2.1 A New Latin Translation of the Gospels

He managed to secure a far grander commission, a revision of the Latin text of the Gospels. It is hard to think of a publication project that would have rivalled the ambition and implication of an attempt to take control of the form in which the Gospels were circulated. A new definitive text would replace the variety of earlier translations ‘dispersed around the whole world’, on Jerome’s word.Footnote ²⁰ There were various obstacles to achieving that goal. Jerome and Damasus must have understood that even in the most optimistic scenario its accomplishment would take a very long time. The production of manuscript copies was time-consuming; the pope did not possess a prerogative and powers to impose a new translation on local churches; operations to spread copies swiftly over long distances had to be created on an ad hoc basis (something that was indeed done, as will be shown in due course). What is more, Vetus Latina translations had shaped the vocabulary and communication of the Christian experience for generations. Telling testimonies of the impact of the Vetus Latina exist in phrases and formulations that were rejected from the Vulgate but remain in Christian use even today.Footnote ²¹ To overcome that challenge, Jerome prefixed a proem to his translation. This took the form of a dedicatory letter, an antique literary device by which authors could simultaneously address their patrons and intended readerships. Jerome’s dedicatee was his commissioner, Pope Damasus, who is saluted in the letter’s address clause and conclusion. The argument in the proem, however, was directed to wider readerships.

In its first half, the proem seeks explicitly to justify the project by explaining its rationale. The translation had been prompted by the fact that available Latin translations frequently disagreed with each other and rendered the Greek original imperfectly. A plethora of inaccuracies had been introduced already in the process of translation and many more had emerged in the course of manuscript transmission, which subjected texts to scribal slips and deliberate interventions. Referring to those central vagaries of copying by hand, Jerome articulated a case for reverting to the Greek original. He emphasised that the New Testament and the Old Testament were two quite different entities in respect of translation. The latter was available in two authoritative forms, the Hebrew original and the Septuagint, a Greek translation. The commanding status of the Septuagint flowed from endorsement by the writers of the New Testament, whose citations from the Old Testament were often recognisably of that translation. The case of the New Testament was more straightforward in that there was a single fountainhead, the original Greek text. Devoid of endorsement by biblical authors, Latin translations were derivatives of inferior status. In their divergence from the Greek original they could make no claim to divinely inspired authenticity. To put it more bluntly, Latin deviations were errors.

This was a daring proposition at the time. Because formal and private devotion had built on Vetus Latina articulations for generations, these enjoyed the status of a received text. That aspect was relevant to the Gospels in particular. They took precedence over all other books of the Christian Bible and their reception history reflects this. In the corpus of extant Latin manuscripts dating roughly from before the ninth century, the Bible more often than not was transmitted in partial copies rather than as volumes embracing all its books. Copies of the Gospels predominate throughout these early centuries. The high proportion of gospelbooks among the survivors may belong to one or both of two factors: that the Gospels were copied more often; and that copies were of higher quality as books, therefore more valued as possessions and therefore enjoying more favourable conditions for survival.Footnote ²² Either way, it is clear that the Gospels were the most treasured of biblical books. Jerome was acutely aware that he was handling a cherished, indeed venerated, text, such that even the slightest emendation could give offence. The proem to his translation offered the assurance that previous readings had been preserved intact wherever possible, which they were for the most part, and that only errors distorting the sense had been corrected.Footnote ²³ It is true that his interventions were rather light. They also became fewer as his work progressed.Footnote ²⁴

2.2 Protection by Papal Commission

The commission obtained from the pope granted Jerome requisites for his work, and it also bestowed prestige beneficial to publication. The latter is the context in which his dedicatory letter, the proem to the translation, foregrounds the address to Pope Damasus. The fact that the pope had commissioned the work is made known in the very opening sentence, as follows.

Jerome’s assertion is that his methodological preference for Greek original over Latin tradition was a papal contract which it would be a derogation to refuse. A few lines below, the commission from Damasus is referred to again. It is now presented more explicitly as a protective shield. In the midst of any criticism that might follow publication, it would be Jerome’s consolation ‘that you, who are the highest priest, command [this translation] to be made’.Footnote ²⁶ The party responsible for the whole affair was its commissioner, the pope.

Fears of criticism were well founded. In 384 or so, at about the time of the project’s completion, Jerome informed a correspondent of his censure by ‘two-legged asses’ that his translation was ‘against the authority of the old and the opinion of the whole world’.Footnote ²⁷ Three epistolary exchanges between Damasus and Jerome in the course of the project imply that such criticisms had been aroused well before. In modern editions, the letters in question are Epp. 19 and 20, Ep. 21 (Jerome’s response to Damasus’ letter, which is incorporated in part), and Epp. 35 and 36. In each exchange, Damasus posed queries which had emerged from his reading of the Latin Bible, and Jerome expounded from his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. The subtext was Jerome’s hermeneutical method, its preference for authentic text in Greek and Hebrew over derivative Latin translations and commentaries.Footnote ²⁸ Their final exchange, which is likely to have taken place in 384, is of primary interest here. In Ep. 35, Damasus posed five questions about biblical readings; in Ep. 36, Jerome responded to three and referred the pope to select commentaries as regards the remaining two.Footnote ²⁹ Each of Damasus’ questions resonated with a contemporary work, Quaestiones Veteris et Noui Testamenti, such that the coincidence cannot have been by chance.Footnote ³⁰ That treatise was written by an anonymous author, who is now called Ambrosiaster, in Rome at the turn of the 370s.

What makes the resonance between Damasus’ letter and Quaestiones more remarkable is the fact that Ambrosiaster was one of the ‘two-legged asses’, to quote Jerome’s disdainful phrase, who disapproved of his method of translation. Emphasising the significance of Latin tradition, Ambrosiaster rejected the proposal that the Greek New Testament had authority over the Vetus Latina.Footnote ³¹ It is a moot point whether Jerome knew Ambrosiaster’s criticism only as an anonymous report or attached to the man.Footnote ³² In either case, when read in the context of Ambrosiaster’s hostility, Epp. 35 and 36 emerge as a defence against a specific enemy. The letters vindicated Jerome’s approach by way of implication rather than explicitly. A head-on assault could have been unfeasible due to Rome’s internal politics.Footnote ³³ Furthermore, Jerome’s later reputation as a towering biblical exegete had not yet formed other than within his own circles and those close to the pope. Damasus was an old man, and Jerome would soon have to find a new patron. Well-connected critics such as Ambrosiaster, who was apparently a presbyter at a suburban Roman church and as such enjoyed a status nearly equal to that of bishops, had to be handled with care.Footnote ³⁴

The question of intended audience is crucial to any attempt to construe a text in its own terms. Antique and medieval epistles were usually of a semi-public nature rather than being confidential exchanges. That public aspect was evident in the practices of their presentation to the recipient and their subsequent transmission. Letters were often recited by the courier to the addressee and others present on the occasion; copies were circulated to parties other than the addressee; several authors released their correspondence as collections.Footnote ³⁵ Jerome was such a one to publicise his letters. As recorded in an autobiographical note at the conclusion of his De uiris illustribus, written in 393, the body of his writings included two discrete letter collections, Epistolarum ad diuersos liber and Ad Marcellam epistolarum liber.Footnote ³⁶ What is more relevant to our inquiry, De uiris illustribus itemises his responses to Damasus’ three letters individually, each under a title suggestive of a treatise, De osanna, De frugi et luxurioso filiis and De tribus quaestiunculis legis ueteris.Footnote ³⁷ In other words, Jerome had published each of his responses as a separate piece. Furthermore, the first and third exchanges, Epp. 19 and 20 and Epp. 35 and 36 respectively, were circulated as such in the Middle Ages, hinting that he had released them as pairings, so that in both cases the papal letter preceded his response.Footnote ³⁸

The literary style of Damasus’ queries is of relevance as to their authorial status and intention. His first two letters were business-like, conspicuously spare in their diction. The third letter, Ep. 35, which poses questions previously raised by Ambrosiaster, opens with an elegant allocution. Erudite allusions and refined remarks abound. The contrast to the previous two letters is such that it has been proposed that Ep. 35 is a forgery, which Jerome penned years after Damasus’ death.Footnote ³⁹ Today’s accepted view is that the letter is genuine.Footnote ⁴⁰ I would put forward a new solution, which sits between those two propositions, namely that Jerome authored the letter in part or completely, but he did so when Damasus was still alive. This scheme entails no suggestion that the letter should be taken as a forgery. For Jerome’s job as a papal secretary involved letter-writing. By his testimony, Damasus had ‘assigned [him] to compose ecclesiastical letters’.Footnote ⁴¹ Years after his master’s death, he boasted that ‘the mouth of Damasus of blessed memory [spoke] my words’.Footnote ⁴² Outlining Ep. 35 for the pope would have been within his secretarial obligations and a papal nod would have authenticated the text.

