The Prague Sacramentary: Culture, Religion, and Politics in Late Eighth-Century Bavaria, ed. Maximilian Diesenberger, Rob Meens and Els Rose

Abstract

Prague, Archiv Pražského hradu, MS. O. 83, more commonly known as the Prague Sacramentary, forms the subject of this tightly focused volume, edited by Maximilian Diesenberger, Rob Meens and Els Rose. This manuscript has long been of interest to historians, palaeographers, liturgical scholars and linguists alike; this volume collects together such interdisciplinary perspectives to form a rounded view of this remarkable historical artefact. This microhistorical focus pays clear dividends, evoking not only the context in which the Prague Sacramentary was produced in late eighth-century Bavaria, but also wider trends, for example in the liturgy, early Caroline minuscule and the written forms of Old High German. The Prague Sacramentary is a composite work. The first part of the manuscript consists of a sacramentary and Mass lectionary; the second part, which was produced in the same scriptorium and bound to the first part soon after its composition, includes Theodore of Canterbury’s penitential and Gregory the Great’s Libellus responsionum. Subsequent additions include a list of names (notable for its unique inclusion of Pippin the Hunchback as ‘Pippinus rex’), a sermon (the so-called De creatione mundi) and a number of Old High German glosses. The potential identification of the scribal hand of the sermon with ‘scribe a’ of the sacramentary suggests a tight frame of composition for the different constituent parts in the late eighth century, and at least one portion of the text, the list of names, may be securely dated to the period between September 791 and July 792. Such circumstances of composition, placed alongside various correspondences in form and content, suggest that, while the manuscript is a composite work, it is not, as Rosamond McKitterick notes (p. 16), a miscellany, but rather forms a coherent whole.