US i. THE BENEVENTAN SCRIPT A HISTORY OF THE SOUTH ITALIAN MINUSCULE BY E. A. LOEW, Ph.D. RESEARCH ASSOCIATE OF THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1914 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY TO JAMES LOEB PATRON OF LIBERAL LEARNING AT HOME AND ABROAD THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED IN GRATITUDE AND DEVOTION Absit tamen ut hac in re magisterii partes mihi arro- gem. Quippe in republica litteraria omnes liberi sumus. Leges ac regulas proponere omnibus licet, imponere non licet. Praevalent istae, si veritate ac recto judicio ful- ciantur: sin minus, ab eruditis et recte sentientibus merito reprobantur. J. Mabillon. PREFACE The present work is an essay in regional palaeography. Its inception goes back to my student days at the University of Munich. My master, Ludwig Traube, had proposed to me the thesis ' Monte Cassino as a centre for the transmission of Latin classics \ After spending some time on this subject it became clear that adequate treatment of it would be possible only after acquiring such a knowledge of the peculiar script used at Monte Cassino as would enable me to make sound and independent judgements with regard to the dates of Monte Cassino MSS., that is, MSS. written in the Beneventan or South Italian minuscule. Thus I conceived the idea of making a careful study of the script employed throughout the lower half of the Italian peninsula. Traube made no objection to my working on a subject of my own choice ; but with characteristic generosity put at my disposal his entire library, his very large collection of facsimiles, and even some of his own notes. Owing to my ill health I had not the fortune to put into Traubes hands the completed study. But I had at least the satisfaction of knowing that he approved of the results reached before his death. All who knew Traube know that he was like a father to his pupils. No one can feel more keenly than I the loss my work has suffered by want of his guidance and criticism ; and the best verdict I could hope for upon this book would be that it was at least conceived in Traubes spirit. The claim the present work may make upon the attention of scholars is that the results embodied in it are drawn almost vi PREFACE entirely from the original sources, the MSS. themselves. It is not the merit but the good fortune of the author that he has been able to investigate nearly all the extant material in his field ; for through the support both of individuals and of institutions, he has been privileged in quite extraordinary measure, in being given the opportunity to visit all the libraries containing MSS. that concerned him, and to devote unhindered ample time upon them. But it is none the less true that this book stands upon the shoulders of its pre- decessors ; and it is thanks to the pioneer labours of those who preceded me that I could take full advantage of the opportunity I had. The works of the illustrious Monte Cassino scholars Caravita, Tosti, Amelli, and Piscicelli Taeggi have made my own possible. Caravita wrote before the new era in palaeography ushered in by Delisle and Traube, and his work is weak on the palaeographical side. He is at sea when confronted by MSS. not written in the South Italian hand. And even in the case of South Italian MSS. his dates are not always reliable. His classification of the MSS. into strict groups is often arbitrary and sometimes clearly mistaken. There is also some confusion in the press-marks. But these defects may be passed over in view of the great services he rendered in making such rich stores of material accessible to scholars. What has been said of Caravita may fairly be said of the great catalogue of Monte Cassino manuscripts, the Bibliotheca Casinensis, which we owe to the untiring diligence of Tosti, Amelli, and their coad- jutors. In giving a facsimile of each MS. described in the first four volumes of the catalogue its editors put palaeo- graphers under great obligation. Yet the student who depends solely upon this catalogue for his knowledge of Beneventan writing cannot avoid wrong impressions, since the reproductions, being in lithograph, want that accuracy PREFACE vii which can only be achieved by a mechanical process. But neither Caravita nor the editors of the Bibliotheca Casinensis aimed at making contributions to palaeography. The publi- cation which, on the palaeographical side, is our chief, indeed our only, source of information regarding the South Italian script came from the pen of Dom Odorisio Pisci- celli Taeggi, formerly of Monte Cassino, now of Bari. His Paleografia artistica di Montecassino is, as the title suggests, primarily interested in the artistic aspect of the Monte Cassino MSS. Yet the short and well-written pre- face to the section entitled Longobardo-Cassinese is the most important palaeographical contribution we have on the subject, and all our text-books base on it. But the work is expensive and not easily accessible; and the chromo-lithograph facsimiles, although executed with admirable care, and most valuable for giving an idea of the colours used by the miniaturists, are open to the same objection as those in the Bibliotheca Casinensis. They can lay no claim to absolute accuracy. Another study deserving of mention is Professor Rodolico's ' Genesi e svolgimento della scrittura Longobardo-Cassinese \ It marks in several respects an advance upon Plscicelli Taeggi. It too is limited in its scope to the study of the MSS. preserved at Monte Cassino ; but it furnishes some new observations and rectifies some old errors. It contains, to be sure, some faulty and premature conclusions, but these would undoubtedly have been revised had the author extended his researches over a larger field. The short paper entitled Della scrittura Longobarda nelle sue diverse fasi (Rome, 1906), by A. Morinello, would not have been mentioned here but for the fact that it appears as an authority in one of the best text-books on palaeography. It is only fair to the author to state that the pamphlet, which is simply an account of six MSS. preserved at Naples, was meant for private circu- Vlll PREFACE lation, and makes no pretension to being a contribution to the science. The aim of the present work has been to give a history of the South Italian minuscule, and to deal with the various problems it presents. In treating some questions briefly and others at great length, I have been guided by the palaeo- graphical importance of each question discussed. In the his- torical introduction, Monte Cassino may perhaps appear to occupy too much space, but this was inevitable in view of the importance of Monte Cassino both as a seat of learning and as a scriptorium. It seemed important to treat fully the subject of the name, to point out the hopeless confusion which arises from the ambiguous term Lombardic, and to justify the claims of the name Beneventan. Another question of im- portance was the demarcation of the Beneventan zone. I have given a list of all the centres whence Beneventan MSS. are known to have come, and also a list of the MSS. which are to be connected with each centre. The use of Beneventan writing in Dalmatia is of interest both to the palaeographer and to the student of western culture. The Italian origin of our script needed no elaborate demonstration, as it is admitted now on all sides, yet it seemed necessary to discuss in detail the theory that the Visigothic script influenced the development of the Beneventan and to show that this view is unsupported by facts. In the chapter on abbreviations I consciously trans- gressed the limits of my subject proper and gave a short sketch of the development of abbreviations in Latin MSS. I did this partly to render more intelligible the discussion of the Beneventan abbreviations, and partly to make Traube's results accessible in English. This chapter may be found to be the most useful in the book. In dealing with such a mass of details as that presented by the abbreviations found in hundreds of MSS., it was necessary to suppress everything PREFACE ix which tended to blur the clear outline of the development. It will be seen that a careful study of the development of several abbreviations has furnished trustworthy, objective dating criteria. In the discussion of the Beneventan sign of inter- rogation an attempt has been made, I believe for the first time, to touch upon a subject which will in the future receive more careful attention from palaeographers. The Beneventan method of punctuating interrogative sentences throws con- siderable light on the manner in which such sentences were read. It also provides the palaeographer with a most interest- ing touchstone for detecting Beneventan influence. In formu- lating the rules and traditions of the script I have tried to show what is essentially Beneventan. Given the Beneventan alphabet and a knowledge of the rules, any one could write correct Beneventan—a fact which I have tested by applying the rules myself in connexion with a fragment which was mistaken for Beneventan. The Appendix demands a few words of explanation. It contains a list of over 600 Beneventan MSS., if fragments are included. Its value lies in the fact that it includes only genuine South Italian products. Nearly all the MSS. mentioned have been examined by me either in the origi- nal or in facsimile. In the case of the few MSS.