Pembroke College : Quaestiones in Vetus et Novum Testamentum

Pseudo-Augustine

Pembroke College

These two strips of parchment preserve part of a theological text that purports to be the work of St Augustine but is in fact by a later, anonymous author. It contains a series of 'quaestiones', or discussion points, relating to the Old and New Testament: the end of the section on the former, and the beginning of the section on the latter, are found here. 'Quaestiones' were a common genre of academic text, and their conventions could be applied to any number of scholarly subjects, including philosophy and law.The particular interest of these fragments is their apparent similarity to a manuscript containing commentaries by Ambrose of Milan and Bede on the Gospel of Luke, now preserved as Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS C. 127 inf. This manuscript, and six others, were identified by Mirella Ferrari as being among the twenty-five volumes that were bequeathed by the Irish monk Dungal to the monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy. Palaeographers have since identified codicological and palaeographical similarities between some of these volumes, in particular their small and portable format, and their production in France within the first quarter of the 9th century, in a style of handwriting typical of the monastery of Saint-Denis, near Paris. It is at Saint-Denis that the monk Dungal is first recorded, around this same period, and the implication is that he may have carried this collection of manuscripts with him when he directed the school at Pavia some years later. The fragments shown here may be from a manuscript not owned by Dungal but produced by one of the scribes responsible for making one of the books known to have been in his possession, presumably in France and perhaps at Saint-Denis. Dr James Freeman Medieval Manuscripts Specialist Cambridge University Library Bibliography: Mirella Ferrari, 'In Papia conveniant ad Dungalum', Italia medioevale e umanistica, 15 (1972) Bernhard Bischoff, 'Eine Beschreibung der Basilika von Saint-Denis aus dem Jahre 799', Kunstchronik 34 (1981) Jean Vezin, 'Observations sur l'origine des manuscrits légués par Dungal à Bobbio', in Paläographie 1981: Colloquium des Comité International de Paléographie. München, 15.-18. September 1981, ed. by Gabriel Silagi (1982)