Le Légendier de Turin: MS. D.V.3 de la Bibliothèque Nationale Universitaire by Monique Goullet (review)

The Légendier de Turin is a manuscript collection of saints’ lives compiled at the end of the eighth century in Northern France, probably at Soissons. It is known as the Turin Legendary because that is where it had come to rest by the mid-eleventh century. It has 265 folios, containing 40 texts in fifteen hands, recounting the lives and deaths of 38 saints (or occasionally more than one saint). These are copies of earlier texts. Goullet is the overall coordinator, but in all there are 27 editors, mostly writing in French or Italian.

The Monumenta versions over-corrected the texts. They were not, however, the first to do so. Medieval scholars made many textual corrections in Caroline script, usually of a minor linguistic nature, probably in Italy. The edition presents the pre-Carolingian text, with these post-Carolingian corrections detailed in the apparatus.

Our late eighth-century compiler seems to have been collecting all the stories he could find, having them copied in the order he found them. Most of the texts were first composed in or before the fifth century, so Goullet sensibly asks if the language is the “langue des textes ou langue des copistes,” thinking here mainly of the spelling, to which lengthy detailed analyses are devoted. There are some non-standard details consistent over the whole corpus, which implies that they belong to the copyists rather than to the forty different composers.

The script used is the rare type now known as ab, which was not used much beyond the end of the eighth century; the manuscript is thus likely to be coetaneous with the reforming De Litteris Colendis and Admonitio Generalis, but was prepared in the preceding intellectual context. The later corrections follow the Carolingian reforms, and in that Italian context the manuscript may well have had a liturgical use, since some musical notations were added.

The texts are printed in textual order. Each line of the manuscript is given its own line on the page, even when it ends mid-word. The texts are presented without explanatory notes. They concentrate on the saints’ deaths (passiones), usually involving horrific tortures. It is unclear how likely the details are to be literally true, and the editors spend little time considering such questions, either from a historical or a theological perspective; insofar as these are historical documents, they show us what some people believed to be true rather than what actually happened to the unfortunate obstinate Christians, although most of the saints are likely to have existed. Absurdities which lose plausibility for a modern reader seem to have been taken in the general stride at the time as being straightforwardly miraculous, for example, the dove which emerged from St Quentin’s severed neck (6r18, p. 224), or the fact that several of the martyrs manage to speak coherently after their tongues have been cut out, including Longinus (20r1, p. 254). The word legendary in English now implies “untrue,” but the word from which it derives merely meant a tale that was to be read (leg-enda).

Not all the saints date from the martyrs’ period before Constantine. Remigius, said here to have been bishop of Rheims at the age of 22 (though the text says 21: adoliscens uicissimi secundi anni, 50r12, p. 330), died in old age in 533–535. Gregory of Tours gave him a chapter (in about 590), though this Life is not Gregory’s source; the details of his real life were probably well known generally at the time the account in the Legendary was written, so the atmosphere there is less miraculous.

Overall, these are powerful stories designed to achieve an immediate emotional impact among the listeners. This immediacy of impact implies that the language when read aloud was not hard...