 M. Huglo, Les tonaires…, op. cit., p. 47-56 ; but see now Meyer’s remarks in Aurélien de Réome, Musica disciplina, 21-27.
59 M. Bernhard and M. Ferrari, « Aliquid super quibusdam regulis modulationum. Eine unbekannte musiktheoretische Schrift Aurelians von Réôme (?) in einer Mainzer Handschrift der Jahrtausendwende (Gotha, Forschungsbibliohtek Memb. I 58) », in R. Kleinertz, C. Flamm and W. Frobenius (ed.), Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance. Festschrift Klaus-Jürgen Sachs zum 80., Hildesheim, 2010, p. 29-46.
60 M. Bernhard and M. Ferrari, « Aliquid super… », ibid., p. 42.
61 It would be interesting to see if Aurelian’s ideas surface at all in Almann’s unedited treatise on the consecration of churches, preserved in ms. Albi, Médiathèque Pierre Amalric, 42 (51), fol. 23v°-42v°. A. Wilmart (« La lettre philosophique… » op. cit.) signaled the interest of this treatise long ago. E. Mainoldi has announced a critical edition (cf. « Una proposta… », op. cit., p. 8, n. 2).
62 On the identity of Manno, see A.-M. Turcan-Verkerk, « Mannon de Saint-Oyen dans l’histoire de la transmission des textes », Revue d’histoire des textes, 29 (1999), p. 169-243, at 205-217 and 240-242.
63 Mus. disc. 20.25 (ed. Gushee, p. 131). J. P. Ponte, « Aureliani Reomensis, Musica disciplina. A Revised Text, Translation, and Commentary », 3 vols., PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1961 ; U. Pizzani, « The Fortune of the De institutione musica from Boethius to Gerbert d’Aurillac : A Tentative Contribution » in M. Masi (ed.), Boethius and the Liberal Arts : A Collection of Essays, Berne, 1981, p. 97-156 ; Id., « Aureliano di Reome et la riscoperta del De institutione musica di Boezio », Esercizi, 2 (1979), p. 7-28 ; N. Phillips, « Classical and Late Latin Sources for Ninth-Century Treatises on Music », in A. Barbera (ed.), Music Theory and Its Sources : Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Notre Dame (IN), 1990, p. 100-135 ; B. Haggh, « Aurelian’s Library… » op. cit., p. 271-300 ; A. Morelli, Il « Musica disciplina » di Aureliano di Réôme. Fondamenti teorico-disciplinari dell’ars musica nel ix secolo, Udine, 2007 ; Meyer’s notes in the Aurélien de Réome, Musica Disciplina…, op. cit.
64 N. Phillips, « Classical and Late Latin Sources… », op. cit., p. 103-119. According to Phillips (p. 113), Aurelian’s debt to Isidore is muddied by Isidore’s own use of Cassiodorus and by the complex textual history of Cassiodorus’s Institutes.
65 C. W. Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha : Scientific Writings Falsely Attributed to Bede, Cornell, 1954, p. 21-38 ; J. J. Contreni, « John Scottus and Bede », in J. McEvoy and M. Dunne (ed.), History and Eschatology in John Scottus Eriugena and his Time, Louvain, 2002, p. 91-140 ; V. Petroff, « Carolingian School Texts… », op. cit.
66 See the general survey of Carolingian scientific learning in J. J. Contreni, « Counting, Calendars, and Cosmology : Numeracy in the Early Middle Ages », in J. J. Contreni, Learning and Culture in Carolingian Europe. Letters, Numbers, Exegesis, and Manuscripts, Farnham/Burlington, 2011, p. 45-83.
67 Ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 5543, fol. 77r°. Stock has already drawn attention to its importance for Eriugena’s fourfold division of nature and his use of Bede in his earlier treatise on predestination. B. Stock, « In Search of Eriugena’s Augustine », in W. Beierwaltes (ed.), Eriugena. Studien zu seinen Quellen, Heidelberg, 1980, p. 85-104, at 86-91.
68 For the vernacular glosses, see B. Bauer, « The Celtic Parallel Glosses on Bede’s De natura rerum », Peritia, 30 (2019), p. 31-52 ; Id., « The Interconnections of St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 251 with the Celtic Bede Manuscripts », Keltische Forschungen, 8 (2019), p. 31-48 ; P.-Y. Lambert, « Les commentaires celtiques à Bède le Vénérable », Études celtiques, 20 (1983), p. 121-139 and 21 (1984), p. 185-206.
69 F. Lipp, « Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit.
70 F. Lipp, « Carolingian Commentaries… », ibid., p. 191-268.
71 Operum Venerabilis Bedae, t. 2, ed. Johannes Herwagen, Basel, 1563.
72 See J. J. Contreni, « ‘Old Orthodoxies Die Hard’: Herwagen’s Bridferti Ramesiensis Glossae », Peritia, 22-23 (2012), p. 15-52, with references to the prior literature on the attribution.
73 F. Lipp (« Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit., p. 231-239) thought it was possible that Jone’s argument for Auxerre affiliations might apply better to pseudo-Byrhtferth’s commentary on the De temporum ratione.
74 This passage was edited and studied by C. Meyer, « La théorie des symphoniae selon Macrobe et sa diffusion », Scriptorium, 53 (1999), p. 82-107, at p. 96. A parallel between the passage and Aurelian’s text is not mentioned, nor in Meyer’s recent notes on Aurelian’s work in Aurélien de Réome, Musica disciplina. Under § 26 L. Gushee notes the parallel supplied by Bede, Nat. rer. 13 (PL, t. 90, col. 211 = ed. Jones, p. 204-205).
75 The oldest witness of this wandering Macrobian excerpt is a manuscript probably from the Loire ambit of Ferrières-Auxerre : ms. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud. lat. 118.