Why propose a role for Jerome in the composition of Ep. 35? A man of letters, Damasus was competent to compose stylish Latin prose. Several of his poems survive as inscriptions.Footnote ⁴³ It is a debated question as to whether or not Damasus authored the Carmen contra paganos, an invective apparently against a certain Vettius Agorius Praetextatus. If the identification of the object of the poem’s abuse is accurate, the writing took place in 384. The most recent detailed consideration, by an editor of Damasus’ epigraphic poetry, concludes that the question of authorship is unanswerable; and that the candidacy of Jerome, whose disdain for Praetextatus is manifest in two roughly contemporary letters, cannot be ruled out.Footnote ⁴⁴ It has also been speculated that if Damasus authored the invective, Jerome ‘surely had a hand in it’ and discussed the project with the pope who, at almost eighty, ‘relied heavily on his new secretary’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Whether such considerations pertain to Carmen contra paganos cannot be known for sure. Yet, they do apply to Ep. 35. The letter cannot have been written more than a few weeks or months before Damasus’ death in 384. The man was past his prime.

The previous argument that Jerome had forged Ep. 35 in 387 was premised on seven verbal and phrasal analogies between it and his writings, and on certain articulations in Ep. 36 allegedly too impolite to represent genuine dialogue.Footnote ⁴⁶ Much of that evidence was misread, as has been pointed out elsewhere: there is nothing rude to Ep. 36, while at least two of the verbal reminiscences observed between Ep. 35 and works by Jerome were by no means unusual phraseology at the time. Furthermore, the phrase ‘furtiuis noctium operis’ (‘at stolen [hours] of night work’), which resonates with Jerome’s Epp. 34.6, 114.1 and 119.1, reads as reported speech in Ep. 35. It was, then, a quotation from his previous communication with the pope, now lost. On the basis of these observations, the remaining Hieronymian locutions of the letter were rejected as evidence of his authorship; for they ‘can be explained by this same logic of complimentary imitatio’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The corollary would be that Damasus was very well acquainted with Jerome’s other writings, especially his letters. To demonstrate whether that could be the case, we may reflect on one of the remaining cases of analogy.

The sequence of iucundius (‘happier’) followed in the next clause by mella (‘honey’ in the plural), which cannot compare with the contemplation of God’s mysteries, seems to have been a Hieronymian invention. The phrase does not appear within reported speech in Ep. 35. The imitation of Jerome’s epistolary voice on this occasion would, then, have required familiarity with his Ep. 30, which also employs the phrase. Had Damasus read that letter, addressed to Marcella in 384 or so, or some other of Jerome’s writings of which we are now unaware? That could hardly have been the case. Ep. 35 betrays a lack of previous engagement with the body of Jerome’s epistolary writings. This applies even to the above-discussed two letters Jerome had sent to Damasus from the Syrian desert in 376 or so. It transpires from a remark in Ep. 35 that the pope had failed to read and archive those two letters at the time of their dispatch in the 370s and finally did so only slightly before the writing of Ep. 35:

A request for copies of Jerome’s previous letters to him suggests that Damasus did not possess a collection of his secretary’s correspondence. The situation speaks of cursory acquaintance of, rather than a scrupulous familiarity with, Jerome’s epistolary writings. It should be added that Damasus’ acknowledgement of Jerome’s first two letters to him was long overdue. Conveyed by Ep. 35, the acknowledgement was received at the very last moment: months, weeks or days before Damasus’ death. Such opportune timing hints at Jerome’s agency. In conclusion, his three epistolary dialogues with Damasus represent a collaborative effort to affirm that his exegetical skills were more than a match for those of his critics. By no means confidential or private, the three exchanges were penned with a larger public in mind. The campaign culminated in Epp. 35 and 36. Jerome had by then emerged as the dominant partner, the proof of which are his fingerprints over the pope’s enquiry. In his capacity as papal secretary, he had assumed the role of solicitor too. The mouth was Damasus’ but the words were Jerome’s.Footnote ⁵¹

In Ep. 36, his last letter to Damasus, Jerome made use of his affiliation for the benefit of still another Latin translation. He observed that he ‘wishes to dedicate’ to the pope a translation of a treatise on the Holy Spirit, then in progress, by Didymus, a pupil of Origen.Footnote ⁵² That translation was completed in Palestine three years after Damasus’ death. Jerome’s prologue points up the papal connexion twice, first in stating his own desire to have had the translation dedicated to Damasus, then in Damasus’ injunction that he assume the project.Footnote ⁵³ Assertions of proactive endorsement by the pope could generate an aura of authority, and the impression is that Jerome had upgraded his Didymus translation to the status of a (posthumous) papal commission. Furthermore, in a letter from the early 390s he referred to his translation of the two homilies by Origen mentioned above as having been made ‘at the request of blessed Damasus at Rome’.Footnote ⁵⁴ He had dedicated the translation to the pope, whereas nothing indicates that the undertaking would have been a papal request. This claim to commission by Damasus had unintended consequences.Footnote ⁵⁵ Towards the end of the 390s, it was cited by Rufinus in a prologue to his translation of Origen’s On the First Principles.Footnote ⁵⁶ Origen had by then been turned into an object of fierce denunciation. Rufinus’ reference to his earlier endorsement by Damasus and Jerome was a precautionary measure against criticism of Origen and the stricture that he must not be read. However, Rufinus’ depiction of Jerome as Origen’s enthusiastic supporter raised eyebrows in Rome, resulting in bitter strife between the two former friends.Footnote ⁵⁷

2.3 The Impact

Neither affiliation to Damasus nor a new translation of the Gospels made Jerome an established figure in Rome. He remained a client, dependent on patronage. He was criticised for too zealous promotion of monastic and ascetic ideals, and there circulated rumours of his having an affair with Paula, an aristocratic supporter.Footnote ⁵⁸ Having lost papal sponsorship with Damasus’ death in 384, a case against him was brought in an ecclesiastical court, over which Pope Siricius (†399) appears to have presided. The exact details of the indictment are unknown, but Jerome was found guilty. He left Rome humiliated in 385 and never came back.Footnote ⁵⁹ Those who aligned themselves with Ambrosiaster’s traditionalism in biblical exegesis were certainly pleased. Jerome’s status in Rome remained precarious throughout Pope Siricius’ incumbency. Subsequently, irrespective of efforts by Jerome’s Roman friends, the pope chose to side with Rufinus in their widely publicised contention.Footnote ⁶⁰ Jerome’s absence from Rome and declining reputation there must have weakened his Gospel translation’s first impact within the city. Papal recourse to the Vulgate is apparent only from Pope Zosimus onwards, incumbent in 417–18.Footnote ⁶¹

Be that as it may, the translation found some very important contemporary readers elsewhere. The most notable among them was Augustine, bishop of Hippo in north Africa (†430). He had adopted Jerome’s translation by the first years of the 400s. His De consensu euangelistarum, composed then, relies on Jerome’s text almost throughout.Footnote ⁶² In a letter to Jerome, Augustine noted that the translation, which his collations with Greek manuscripts had proved to be ‘virtually faultless’, amounted to a considerable contribution to biblical scholarship.Footnote ⁶³ Jerome’s primary readerships also included more notorious parties. The earliest identifiable reader of Vulgate translations of New Testament books other than the Gospels, for which anonymous translators who followed Jerome’s lead were responsible, was Pelagius (†418). His teachings formed the basis of Pelagianism, a set of beliefs censured as heterodox by Augustine and other contemporaries. One of the most prolific Pelagians, Julian, bishop of Eclanum († c.455), cited the Gospels from Jerome’s translation.Footnote ⁶⁴

No extant copy of Jerome’s translation can be associated with him or his circle. But the earliest extant manuscript, most of whose leaves survive in St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 1395 (CLA VII.984), is not far removed from the sphere of his influence. The book, about a half of whose extent survives in seven volumes, was made in northern Italy, possibly Verona, in the first half of the fifth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ It has been speculated that some of the notes found in its margins might derive from Jerome’s insertions, a proposition beyond verification.Footnote ⁶⁶ In palaeographical terms, the manuscript is of mediocre quality, which, together with the absence of liturgical notes, betrays the fact that the volume was one for personal use rather than a public purpose.Footnote ⁶⁷

Institutional uses followed private. The earliest surviving Latin lectionary, the Wolfenbüttel Palimpsest, more precisely, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, MS Weißenburg 76 (CLA IX.1392), may be instanced here. The volume carries passus both from the Old and New Testaments to be recited in the liturgy. Those from the New Testament were taken from the Vulgate in the main, while Vetus Latina sources were also deployed. Dating from the first half of the sixth century, the book comes from Gaul.Footnote ⁶⁸ Its liturgical application of Jerome’s text is witness to penetration into communal milieux. The Wolfenbüttel Palimpsest embodies adaptation in an institution far from Rome. The book implies previous transmission in Gaul with activist engagement.

