The Necrology of San Nicola della Cicogna (Montecassino, Archivio della Badia 179, pp. 1-64) (review)

The Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana (MLB) is monumental in its objectives and its potential long-term benefits for medieval studies as evidenced in this, only its second of three present volumes. The purpose of the MLB is the "discovery, study, and editing, of medieval liturgical texts" in the Beneventan script. Beneventan was employed in a zone that extended from southern Italy to Dalmatia from the eighth until the sixteenth century and the manuscripts are overwhelmingly liturgical in nature.

The other two volumes published thus far in the MLB are Roger Reynolds, The Collectio canonum Casinensis duodecimi seculi, an implicit edition with introduction (Toronto, 2001); and Richard F. Gyug, Missale Ragusinum, the Missal of Dubrovnik (Toronto, 1990). The titles reveal the range of materials within the category of Beneventan liturgy. It is this breadth that makes the series especially worthwhile. Beneventan is a shared information technology passed down through the training of clerics. Within the Beneventan community there existed numerous others: monastic, regular, Byzantine, Norman, Angevin, urban, and rural are the most obvious. Further communities within these were formed by a shared ritual life that extended across political and economic boundaries. As the MLB expands, it should provide opportunities to test our current models of medieval community and ecclesiology.

Hilken's edition of the necrology of San Nicola della Cicogna is a wonderful research tool that should provide a basis for many other projects. San Nicola, founded in the late tenth or early eleventh century, persisted as a community into the early fourteenth century. We have a twelfth-century inventory of some twenty-four books and three extant codices. One of these is the chapter book (containing texts used for the daily liturgy and business of the chapter room). This includes the martyrology/necrology, various ordines, capitular homilies, the Rule of Saint Benedict, the Collectio capitularis, a letter of Abbot Theodomar to Charlemagne, and the Memoriale qualiter (a commentary on the Rule). Hilken provides the reader with such a complete description of these (that of the homiliary is essentially an implicit edition and could be a study in its own right) that the book is really a guide to Monte Cassino 179.

As Hilken observes, a necrology is a book of life. Not only in the religious sense of a memory of the holy dead but of a record of a living community and its extended bonds of affection, relation, and economy (as attested by the supporting documents of the appendix ranging from oblation to tenancy). The edition successfully provides us with the "medieval intention preserved in an intelligible modern typography." It presents all of the layers of the manuscript—additions, emendations, punctuation, and various spelling. The range of texts and the transparent nature of the edition offer us an opportunity for closer studies of Cassinese and Beneventan culture and society. One could use this in a graduate seminar on either monasticism or medieval Italy.

My complaints are few. A map would have been helpful in situating San Nicola and its remembered dead of known origin. Some of Hilken's analytical lists are apparently exemplary rather than complete. His analysis of the necrology precedes the edition of the necrology and his explanation of the relevant notation, leaving the reader searching to explain the notation. In the end these flaws are easily overcome, and I look forward to using this edition for many years.