76 cod., Ioh<annem ?> Meyer (C. Meyer, « La théorie des symphoniae… », p. 196).
77 Compare Nat. rer. 13 (ed. Jones, p. 205, l. 9-10) : nouissima luna XXVII diebus et tertia diei parte signiferum conficiens. A parallel passage in Temp. rat. 8 (ed. Jones, p. 302, ll. 56-57) can be excluded because of its omission of the word parte.
78 K. Springsfeld, Alkuins Einfluß auf die Komputistik zur Zeit Karls des Großen, Stuttgart, 2002, p. 371. Cited by C. Meyer in Aurélien de Réome, Musica disciplina, p. 288.
79 I exclude a clever reader who could recognize and supplement from the source.
80 Aurélien de Réôme, Musica disciplina, p. 74.
81 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon 3 [ed. Jeauneau, Turnhout, 2000 (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 164), p. 44, l. 1230-1245, at l. 1241 ; p. 146, l. 4281 ; p. 147, l. 4298, at 4291 ; PL, t. 122, col. 648C and 722A.B). The former passage implies a dispute over the verse.
82 John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon 3 (ed. Jeauneau, p. 44, l. 1230-1245 ; PL, t. 122, col. 648C) : In hoc namque sensus eorum uariatur, quibusdam affirmantibus statum mutabilium futurum, quibusdam uero naturalem motum elementorum semper non cessaturum ; illi quidem sequentes quod scriptum est « Erunt omnia quieta » [II Par. 14, 7 : donec a bellis quieta sunt omnia], et hoc de statu mutabilium intelligentes, illi uero « Concentum caeli quis dormire faciet ? » [l. 1241] de aeterno mutabilium motu dictum est accipientes. So far, no further confrontation between these two verses has surfaced in patristic or Carolingian literature.
83 See the manuscript description in Gushee’s edition of Mus. disc., p. 30-34, and now by C. Meyer in Aurélien de Réôme, Musica disciplina, p. 33. For the fascinating use of this codex’s texts – or the codex itself – by Johannes Ciconia around 1400, see B. Haggh, « Ciconia’s Citations in Nova musica : New Sources as Biography », in S. Clark (ed.), Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture, Woodbridge, 2005, p. 45-56.
84 Sidera errantia : quibus procella tenebrarum seruata est in aeternum.
85 F. Lipp, « The Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit., p. 250. The anonymous Irish text was edited by R. E. McNally, Commentarius in epistolas catholicas ; Tractatus in septem epistolas canonicas…, Turnhout, 1973 (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 108B, Scriptores Hiberniae minores, 1), p. 49.
86 PL, t. 90, col. 328D, incorporated into the commentary for Temp. rat. 8. F. Lipp, « The Carolingian Commentaries… », ibid., p. 250.
87 PL, t. 90, col. 209AB (Coelum in dextrum… cursum suum amittunt) ; compare col. 327D-328B ; F. Lipp, « The Carolingian Commentaries… », ibid., p. 247 and 249, who traces it to the commentary in ms. Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 644, fol. 2r° (Lipp siglum I).
88 PL, t. 90, col. 363B. For the oldest record, see Operum Venerabilis Bedae, t. 2, ed. Johannes Herwagen, Basel, 1563, p. 86. The parallel has recently been noted by C. Meyer in Aurélien de Réome, Musica disciplina, p. 288. Aurelian adds mox before alter occidat.
89 Macrobius’s Commentary on Scipio’s Dream was an important source for the topics of Bedan cosmology.
90 PL, t. 90, col. 361AB.
91 PL, t. 90, col. 234D : Lacteus circulum zodiacum… feruntur, intersecet. See Macrobius, Somn. 1, 12, 1, in J. Willis (ed.), Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, Stuttgart, 1994, p. 47, l. 31-48, l. 2.
92 Bede, Nat. rer. 17 (ed. Jones, p. 209-210, l. 17-19). Compare Temp. rat. 11 (ed. Jones, p. 316, l. 63-64) : per duodecimam partem zodiaci, id est signiferi circuli, quae XXX diebus et decem semis horis impletur. Again, Temp. rat. 16 (ed. Jones, p. 336, l. 79-80) : singula uero signa sol tricenis diebus et denis horis ac semisse.
93 PL, t. 90, col. 234C.
94 Ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, NAL 1615, fol. 131r° ; Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 1260, fol. 3v°.
95 Ms. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Vossius lat. 8° 88, fol. 8v°.
96 See V. Petroff, « Carolingian School Texts… », op. cit., for the use by Remigius of Auxerre.
97 PL, t. 90, col. 187BC. Cited in J. J. Contreni, « John Scottus and Bede », in J. McEvoy and M. Dunne (ed.), History and Eschatology in John Scottus Eriugena and his Time, Louvain, 2002, p. 91-140, at p. 101.The same text appears among the glosses to the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae decem, themselves often associated with Auxerre. See J. Marenbon, From the Court Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre : Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1981, p. 185, n° I.b. Element I.
98 V. Petroff, « Carolingian School Texts… », op. cit.
99 Isidore, Etymologiae 11.1.1.
100 Such a study is in preparation by Pierre-Yves Lambert and Jacopo Bisagni. See further D. Barbet-Massin, « Le manuscrit 477 (461) d’Angers : étude codicologique et textuelle », Britannia Monastica, 19 (2017), p. 15-44.
101 F. Lipp, « The Carolingian Commentaries… », op. cit., p. 13.
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Jeremy Thompson, « Studies on Nature, Music and Arithmetic in the Circle of Heiric of Auxerre », Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre | BUCEMA [En ligne], Hors-série n° 17 | 2026, mis en ligne le 01 mars 2026, consulté le 13 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cem/24948 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15yrd
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