While Jerome’s revision of the Gospels must have met with considerably more contemporary success than the historical record reveals, these instances were exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of Latin Gospel manuscripts preserved from the fifth to eighth centuries convey Vetus Latina texts. A point of interest is that various readerships did not consider Jerome’s text and older translations mutually exclusive entities. A common feature of transmission was that manuscripts adopted readings both from the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate.Footnote ⁶⁹ A case in point is the afore-mentioned Wolfenbüttel Palimpsest, which amalgamated Vetus Latina readings with Jerome’s. While a good deal of such textual complexity is likely to have ensued from the vagaries of manuscript transmission, there were readers who set out to compare Latin translations. It was, no doubt, an inevitable stage in the Vulgate’s path to dominance that the two competing traditions should have been regarded as commanding authority in concert.

Jerome’s commission from Damasus was certainly an effective device in the pursuit of contemporary and later audiences. Although the extent to which this was so cannot be measured, a corpus of indirect signals shows that Jerome’s emphases on Damasus’ support yielded increasing dividends in the long run. For their relationship came to be seen as an archetype of what papal collaboration represented. The earliest known expression of that idealised reception are two letters about the liturgical use of the Psalter, purportedly exchanged between them. Damasus enquired and Jerome responded, as in their epistolary exchanges discussed above. The two forgeries have been dated roughly to the turn of the fifth century. They found application in Rome during the latter half of the 530s: the anonymous author of the Liber pontificalis, a collection of short papal biographies, used the letters as source material. In the ninth century, the letters were incorporated in the so-called Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, a great boon to their circulation.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is also of significance that the decretals were a Frankish, rather than Roman, compilation, assembled for service in the heartlands of the Carolingian empire.Footnote ⁷¹ The incorporation of the forged exchange between Damasus and Jerome, therefore, testifies to perceptions north of the Alps. To return to the Liber pontificalis, it also introduced as a preface two new apocryphal letters between Jerome and Damasus. The actors in the roles of the one who requests and the one who complies were now reversed. Jerome asked for a chronological account of the deeds of all the popes from St Peter to the present, to which the Liber pontificalis was the response.Footnote ⁷² The inversion of their functions in dialogue was necessary because the anonymous author of the Liber pontificalis held that Jerome was sojourning at Jerusalem during the period in question. Sources requisite for a papal chronology would not have been accessible there. A heavily edited text of a genuine letter by Jerome, Ep. 73, represents yet another variety of recasting and forgery. The redactor, who was a bad Latinist, apparently worked in the sixth century. The letter is concerned with the identify of Melchizedek, a biblical character. The original was addressed to Evangelus, and Pope Damasus was in no way involved. Disposing of Evangelus, the redactor-cum-forger relegated Jerome to recipient and attributed the letter to Damasus. The aim was apparently to stress that the opinions proposed in the letter were papal by definition.Footnote ⁷³

In medieval biographies, Jerome’s Roman connexion is a recurrent feature.Footnote ⁷⁴ The anonymous ninth-century author of the so-called ‘Hieronymus noster’, a hagiographic life, quoted the elegant first section of Damasus’ final letter to Jerome, Ep. 35, discussed in Chapter 2.2.Footnote ⁷⁵ Nicola Maniacutia, a twelfth-century biblical scholar, did the same in his life of Jerome.Footnote ⁷⁶ As regards the translation of the Gospels, Nicola Maniacutia observed that Jerome had ‘scrupulously corrected [their] text, confused at copyists’ fault’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The comment echoes the dedicatory letter to Damasus, prefacing the Gospels. All these notions were much in evidence in various types of writing concerning Jerome. Finally, John Beleth in his influential treatise on liturgy, written in the 1160s, stated that Jerome reformed Catholic liturgy on the basis of a commission coming ultimately from Emperor Theodosius but assigned to him by Pope Damasus; that he corrected heterodox articulations of Origen’s homilies read in Catholic services; that his biblical translations held the same authority as the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament; and that Jerome served seven popes and was made the cardinal of San Lorenzo.Footnote ⁷⁸ The office of cardinal priest was a medieval creation. A crude anachronism in a late-antique context, the designation was a conception of what Jerome’s Roman standing should have been. The perception was ubiquitous and remained so for centuries. Countless medieval and early-modern visual representations, be they manuscript illustrations, wall-paintings or canvases, depict Jerome in a cardinal’s red robes.

We may end with the visual evidence of a pictorial cycle found in two famous Carolingian bibles, which presents Jerome’s career as a biblical translator and exegete. The manuscripts in question are the First Bible of Charles the Bald, now BnF, lat. 1, and the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome. They date from 845 and the late 860s and come from Tours and Reims respectively.Footnote ⁷⁹ Their Jerome illustrations comprise three panels.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the first, Jerome leaves Rome to dedicate himself to biblical translation. The second panel shows him exposing the Bible to an audience of friends in Bethlehem. A stenographer beside him takes notes and scribes make further copies. In the third panel Jerome distributes copies of the Latin Bible to monks, who return to their communities, presumably in the Latin West. Costumes are Carolingian, but the narrative cycle, which must derive from a common source, is older, perhaps by centuries. At any rate, the second and third panels depict an early-medieval view of highly successful publication. The third panel, in which readers flock to Jerome to pick up copies, portrays mass production in contemporary terms. The scene is idealised and relates to circumstances in which the Vulgate was widely available. Even so, it does resonate with Jerome’s experience after leaving Rome. In a letter written in the Holy Land c.392, he advised the recipient, Bishop Aurelius of Carthage, as follows.

As in the Carolingian panels, Jerome had scribes to write down his words and parties from overseas came to obtain copies. He had established himself as a foremost Latin exegete, who published effectively far from many of his intended audiences. Papal patronage was no longer on offer or urgently needed. Yet Damasus’ endorsement remained relevant, something made clear by the cited letter. Aurelius was informed that Jerome had translated two homilies by Origen on the Song of Songs on commission from Pope Damasus.Footnote ⁸²

3.1 The Impact

The recital at St Peter in Chains had a long-term impact at the scene. Evidence for that is found in the so-called Corpus Laureshamense, a composite manuscript, now BAV, Pal. lat. 833, in which are assembled epigraphic collections from various sources, put together sometime before c.835 at Lorsch in central Germany.Footnote ¹¹² One of its components reports a sequence of four epigraphs, of which the first two quote Arator and the following two patently came from St Peter in Chains. Ignored in previous scholarship on the reception of Arator, their status may be briefly assessed here. We may begin with the inscriptions certainly from St Peter in Chains. One records the fulfilment of a vow of Eudoxia, her father Theodosius and his wife Eudoxia. These were Eudoxia († c.493), who was the consort of Emperor Valentinian III and who provided funds to rebuild the destroyed church, and her parents, Emperor Theodosius II and Empress Eudoxia. Although the epigraph does not identify the vow, it must have embraced her sponsorship of the work of reconstruction.Footnote ¹¹³ The other inscription patently from St Peter in Chains commemorates Pope Sixtus III (†440) and Presbyter Philip, who, respectively, dedicated the basilica and supervised the project of reconstruction.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As for the two immediately preceding Arator inscriptions, they are associated with St Peter in Chains on account of his publication of the Historia apostolica there. Furthermore, the subject matter of the first epigraph is the above-quoted celebration of Peter’s chains, with which Book 1 concludes.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The second Arator epigraph is discussed shortly. The four inscriptions constitute a discrete whole by virtue of their shared associations with St Peter in Chains.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It is highly unlikely that a copyist, of the Corpus Laureshamense or a lost intermediate source, would have brought them together from various sources. To do so, he would have to have known that the church had previously been dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, as in the Sixtus epigraph; that the vow of Eudoxia and her parents concerned that same church, not identified in the inscription in question; and that Arator had recited his work there. The manuscript received the epigraphs, probably through an intermediate source, from notes taken on the spot in the seventh century or even the sixth.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The second Arator epigraph reads: ‘The eunuch’s profuse faith was immediately incited by the sight of water; baptised, he is in peace.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ The context is Acts 8:26–40, the baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by Philip the Evangelist. Extracted from a longer sentence, the epigraph was slightly modified to make a coherent whole and, no doubt, to explain the painting to which it served as a legend.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Contrasting with Philip’s several appearances in Acts, in the Historia apostolica he only features in the story in question. To spot the verse, the party responsible for the inscription must have known Arator’s epic rather well.

