Abstract At the end of antiquity and the onset of the Middle Ages the genre of chronicles flourished as a lively and non-central practice of continuing, compiling and combining chronographic material. Any given manuscript could thus become its own “work” containing a singular combination of different texts, often reworked, or linked in some manner to form a unified whole. One of those “chains of chronicles” (Ian Wood) is preserved in two different forms by Paris BN Lat. 4860 and Augsburg, SuStb 2° 223, both of which Theodor Mommsen assumed to be copies of a lost Reichenau codex (“Reichenauiensis”) described in the catalogue of Reginbert of Reichenau between 835 and 842 AD. More recent research has instead tried to interpret the later Augsburg copy as a descriptus of the Paris manuscript, which would have (and in some cases has already had) some consequences for the textual criticism of many works also, only, or primarily attested by this chronographic compilation. By analyzing and comparing the individual ways in which each manuscript reflects the same common tradition (or diverts from it), this paper demonstrates that, indeed, Mommsen’s analysis is correct: Both manuscripts attest to a single lost archetype, Mommsen’s “Reichenauiensis”. The reaffirmation of this position along with a more profound understanding of the ways the texts were obviously reworked especially by the Carolingian compiler(s) of the Paris manuscript sheds new light on some discussions of the chronicle of Prosper and especially its so-called “Reichenau continuation”, the chronicle of Cassiodorus, the Laterculus Vandalorum, and the often misunderstood so-called “Fasti Augustani”, the first complete edition of which is presented as an appendix. The paper also serves as a case study of the many ways late antique chronographic texts were used, continued, (re‐)combined and appropriated in late antiquity by medieval or early modern scholars and, finally, modern critical editors.
Read full abstract