Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch

L’acrostiche, arme politique?

Jean-Yves Tilliette — 2025-07-16

Jean-Yves Tilliette: The acrostic, a political weapon? Literary technique and moral denunciation in the poetry of Walahfrid Strabo

The courtly poetry of the Carolingian period, following a practice that had begun in Constantine’s Roman Empire, liked to use acrostics to emphasise the names of the great ﬁgures it wished to celebrate. How-ever, Walahfrid Strabo’s use of this device in his Visio Wettini seems to be different: unlike usual, the reader has to pay close attention to decipher the names written vertically, including those of Abbot Waldo of Reichenau and Charlemagne, which the layout tends to hide. The hypothesis is that this unusual graphic layout reﬂects the severe judge-ment passed on these ﬁgures at a time when Louis the Pious and Bene-dict of Aniane were advocates of moral reform: from an eschatological point of view, between the erasure of their names, to which the damned are condemned, and the explicit proclamation of the names of the elect, an intermediate treatment is reserved for individuals whose shortcom-ings have earned them purgatorial punishments in the hereafter.

L’inno Iuste iudex Iesu Christe: tradizione, anonimato e problemi di attribuzione

Pierluigi Licciardello — 2025-07-16

Pierluigi Licciardello: The hymn Iuste iudex Iesu Christe: tradition, anonymity, and problems of attribution

The hymn Iuste iudex Iesu Christe is a composition in 36 Trochaic ac-centuative tetrameters, written in the area of Angers around the middle of the 11th century. It has been attributed by scholars to Berengar of Tours; however, this attribution does not appear until the 12th century.
It could be attributed instead to his friend Bruno-Eusebius, Bishop of Angers, who was the author of a small corpus of similar composi-tions in accentuative verse. Alternatively, it might have originated as an anonymous text, attributed to Berengar because of the existential situation it expresses. Indeed, the hymn is a supplication for help from a man who, surrounded by enemies, invokes God’s justice. The violent tone recalls the model of the ›imprecatory Psalms‹. The anonymity, in this case, makes the text objective and adapts it to any man living in the same condition. The hymn was transmitted in 85 manuscripts dat-ing from the 11th to the 16th century and was translated into several languages in modern times. This paper provides a new edition of this hymn from the 39 oldest manuscripts (11th – 14th centuries), with a list of the variants and an apparatus of the sources. A great diversity can be seen in the structure, since some manuscripts reverse, omit, or add some stanzas.

The Textual Transmission of Aldhelm’s Carmen de virginitate, with a Revised Handlist

Colleen M. Curran — 2025-07-16

Rudolf Ehwald published the last scholarly edition of Aldhelm’s col-lected works in 1919. However, in the passing century, little atten-tion has been given to the manuscripts that contain Aldhelm’s poetry or how they relate to one another. Even more strikingly, little to no work has been done on the transmission of these manuscripts and or how Aldh elm’s works were read and copied. Instead, Ehwald’s lists of manu scripts containing Aldhelm’s works are still widely considered the established corpus. This article will introduce eight previously unat-tested manuscripts and fragments containing Aldhelm’s Carmen de vir-ginitate and will further address manuscript variants between the now twenty-nine manuscripts of the Carmen. Most importantly, the anal-ysis of these previously unattested manuscripts will be a springboard for reassessing the transmission and reception of Aldhelm’s Carmen. A Revised Handlist of manuscripts containing Aldhelm’s Carmen de virginitate follows the article as Appendix A.

Quae si non erant, qua consequentia dicitur quia erant?

Luce Carteron — 2025-07-16

Luce Carteron: Quae si non erant, qua consequentia dicitur quia erant? Insular Grammatical Tradition in Fridugisus’ of Tours De substantia nihili et tenebrarum

The well-known De substantia nihili et tenebrarum sent by Fridugisus of Tours to Charlemagne in 800 has been analysed many times, but these works are generally not based on grammar. Yet in proving that the words nihil and tenebrae have an extra-mental referent, Fridugi-sus seems to draw on the insular tradition, which deﬁned nouns as a corpus or a res, without necessarily distinguishing them from their referent. This article aims to shed new light on the reading of this text.
By developing the intuition formulated by S. Haverkamp in 2006, we could also add to the sources of Fridugisus’ demonstration a deﬁnition from the Liber Glossarum, which evokes the idea of nomen insub-stantiale. A study of the lexical networks innervating the deﬁnitions of nothingness and darkness conﬁrms as well the importance of grammat-ical analysis to deepen our understanding of this text.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

2025-07-16