While the recitation at St Peter in Chains was a great success critically, to judge by the testimony of the Relatio, the venue seems to have served in other respects as an ideal setting for publication. It was clear that in a foreseeable future, pilgrims would flock there to commemorate the instruments of Peter’s martyrdom, a tangible connexion to Arator’s subject matter. Among them, many would be literate and some would acquire books. What better advertisement for an epic on St Peter’s martyrdom could there be than to have its verses inscribed on the very walls that enclosed his chains? Early manuscripts of the Historia apostolica do not survive from Rome, an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence. Interestingly, one setting for commercial book dissemination stood in the immediate proximity to St Peter in Chains: the bookshop of a certain Gaudiosus was situated adjacent to the church. The evidence comes from a colophon in a late ninth-century copy of the Gospels, now Angers, BM, MS 24 (20). According to the colophon, ‘Gaudiosus’ bookshop’, statio Gaudiosi librarii, had produced a copy of Jerome’s translation of the Gospels; this would have been an exemplar from which the Angers manuscript descended, perhaps through an intermediary. The colophon resembles others from late antiquity.Footnote ¹²⁰ The need to identify the translation as Jerome’s at Rome suggests, according to one of today’s most authoritative specialists, that the lost ancestor of the Angers manuscript dated from the sixth century at the latest.Footnote ¹²¹ Bookshops disappeared from Rome after the Gothic devastation of 546, for which reason it has been argued that Gaudiosus’ was still operative on the occasion of Arator’s recital.Footnote ¹²²

The success of Arator’s work cannot, of course, be explained by appeal to political motifs, authorial recitations and the infrastructure of bookmaking in Rome. The former only amounted to a subsidiary theme, while the deeds of Peter and Paul, a subject of universal Christian relevance, supply the leitmotif. Arator wrote with wider readerships in mind.Footnote ¹²³ He consigned the work to two associates, Parthenius and Florianus. His dedicatory letter to Florianus makes no mention of the papacy, for which reason the case is introduced here only briefly. Florianus, an abbot, is an elusive figure. He may have been the abbot of ‘Romenum’ either near Milan or closer to Trento, or of Romainmôtier in today’s Switzerland. He was apparently the same Florianus who received two letters from Ennodius, a bishop and poet, who had mentored the young Arator.Footnote ¹²⁴ A short accessus to Arator, a biographical note on him, found in several Carolingian manuscripts, proposes that Florianus was given the work so that the ‘volume would be reinforced by means of his authority’.Footnote ¹²⁵ This is no doubt true in respect of local transmission. It resonates with Arator’s depiction of Florianus as an avid reader with access to a great number of books.Footnote ¹²⁶ The implication is that Florianus presided over a community with an impressive library, and Arator sought to have his work installed there.

As for his other dedicatee outside Rome, Parthenius was approached so that readerships in Gaul could be accessed. Parthenius, with whom Arator had studied as a young man, was a magister officiorum in the court of King Theudebert I of Austrasia. The man was a scion of a well-connected senatorial family in Gaul. He was apparently a nephew of Ennodius, the said patron of the young Arator.Footnote ¹²⁷ In a dedicatory letter attached to, or sent with, the copy consigned to Parthenius, Arator praised his friend as renowned for erudition in Germania.Footnote ¹²⁸ The aspect of learning was important because Arator requested that Parthenius use his connexions to promote the poem among bishops in ‘learned Gaul’ (Gallia studiosa), ‘for they are teachers of faith’.Footnote ¹²⁹ This and what would be the phenomenal subsequent dissemination of the Historia apostolica as a Latin textbook suggest that Arator’s objective was to penetrate Gaulish classrooms by means of episcopal influence. Efforts to supersede pagan literature with Christian poetry at schools were in evidence across Christendom, from fourth-century Constantinople to eighth-century Northumbria.Footnote ¹³⁰ Gregory Nazianzen’s poem To his own verses (Εἰς τὰ ἔμμετρα, In suos versus) may be instanced here as testament to such aspirations.

The period of Arator’s active years saw several attempts to foster Christian literary education. The onus of implementation was on bishops, as stated in the pertinent stipulations of an ecclesiastical assembly in Provence in 529 and the second council of Toledo in 531.Footnote ¹³² On the evidence of Venantius Fortunatus’ Vita sancti Martini, it has been argued that Arator’s verse had already been incorporated into a school curriculum within some twenty years of its publication. This work, written apparently at Poitiers sometime between 573 and 576, sings the praises of Arator, mentioning him by name. Venantius, who was born near Treviso in the 530s and studied in Ravenna in the 550s or 560s, would have read Arator during his school years in northern Italy.Footnote ¹³³ Be that as it may, a group of late ancient Christian poets, Arator, Juvencus, Sedulius and Prudentius, had widely replaced in grammatical education the pagan classics, with the exception of Virgil, by the end of the seventh century.Footnote ¹³⁴

Arator used the pope’s endorsement as bait. In his dedicatory letter to Parthenius, he mentioned that Pope Vigilius had ordered the work’s preservation in the papal library, a plain allusion to the Relatio. Asserting that the learned circles of Gaul would certainly appreciate a piece commended by the pope, he pointed out that Parthenius would obtain fame by circulating the Historia apostolica.Footnote ¹³⁵ Arator’s affirmations bespeak a conviction that papal engagement in publication would advance dissemination far from Rome. Such confidence was apparently well founded. Arator’s most recent editors argue on the basis of textual evidence that the earliest phase of its transmission now traceable through manuscripts in all probability derives ultimately from Parthenius’ now lost copy.Footnote ¹³⁶ If so, that volume fathered numerous offspring; our earliest complete manuscripts, which are from the ninth century, descend from it. Interestingly, the dedicatory letter to Parthenius is found in only two of the nine copies that represent the earliest stratum of the tradition.Footnote ¹³⁷ These are BnF, lat. 2773 and 9347, both from the same centre of Reims. Parthenius died in 548, granting him approximately four years to promote the Historia apostolica. A paucity of time, however, can hardly account for the insignificant transmission of the letter to him. For, once incorporated in a copy of the Historia apostolica, the letter would have been transmitted to new copies if the scribes responsible for them so decided. Many obviously preferred not to. This may have had to do with Parthenius’ poor reputation: he was lynched by a mob angered by the crown’s fiscal policies, for which he was blamed. In the eyes of contemporaries, his terrible death was fair retribution for his sins. Gregory of Tours (†594) dedicated a short vignette to Parthenius in his very influential history of the Franks. Gregory’s Parthenius was a glutton, who broke wind in public, and had his wife and friend killed when he wrongly suspected them of adultery.Footnote ¹³⁸ The man was destined to posthumous neglect. The reduced transmission of Arator’s letter to him contrasts with the dissemination of both the dedicatory letter to Pope Vigilius and the Relatio, the report of the publication event in Rome. The former is included in each of the nine early manuscripts, and seven of them also carry the Relatio.Footnote ¹³⁹

The Relatio was certainly communicated to Gaul in the copy Arator sent to Parthenius. The evidence of our earliest complete manuscripts and the aforementioned allusion to Relatio in the dedicatory letter to Parthenius combines to suggest this was so.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ To that extent, Relatio reads not only as a postscript with a text-critical function resembling that of a subscriptio, but also as a promotional piece. Arator may have penned it, for he certainly took benefit in advertising the papal endorsement. Be that as it may, the contrast between the transmission of the Historia apostolica’s papal paratexts and that of the dedicatory letter to Parthenius hints that it was the association of the former, and not the latter, that gave the boost to the work’s dissemination in Gaul.

4.1 A Presentation at Rome

Fulcoius completed De nuptiis Christi et ecclesiae, henceforth De nuptiis, sometime between 1069 and April 1073, during his first years under Manasses’ service. A long biblical epic in hexameter verse, it belongs to the same genre as Arator’s Historia apostolica. It is a work of considerable literary ambition. Running to 4,737 lines, its narrative extends from Genesis to the Acts of the Apostles, a scope that exceeds that of late-antique biblical epicists, including Arator. Composition must have taken years. For instance, Lawrence of Durham, a twelfth-century versifier of the Bible, wrote 3,076 lines of non-rhyming elegiac couplets in a period of three to four years.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Fulcoius is likely to have begun De nuptiis before relocating to Reims c.1070. At the time of completion he enjoyed Manasses’ patronage, as the poem makes abundantly clear on multiple occasions.Footnote ¹⁶²

De nuptiis survives in three twelfth-century manuscripts, to be discussed in due course. One, BnF, lat. 16701, prefaces the text with a verse address to Pope Alexander II and Archdeacon Hildebrand, a zealous reformer and the future Pope Gregory VII. The final terminus for publication, April 1073, is supplied by Pope Alexander’s death. The poem first laments the demise of Rome’s past glories and then celebrates her new heroes, Alexander and Hildebrand. Its peroration communicates the presentation to them of a copy of De nuptiis and offers compliments to Manasses:

The articulations ‘hos uiduisse’ (‘to have seen them’) and ‘deporto’ (‘I carry’) imply Fulcoius’ own agency in presenting the copy. That reading finds support in his later remark that he had crossed the Alps on Manasses’ order.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Because the presentation cannot be dated other than as 1069 × 1073, its implications in respect of Manasses are not entirely clear. If the date was towards the beginning of that timeframe, the objective would have been to thank the pope and his preeminent servant for favouring Manasses’ election.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ A later date would instead connect the event to negotiations about a vacancy after the death of Abbot Herimar of Saint-Remi in 1071, which Manasses was reluctant to fill.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Either way, Fulcoius promoted the archbishop in the papal court.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ He did the same in epistolary poems addressed to Pope Alexander II in the early 1070s and, some years later, to Pope Gregory VII, and to Hugh of Die, the said papal legate to France.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

It should be emphasised that De nuptiis must not be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a publicity campaign for Archbishop Manasses. A literary patron’s task was to enable the authorial process, for which the reward was fame.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The work, not the patron, was at the centre. That applies in the case of De nuptiis. A long versification of the Christian salvation history, it exudes aspirations that surpass its panegyrical function. A comparison to Arator is again instructive. The Historia apostolica was, at one level, a propaganda piece in service of Arator’s patron, Pope Vigilius. But in reaching for audiences far from Rome, Arator saw his work in a wider setting than just service to the papal cause. A letter by which Fulcoius subsequently dedicated a collection of shorter verse to Manasses implies that he likewise regarded his work as transcending the service it paid the patron. A panegyric celebrating Manasses’ maecenate, the letter argues that Reims rivalled Rome. To make that case, Fulcoius adduced such accomplishments by his patron that lacked papal counterpart. The poet had offered his work to Reims and Rome, and where Manasses had endorsed him, papal support had not been forthcoming.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The implication is that the presentation of De nuptiis in Rome had been intended primarily to gain sponsorship for the poet and his work, rather than the patron and his cause.

Fulcoius’ sour words about Rome bespeak a failure. The manuscript evidence does the same. De nuptiis survives in only three witnesses. They come from regions not far from his own sphere of activity, hinting that the primary transmission had been a local affair through his own networks. None the less, one impact is ascribable to his having taken De nuptiis to Rome. Sometime during the first half of the twelfth century, an anonymous epitaphist at Beauvais affirmed that ‘Beauvais [and] Reims together with Rome desired’ to hold Fulcoius after his death.Footnote ¹⁷¹ As regards Rome, such hyperbole must ultimately derive from Fulcoius’ having commended De nuptiis to the pope; his other dealings with Rome were characterised conspicuously by Manasses’ disaster.Footnote ¹⁷² What reasons explain the lack of papal enthusiasm is now only a matter for speculation. Fulcoius apparently did not have effective contacts in Rome who could have recommended him. Association with Manasses was a liability. Furthermore, like his patron, the poet was not a reformer in the mould of Alexander II and Hildebrand. While the imposition of clerical celibacy was among the most imperative of papal objectives, Fulcoius could conditionally defend clerical marriage and relish eros.Footnote ¹⁷³ There was an ongoing controversy as to whether clerical marriage could be sanctioned or should be eradicated, with heated contributions in support of both positions.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ From the Roman point of view, Fulcoius was on the wrong side.

4.2 A Textbook for Schools

Equipped with a prefatory verse address to the pope, De nuptiis chimes with Arator’s Historia apostolica, regularly accompanied by his dedicatory address to the pope in manuscripts. Arator had served as a school-text for centuries and Latin teachers in Fulcoius’ time would have noted the parallel. De nuptiis was, I would argue, targeted at schools, to be used as a textbook like the Historia apostolica. The evidence of reception offered by the manuscripts is critical here. Beauvais, BM, MS 11 is our richest witness to Fulcoius’ extant writings, many of which survive nowhere else.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The volume, on palaeographical evidence, dates roughly from the first third of the twelfth century. Later provenance, and perhaps origin, is Beauvais cathedral: the earliest positive attestation to that effect is a library mark from the thirteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The inclusion of two papal letters to the bishop and clergy of Beauvais, copied in a contemporary hand, hints that the manuscript was perhaps made at the cathedral.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The volume conveys an anthology of Fulcoius’ writings with some contemporary insertions. The text is written in a library hand of fine quality. By its physical dimensions, 25 × 17 cm, the volume has the appearance of a library book. Schoolbooks tended to be smaller, especially those in personal use.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ However, institutionally produced books for the schoolroom could be considerably larger than the Beauvais book: Chartres, BM, MS 497, a near contemporary copy lost in the Second World War, was 52.5 × 36.5 cm and was produced under Thierry of Chartres († c.1150) for the school of Chartres.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ As regards the Fulcoius manuscript, Beauvais MS 11, it has been proposed that lacunae in several verses and certain gross errors resulted from direct transmission from an untidy authorial working copy that was difficult to decipher.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The suggestion is fascinating but unverifiable. On the basis of the contents, early date and provenance, one may, however, speculate without very much trouble that the book was made or commissioned by an admirer who had known Fulcoius in person. The margins are almost entirely devoid of annotation, indicating that later consultation was infrequent at best. Importantly, a near contemporary hand inserted a short biography of Fulcoius on the recto of the final front flyleaf. The text, preserved in this manuscript and BnF, lat. 5305 (to be introduced shortly), is given below in English translation.

The piece reads as an accessus to Fulcoius.Footnote ¹⁸² Accessus were standardised introductions to equip readers with basic information about authors and their works. There were several schemes by which to construct an accessus. Our specimen echoes a pattern derivative of an introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid by Servius, a fourth-century grammarian. It accounted for the life of the poet, title of the work, genre of the poem, intention of the writer, number of books, order of books and explanation.Footnote ¹⁸³ Accessus were composed predominantly on books and authors read in the classroom, most notably poets, pagan and Christian. The party responsible for the insertion of the accessus to Fulcoius in the Beauvais manuscript apparently understood that the volume was to serve the needs of students. Explained with more verbose attention than given to the other works, De nuptiis was the focus.

The hand who prefixed the accessus had not authored it. He was a copyist, as is obvious from several errors from which our other copy is free.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ That copy is the Paris manuscript, BnF, lat. 5305, a composite volume. The section relevant to us, folios 49–110, dates roughly from the mid-twelfth century.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ It originally contained two treatises by Anselm, De processione Spiritus sancti and Epistola de sacrificio azimi et fermentati. Not very long after, Fulcoius’ De nuptiis was appended on fols. 67v–110r and then, again soon after, the accessus was copied in an empty space on fol. 67r. Medieval provenance and perhaps origin is Fécamp, a Norman abbey, where the volume was attested in the fifteenth century and possibly as early as the twelfth.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Anselm’s treatises were intended for the edification of mature brethren rather than Latin students. The volume’s physical aspects are likewise appropriate to a library book: it is written in a book-hand of average quality and measures 27 × 19 cm.

The insertion of the accessus points toward the classroom, as do annotations by an early thirteenth-century reader, probably a monk of Fécamp. He entered notes in the margins of Fulcoius’ poem but did not comment on Anselm’s treatises. His entries were in the main brief captions such as ‘On the governance of Jewish people as understood according to the moral interpretation from the first of the Kings etc.’Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Upon engaging with the text more deeply, his guidance smacked more distinctly of school instruction. The annotation quoted below elucidates the conclusion of Book 1’s prefatory section, introduces the work’s two interlocutors, and alerts readers to indicators in the margins that identify which interlocutor is speaking.

Our last manuscript, BnF, lat. 16701, is a booklet, entirely dedicated to Fulcoius. The contents are as follows: epitaphs in his honour, his eulogy to Manasses, the above-mentioned verse address to Pope Alexander and Hildebrand, and then, from folio 4 v to the end, De nuptiis.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ The manuscript originated in an unknown centre in northern France in the latter half of the twelfth century. By its physical dimensions, 18 × 12 cm, it has the appearance of a book produced for the classroom or personal use. Marginalia accompany De nuptiis, but these are rather sparse.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Their precise relation to the text is often hard to establish, such that the perspective from which the work was approached cannot be determined with confidence. A later medieval ex libris on folio 91r associates the volume with teaching. It states that the manuscript came into the possession of the Sorbonne from Peter of Limoges – who authored an influential allegorical treatise on the eye, taught at the Sorbonne and bequeathed more than 120 volumes to it in 1306Footnote ¹⁹¹ – and that it was deposited ‘inter grammaticalia’, that is, among the textbooks used for Latin instruction. Accordingly, the manuscript, itemised as ‘auctor de nupciis Christi et Ecclesie’, appears among ‘libri grammaticales’ in a Sorbonne booklist of 1338.Footnote ¹⁹² That section of the library housed seventy volumes of works used in the teaching of Latin at various levels. Pagan authors, such as Ovid, Virgil, Sallust, Statius and others, often found in multiple copies, prevailed. Among the grammarians were of course Priscian and Donatus, and there were many vocabularies. The only biblical epic itemised in the list is Fulcoius’s De nuptiis.

It would be naive to propose on the basis of a single booklist that Fulcoius had replaced Arator and late-antique biblical epicists at the Sorbonne. Rather, the vagaries of transmission – in this case, belonging to a bequest – explain the case. While we cannot know whether or not De nuptiis was ever used as a school-text at the Sorbonne, the document helpfully demonstrates that it was categorised as such there. The booklist also captures something of Fulcoius’ ambition. He sought to be counted among the great Christian epicists read in the classroom. Such aspirations are evident in his efforts to associate De nuptiis with their works by a denunciation of pagan literature. The introductory section to Book 1 disapproves of the classics as ‘puerile’.Footnote ¹⁹³ Pagan gods and works are denied entry to the poem, because ‘it is shameful to admit pigs to a beautiful meadow’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ The motif of favouring biblical and Christian authors over pagan ones is reiterated multiple times in the sections that follow.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Such affirmations were a rhetorical affectation. Fulcoius’ poetic art was imbued with classical reading, avidly cited in his other works. Even De nuptiis occasionally adduces pagan concepts without an air of criticism. An instance is a description of Fulcoius’ own education in the seven liberal arts. These, he explains, emanated from Pallas Athena.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ That allegorical notion points towards Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, commonly read in schools at the time. It might be added that the title of Fulcoius’ poem was certainly a deliberate allusion to that work.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The renunciation of pagan learning was a motif in Christian Latin poetry. Juvencus and Sedulius, for instance, condemned pagan poetry in the prefaces to their Gospel versifications.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ By doing the same, Fulcoius complied with an established textbook convention.Footnote ¹⁹⁹

De nuptiis did not achieve any great impact. Three surviving manuscripts and one probable allusion about fifty years later, in the Hypognosticon of Lawrence of Durham, is a bleak tally for an author who had sought the favour of the pope and emperor.Footnote ²⁰⁰ The sparseness of the transmission probably had more to do with the milieu of Fulcoius’ career than his literary craft. At the time, new biblical epics were rare. Only two such attempts beside De nuptiis are known from the eleventh century, neither of which attracted notable attention.Footnote ²⁰¹ It has been observed recently that relative to pagan classics, the late-antique Christian epicists who had dominated the Latin classroom for centuries, Arator among them, gradually lost ground from the eleventh century onwards.Footnote ²⁰² The trend was perhaps a factor in undermining the potential of De nuptiis to find readers who taught at schools. However, had Fulcoius lived two or three generations later, his epic would have had better prospects. Grand biblical versifications re-emerged as a fashionable genre for original composition in the twelfth century. Several new works were written, of which some obtained considerable readerships.Footnote ²⁰³ Lawrence’s Hypognosticon, which survives in at least twenty-three manuscripts, including many from the twelfth century, is a case in point.Footnote ²⁰⁴

An unusual new composition at the time, De nuptiis would have needed effective promotion to be a success. Fulcoius had the wrong patron. Affiliation to Manasses, which De nuptiis exhibits in a conspicuous fashion, is likely to have proved counterproductive in the pursuit of readers outside his sphere of direct influence. It did not help that Manasses’ worst nemesis was Hugh of Die, papal legate.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Advocates of the papal cause would hardly be persuaded by the archbishop’s endorsement. A preface reporting that the author had gifted the pope a copy in person was not enough. Active papal contribution to publication, not received, could have made a difference. As is shown in the next chapter, Hugh of Die’s endorsement of Anselm’s Monologion and Proslogion in his capacity as papal legate is a demonstration of how valuable such support could be.

5.1 The Monologion and Proslogion: Hugh of Die, Papal Legate to France

Anselm began his authorial career in the Norman monastery of Bec, where he served as prior from 1063 to 1078 and then as abbot until he was elevated to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1093. He completed his first treatise, the Monologion, a sustained contemplation on some key aspects of God’s essence, in 1077 or one or two years before that. He consigned it for inspection to Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, his former teacher at Bec. The archbishop disapproved of the method by which conclusions were drawn by argument from reason without the citation of authoritative texts as evidence.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Other readers, too, were baffled and further criticism flowed. This demonstrably undermined Anselm’s confidence. In 1077 or 1078 Abbot Rainald, perhaps of Saint-Cyprien at Poitiers, asked for a copy of the Monologion. In his response, Anselm explained his situation as follows.

Anselm composed his next treatise soon after, in 1077. This is the Proslogion, an ingenious fusion of prayer and ratiocination, renowned for the so-called ontological argument, a chain of reasoning which affirms the existence of God as a logical necessity. A milestone in Christian learning, the work is a locus classicus in modern scholarship. The beginnings were not promising, however. Detesting their prior’s inquiries, a party within Anselm’s own brethren at Bec sought to terminate the process of composition by stealing his draft. Anselm recomposed the lost text, but this new draft, on wax tablets, was soon found smashed. A third draft was made on parchment, which was harder to break and easier to conceal than tablets.Footnote ²⁰⁹ The assault should be considered an expression of severe disapproval.Footnote ²¹⁰

By his own admission, Anselm at first preferred not to prefix his own name to the Monologion and Proslogion. He circulated them only anonymously until in 1083 × 1085, Hugh of Die, archbishop of Lyon and papal legate to France, commanded that he sign them, that is, publish them under his own name. This unusual detail is known from a preface which Anselm inserted in the Proslogion upon complying with Hugh’s command. The pertinent passage concludes the preface, a placement that can be taken as emphatic:

Much in the preface to the Proslogion is cliché, but the quoted account of Hugh’s legatine action must have been accurate in its detail, not least for the reason that the legate himself received a copy of the work.Footnote ²¹² A distorted testimony would have been an offence. The two treatises, which had previously been transmitted singly, were now paired together. They became twins. That relationship was communicated through the stressed analogy between their new titles. Previously, they had been called Exemplum meditandi de ratione fidei and Fides quaerens intellectum, which Anselm revised as Monologion and Proslogion respectively.Footnote ²¹³

The pairing of the works, which involved the retitling, the authorial signature and the insertion of the preface in the Proslogion, constituted veritable republication. Stressing the provisional aspect of his texts’ former circulation, Anselm represented this event as the first publication proper. The crux of the whole affair was that he ascribed the republication to a command from Hugh of Die. He ‘above all’ had urged Anselm to sign the Monologion and Proslogion. The detail that Hugh had acted in his capacity as papal legate was plainly of moment to Anselm. For he cared to remark on it twice within a single sentence: ‘fungens … legatione apostolica … apostolica praecepit auctoritate’. These were not empty words. From the second half of the eleventh century onwards, the legatine dignity was a principal instrument by which the papacy took effective action and implemented reformist policies across Latin Christendom. On the word of Dictatus papae, a concept for a canonical collection designed by or under the oversight of Pope Gregory VII, ‘his legate, even if of lower rank, precedes all bishops in a council and can impose the sentence of deposition on them’.Footnote ²¹⁴ Hugh, who was prepared to depose the archbishop of Reims, as shown in the previous chapter, understood his legatine status in those terms.Footnote ²¹⁵

Hugh’s mandate to Anselm was a serious matter, but it has never been assessed in the wider context of Roman legatine action. What follows is a brief survey of how papal legates engaged in authorial publication in roles other than that of author. Cases up to c.1150 were harvested digitally from A Database for Medieval Publication Networks, a work in progress, which embraces most of the identifiable Latin works from Britain and Ireland before c.1540, and manually from the Patrologia Latina, the result of reading all medieval prefatory texts. The corpus is not exhaustive, but, comprising items in the thousands, it is sufficiently large for the needs of this review. Seven cases emerged, summarised below. The principal observation is that our other writers did not see fit to underline the legatine office and authority to the extent Anselm did in the prologue to the Proslogion.

In 1094 Bernold of Constance, monk of Schaffhausen, who was an intellectual protagonist in the German investiture contest, received a commission to compose an exposition on the status of ordinations and baptisms administered by excommunicates.Footnote ²¹⁶ This came from Bishop Gebhard III of Constance, papal legate. A short collage of authoritative extracts, the piece has been regarded as ‘a position paper’ for Gebhard, who needed it for the papal council of Piacenza, to convene the following year.Footnote ²¹⁷ Nothing suggests that a wider audience was being sought, and as such the exposition cannot be considered a publication in the same sense as Anselm’s treatises. Gebhard and Bernold had also collaborated previously, and the exposition should be considered one fruit of a longer working relationship between a scholar and his diocesan. In 1115 or 1116, Alexander, monk of Canterbury, put together a collection of Anselm’s memorable sayings. The work was a commission from Abbot Anselm of San Saba at Rome, papal legate to England. The connexion between the author and commissioner had nothing to do with the legateship, however; it flowed from their relationship with the protagonist. Alexander had been one of the most trusted servants of the late Archbishop Anselm, who happened to be the legate’s uncle.Footnote ²¹⁸ In about 1133, Arnulf, archdeacon of Sées, later bishop of Lisieux, wrote an invective against Bishop Girard of Angoulême to denounce his support for ‘anti-pope’ Anacletus. He sent the work to Bishop Geoffrey of Chartres, the reasons for which were practical and political. Geoffrey had been Arnulf’s patron, and, in his capacity as papal legate to Aquitaine, the man was Anacletus’ main opponent in France.Footnote ²¹⁹ Next, Brother Geoffrey of Tiron wrote a life of Bernard, the founder of his house, in 1137 × 1143.Footnote ²²⁰ The work was dedicated to the same Bishop Geoffrey of Chartres who had requested it to be written.Footnote ²²¹ Geoffrey was the diocesan of Tiron and its benefactor. That local connexion, rather than Geoffrey’s legatine dignity, accounts for the dedication. The same applies to our next case, a short liturgical treatise from 1137 × 1152. The author, Brother John of Echternach, an obscure figure otherwise unknown, dedicated it to Archbishop Adalbero of Trier, papal legate. As John did not emphasise Adalbero’s legatine dignity, we must assume that his dedication belongs to the fact that Adalbero was John’s diocesan.Footnote ²²² In 1138 or 1139, Osbert of Clare consigned a copy of Vita beati Edwardi to Cardinal-Bishop Alberic of Ostia, papal legate. Part of the project to secure a papal canonisation for King Edward the Confessor, the letter requested Alberic’s help in the process.Footnote ²²³ In 1145, upon their joint preaching mission to the heretics of Nantes, the same Cardinal-Bishop Alberic of Ostia, papal legate to southern France, requested that Hugh of Amiens, archbishop of Rouen, compose a treatise on the subject. Hugh completed the work somewhat later than expected, but he considered it a commission from Alberic, to whom he consigned it. The salutation addresses Alberic with his apostolic designations. His status as a papal delegate is not referred to elsewhere.Footnote ²²⁴

This survey shows papal legates to have been commissioners and dedicatees, normal protagonists in medieval publishing. In three cases the bond ensued from the legate’s status as diocesan of the author in question rather than from his apostolic legateship. Such affairs do not embody any deliberate attempts to draw Rome into authorial domains. Rather, they attest to the expansion of the papal apparatus by employing bishops outside Italy as legates. The dedicatees of the remaining four texts were not the authors’ diocesans. In these cases, the dedicatees’ legatine mission was not the relevant factor, but rather their potential to advance a canonisation in Rome or the fact of a family relationship. None of these aspects pertains to Anselm’s connexion with Hugh of Die. He was not Anselm’s diocesan, and there is no evidence of any previous association between them, let alone collaboration. Hugh acted neither as Anselm’s dedicatee nor, at least in the conventional sense, the commissioner.

Hugh’s intervention was unparalleled as a legatine act. Yet, in its essence it echoed an age-old, but mostly inoperative, notion that Rome could reject and commend writings. This was expressed in a fully developed form with regard to works already published in a spurious decretal known as De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, purportedly issued by Pope Gelasius (†496). Datable to the sixth century, the document is the earliest extant list of books commended and prohibited by the papacy.Footnote ²²⁵ The document enjoyed a very wide circulation since it was incorporated in the ubiquitous Pseudo-Isidorian decretals in the Carolingian period.Footnote ²²⁶ It also found its way into several other collections such as the so-called Collectio Lanfranci, which Anselm demonstrably perused at Bec.Footnote ²²⁷ Pope Nicholas I (†867) explicitly entertained the idea that the papacy could also censor new writings at will. Two of his letters may be instanced here. One, addressed to Emperor Charles the Bald, advised that the recent translation by John Scottus Eriugena of De diuinis nominibus of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite should have been sent to the pope ‘to be approved or rejected by our judgement according to custom’. Nicholas asked that the work be immediately despatched so that ‘once it is approved by our apostolic judgment, it may instantly be more favourably regarded by all on account of our authority’.Footnote ²²⁸ The letter seems to have faded into oblivion until it resurfaced in the canonical collection of Cardinal Atto of San Marco, put together in Rome apparently in the 1070s. Its next known application is in an unknown manuscript bearing a text similar to the one found in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 713, fol. 139r–v. Using that lost manuscript as his source, Ivo of Chartres (†1115) included the letter in his Decretum.Footnote ²²⁹ Ivo was an acquaintance both of Anselm’s and Hugh’s.Footnote ²³⁰ The other pertinent letter by Nicholas I was sent to the bishops in Gaul. In it he asserted that the pope had authority to approve or reject writings.Footnote ²³¹ The letter was frequently copied, from the Carolingian period onwards. At some point it was incorporated in books containing the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals in France and Normandy.Footnote ²³² Ivo of Chartres included it in his Tripartita and Decretum. They greatly abbreviate the letter, which is lengthy, so that the statement on papal prerogative to commend or dismiss written works comes first.Footnote ²³³ The text in the Tripartita consists only of the clause on the papal prerogative to censor writings, evidencing Ivo’s focus on the subject.

No claim is made here that Hugh or Anselm would have read or known Nicholas’ letters. Rather, the letters’ transmission suggests that in their circles it was accepted that the pope, and by implication his legates, were possessed of the privilege of sanctioning writings. Previously very uncommon, the application of such ideas embodied the reform papacy’s activism and predisposition to intervene in local affairs. Another relevant manifestation of those reformist tendencies was the increasing attention Rome was paying to debate on doctrinal issues. This unavoidably led to its intervening in authorial book-circulation.

At this juncture, Jerome’s collaboration with Pope Damasus in the production of a new Latin translation of the Gospels may be recalled. Part of their project was to prepare for the denunciation of Jerome’s methodological preference for the Greek original over Latin tradition. Censure was expressed even as Jerome was still working. Such tensions evoke Anselm’s situation. The methodological approach of the Monologion had been explicitly disapproved of before publication; a party at Bec sought to terminate the composition of his next treatise, the Proslogion, by destroying and stealing its drafts. Hugh’s extraordinary legatine command must belong to this context of reception. Hugh was certainly aware of strains surrounding dialectical discussions on divine mysteries. He had, for instance, participated in dealings leading to the condemnation of Berengar, a theologian who, among other things, was alleged to have preferred reason to faith.Footnote ²³⁴ So that the function of Hugh’s command to Anselm can be appreciated in a general sense, Nicholas I’s letter to Charles the Bald may be requoted: ‘once approved by our apostolic judgement, [a writing] may instantly be more favourably regarded by all on account of our authority’.Footnote ²³⁵ By implication, Hugh’s command was an apostolic certificate of the validity of Anselm’s treatises.

Hugh’s motive to intervene would have been connected to the bond between Bec and the reform papacy, which had been tied already in the 1050s, when Lanfranc, Anselm’s predecessor as prior, lived there.Footnote ²³⁶ An indication of a special relationship exists in a letter from Pope Gregory VII to Anselm, which states that report of his ‘good deeds’ had reached the curia. The letter can only be dated as 1079 × 1085 and it cannot be known whether or not it was Hugh who had recommended Anselm to the pope.Footnote ²³⁷ It might be thought that an intellectual incentive would also have been a prerequisite for Hugh’s action. He was an erudite reader, or so the books he bequeathed to his church would suggest. A list in a Lyon necrology betrays a fine personal library focused heavily on patristic theology, chief among which are the writings of St Augustine, with more than twenty individual titles attributed to him. Augustine was also Anselm’s main intellectual hero. A volume dedicated to the works of Boethius, whose rationalistic method of theological inquiry was much like Anselm’s, is likewise included. Hugh also owned almost all of Anselm’s treatises, but none of his prayers.Footnote ²³⁸ In his opinion, the man was an eminent teacher. When Anselm, then archbishop of Canterbury, was in exile 1097–1100, they became great friends. In demonstration of his admiration, Hugh always insisted on calling Anselm his ‘master’.Footnote ²³⁹

The literary topos of affected modesty, absolutely universal in medieval writing, can only have been of secondary importance for Hugh to have interfered and for Anselm to have published anonymously at first. Authorial anonymity belonged to expressions of modesty; and articulations of willingness to publish and disseminate anonymously but failure to do so – that is, that the author signed his work claiming that he would prefer not to – were a variant of it.Footnote ²⁴⁰ It seems very unlikely that Hugh’s intention was simply to force Anselm to abandon any false modesty. Anonymous publication in conformity with a literary topos would hardly have been an issue for someone who was not then among the author’s associates. It is still more unlikely that compliance with convention would have prompted extraordinary legatine action, years after the first release. This is not to say that the modesty motif would not have been an incentive for Anselm to divulge the fact that he forsook anonymity because a papal legate had told him to. We know that he had more pressing concerns, however, and these must principally explain his repeated insistence that he published under an apostolic mandate. A statement from about 1140 supports this reading; Peter of Poitiers, secretary to the abbot of Cluny, proposed that some contemporary writers suppressed their names for fear of accusations of falsity and heresy.Footnote ²⁴¹

How far Hugh’s intervention silenced criticisms against the Monologion and Proslogion cannot be known, but it was certainly a powerful deterrent. His apostolic charges would have overruled the mandate of even the greatest local powers, including the authority of bishops and synods. It is of interest here that Archbishop Lanfranc, who, as noted above, had initially frowned upon the Monologion, soon afterwards came to endorse it. A dedicatory letter to him which Anselm prefixed to his work is implicit proof that he had a change of heart.Footnote ²⁴² As archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc was a major source of ecclesiastical authority in the Anglo-Norman realm. But he was not Anselm’s diocesan, and the impression is that his endorsement was considered less potent than Hugh’s, received years later. For, as far as the evidence permits us to conclude, it was only after Hugh’s legatine command that Anselm found the confidence to circulate the treatises without constraint.Footnote ²⁴³ Within a few years of the event, certainly before his translation to Canterbury in 1093, he recommended the Proslogion to a potential reader with assurance.Footnote ²⁴⁴ His reluctance to circulate the work was gone. In the early 1090s at the latest, he appended to the Proslogion a critique by Brother Gaunilo of Marmoutier of the ontological argument and his own reply to it.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Both sides of the dialogue operated from reason alone, and Anselm was unashamedly convinced of his method and conclusions.

5.2 De incarnatione Verbi and Commendatio operis: Pope Urban II

At the turn of the 1080s, Anselm, then abbot of Bec, became involved in a dispute on the nature of the Trinity.Footnote ²⁴⁶ The bone of contention was a new Trinitarian proposition by Roscelin of Compiègne, a secular teacher, which was subsequently rejected as tritheism. Having been informed of Roscelin’s proposition, Anselm sought to define his terminology in brief.Footnote ²⁴⁷ Soon afterwards he decided to compose a full-scale exposition in order to dissociate himself from the teachings of Roscelin, who had claimed that he and Anselm were essentially in agreement. On learning that a clerical assembly at Soissons had condemned Roscelin, Anselm considered the matter solved and halted his writing.Footnote ²⁴⁸ However, when visiting England in 1092–3, he was told that Roscelin was once again propagating his doctrine. He decided to resume the writing of his response.Footnote ²⁴⁹ Another delay, of an unknown length, followed after his appointment as archbishop of Canterbury on 6 March 1093. It is not clear precisely when the work met completion, but a short report by Eadmer, his assistant and biographer, implies that this was years rather than months before the Council of Bari in 1098.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Anselm titled the piece Epistola de incarnatione Verbi and dedicated it to Pope Urban II.

De incarnatione proved relevant to the said Council of Bari in southern Italy. The council was presided over by Urban II, being convened on 1 or 3 October 1098 and in session for a week. Exiled from England between 1097 and 1100, Anselm attended in person. He had met the pope on multiple occasions in the months before. Given the prominent role the pope conferred on him at the council, preparations must have been laid during their consultations. One of the chief issues to be discussed in the council was the integration of the Greek churches of southern Italy into the Roman obedience. A major obstacle was that great controversy between Latin and Greek Christianity on the filioque addition to the Nicene Creed. In Anselm, the pope had a champion who could lucidly propound the Catholic dogma of the Trinity, the doctrinal framework of the contest. Pope Urban assigned Anselm to deliver a plenary speech on the subject at Bari. It proved a great success, or at least the Latin delegates were much impressed. Underscoring Anselm’s conciliar triumph, the pope quoted the De incarnatione in his response to the Greek party.Footnote ²⁵¹ Papal citation had an impact on Anselm’s audiences, as will be demonstrated in an essay on the subject that I have forthcoming.Footnote ²⁵²

What concerns us here is that, at one of their meetings in 1098, Anselm presented a copy of his work to Urban II, to which he had prefixed a dedicatory note, titled Commendatio operis ad Vrbanum papam II in its most recent edition, henceforth Commendatio. The presentation copy does not survive, and manuscripts of Anselm’s treatises representative of primary circulation do not transmit that piece.Footnote ²⁵³ The implication from the latter is that Commendatio was intended exclusively for the volume gifted to the pope. Yet, attested by at least twenty-two manuscripts, it gained a relatively wide circulation. While Commendatio identifies its mother text only as ‘subditum opusculum’ (‘the work appended’), our manuscripts attach it either to De incarnatione or Cur Deus homo, Anselm’s largest treatise, which he finished in Italy some weeks before the Council of Bari.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Printed editions previous to the first critical edition, by F. S. Schmitt, affix Commendatio to De incarnatione. On the basis of parallels of style and subject matter, Schmitt contended that Commendatio’s authorial affiliation is to Cur Deus homo instead.Footnote ²⁵⁵ While I believe he erred, the question of which one of the two treatises Commedatio should preface does not affect the following argument.Footnote ²⁵⁶ What matters here is that Anselm gifted a copy of his work, either De incarnatione or Cur Deus homo, to Pope Urban II.

Commendatio comprises two clauses. The first is an apologia for rationalistic theology. The opening states that the Fathers explicated Christian principles from reason in order to contest unbelievers and cultivate believers. Then comes the crux: that endeavour should be resumed. The reasons are as follows. Patristic expositions did not exhaust the rational basis of faith, which is too enormous for man to chart in its entirety. God bestows his gifts on the faithful until the end of the world. The Bible encourages Christians to seek to understand what they believe. Understanding is a midway point between faith and the revelational sight of God, the latter being the ultimate goal of Christian life. Hence Anselm’s own inquiries and their publication for the benefit of others, whom he encourages to assess his work. The final clause requests that Pope Urban approve and, if need be, amend ‘the work appended’.

Anselm’s other writings, too, articulate validations of his theological method, but never in the same overtly apologetic spirit as does the Commendatio.Footnote ²⁵⁷ Considering how important justifications of free inquiry are to the history of critical thinking, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the piece.Footnote ²⁵⁸ One major aspect remains unremarked: presenting Commendatio to Urban II was an act of promoting rationalistic discussion about faith to the highest ecclesiastical authority. Such a purpose resonates with my reading of Hugh of Die’s injunction to Anselm; the legate implicitly endorsed the method of inquiry applied in the Monologion and Proslogion. On committing Commendatio to Pope Urban, Anselm’s position was, of course, very different to the late 1070s when he wrote those two treatises and when, some years later, Hugh ordered him to publish them under his own name. Preferment to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1093 had elevated Anselm to heights at which criticisms by readers could hardly impinge. Even so, Commendatio should be seen as a device to amplify the apostolic endorsement for his theological method, which was first pronounced by Hugh and was subsequently brought to perfection at the Council of Bari.

Commendatio has yet another lesson for us, deriving from its manuscripts. In fifteen of the twenty-two survivors it is prefixed to Cur Deus homo, most often as its final paratext after a prologue proper and a list of chapter headings. Significantly, while placing Commendatio that way, eight copies of the said sub-group furnish it with the heading ‘Prologus Anselmi de incarnatione uerbi’, with some textual variation.Footnote ²⁵⁹ It is a striking disagreement that Commendatio is affiliated to De incarnatione by heading and to Cur Deus homo by placing. Given that these eight manuscripts position Commendatio after the prologue to Cur Deus homo, and in most cases also its list of contents, only a most inattentive copyist would not have noticed an incongruence so apparent. We may assume that at least some of them, if not all, were alive to the problem. Some copyists harmonised the discrepancy by omitting or modifying the heading: variants such as ‘Prologus’,Footnote ²⁶⁰ ‘Prefatio libri’,Footnote ²⁶¹ ‘Excusatio et commendatio operis ad Vrbanum papam’,Footnote ²⁶² and ‘Epistola ad Vrbanum papam’Footnote ²⁶³ emerged in the process.Footnote ²⁶⁴ These approaches to the heading – deliberate negligence, omission and modification – embody reflexion at various stages of transmission as to how to serve Commendatio to readers in the face of a perceived misidentification of its mother text. Even if associated also with another treatise in their exemplars, copyists considered the address to Pope Urban an adornment to Cur Deus homo. The new headings ‘Excusatio et commendatio operis ad Vrbanum papam’ and ‘Epistola ad Vrbanum papam’ demonstrate that the papal aspect carried prestige.