The Glossa Ordinaria Manuscripts of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Monza

ABSTRACT

The Glossa ordinaria is a set of standardized glosses to the Vulgate Bible text. It was developed in the early twelfth century and remained a standard feature of the Latin Bible through the early age of printing. Important scholarly studies of the past few decades have clarified much about the origin and use of the Glossa ordinaria, but there has been less attention given to the way in which Glossed Bibles were collected in medieval libraries. Before the advent of printing, manuscripts of the Glossa ordinaria always circulated in the format of part-Bibles, copies of specific biblical books or collections of similar books; as a result, collections were often spotty and are thought to have been somewhat randomly assembled. This study examines the remarkable set of Glossa ordinaria manuscripts in the Biblioteca Capitolare of Monza, Italy, where an almost complete Glossed Bible (missing only the books of Maccabees and Ruth) were collected in the late twelfth century. Special attention is given to several canons of the Monza Cathedral who donated these books to the library, especially one Guidotto, who left a number of manuscripts signed with his name, some of which say they were copied especially for the cathedral library. This suggests a deliberate medieval attempt to collect a Glossed Bible, and invites further exploration of other canonical libraries to more closely determine the relationship between the Glossa ordinaria and the biblical scholarship and book collecting habits of medieval Augustinian Canons.

The Glossa ordinaria, the standardized glossed Bible that circulated in the later Middle Ages, has been widely studied in recent years. Thus, for the first time since Beryl Smalley called attention to it half a century ago,¹ scholars have a clear idea of what it is and where it came from. In particular, Christopher de Hamel has shown how, starting about 1140, glossed part-Bibles were significant in the Paris book trade, to the point where one could have gone to a copyist and asked for a particular pecia of “the Gloss,” by then a standard and recognizable text, to any part of the Bible.² A number of scholars, including Margaret Gibson, Karlfried Froehlich, Theresa Gross-Diaz, and Lesley Smith,³ have clarified the origins of the standardized gloss in the early twelfth-century school of Laon. Their studies have shown that the Glossa ordinaria is a twelfth-century adaptation of Carolingian adaptations of patristic biblical commentary, that is, a selection and compression of the exegesis of Hrabanus Maurus, Haimo of Auxerre, Walafrid Strabo, and other Carolingians, which in turn consists of selections and compressions of the commentaries of patristic and early medieval authors such as Origen, Augustine, Gregory, Isidore, and Bede.

What clearly distinguishes the Glossa ordinaria from all earlier commentaries, despite being composed almost entirely of portions of these older texts, is the fact that the Glossa ordinaria arranges these existing interpretations on the manuscript page between the lines, or in the margins of a full text of the relevant portion of the Bible.⁴

Scholars have long proposed theories about the authorship of the Glossa ordinaria. In the late fifteenth century, Johannes Trithemius suggested that the text was written by Walafrid Strabo, a pupil of Hrabanus Maurus.⁵ Trithemius may have attributed the Glossa ordinaria to Walafrid Strabo because the first gloss in the manuscript he published in his 1449 Basil edition came from Walafrid’s commentary on Genesis, and was marked as such; he may also have had a nationalistic interest in naming a German author for this influential text.⁶ In any case, this suggestion led J. P. Migne, the nineteenth-century editor and publisher of several collections of Christian theological works, to put the Glossa ordinaria under the name of Walafrid Strabo in his influential Patrologia Latina.⁷ Migne, like Trithemius, thought that the “original” Glossa ordinaria was only the marginal

Figure 1.

Glossa Ordinaria to the Epistle of Paul to the Romans (fragment, ca. 1135). Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ms. Coll. 591, fol. 4v.

gloss, and that the interlinear gloss was a later accretion of the twelfth-century schoolman Anselm of Laon, so he published the text of the marginal gloss only in J. P. Migne’s Patrologia Latina, among Carolingian authors. However, scholars today think that the “marginal” and “interlinear” glosses developed together, since they seem to be rather fluid in the manuscripts.⁸ Nevertheless, Migne’s claim of a role for Anselm of Laon in the formation of the Glossa ordinaria was prescient, since twentieth-century scholars have traced the beginnings of the gloss to many books of the Bible to the early twelfth-century school of Laon, especially to Anselm of Laon and his brother Ralph, and see the culmination of the process later in that century in Paris, especially around the figure of Peter Lombard.⁹ In short, there is fair scholarly consensus about the development of the Glossa ordinaria, although some aspects of the Parisian stage of this development are still under discussion.¹⁰ What still needs clarification is how the Glossa ordinaria was collected and read in the Middle Ages.

All of these questions are part of a general interdisciplinary trend toward the study of the reception, as well as the development and context, of medieval texts. I hope this article will contribute to that blossoming field of study.

Since the Glossa ordinaria was a school text, part of the encyclopedic movement of learning in the twelfth century, one might expect it to be well represented in medieval cathedral libraries, the seedbed of the universities. However, Lesley Smith’s study of the ownership of glossed Bible codices in medieval libraries, especially in England, suggests that, although some Benedictine monasteries had copies of most or all books of the Bible in a glossed form, and often in multiple copies, houses of Augustinian canons regular (that is, cathedral libraries) seldom did. As Smith writes:

In Paris, as we know, the Augustinian house of canons at St Victor was at the cutting edge of theological learning and teaching, and yet it seems to have had relatively few Glossed books. In England, as far as the number of books in Augustinian houses is concerned, the situation does not seem to be very different. The Bridlington catalogue of c. 1200 lists 118 volumes [but] there are only twelve Glossed volumes, including Gilbert de la Porrée on the Psalter, and the spread of books is conservative: Genesis, the Prophets, Job and the Gospels, together with the Psalms and the Epistles.¹¹

Smith also notes that the 1355–1360 catalogue of the Augustinian community of Lanthony, in Wales, included about five hundred items, but only thirty-three or thirty-four glossed books, of which just twenty-five or twenty-six “form a group … covering the greater part of the Bible.” But, the spread of books suggests that they were donated rather than commissioned, since there are multiple copies of Job and Luke, but no Song of Songs.¹²

The library collection I wish to analyze in this essay, that of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Monza, provides an interesting contrast to what Lesley Smith found to be the case in English Augustinian houses. In Monza, as well as evidence of significant donations, there seems to have been a concerted medieval effort to commission and collect the glossed Bible. This case study allows us a glimpse into medieval practices of reading and collecting manuscripts, practices that were undoubtedly widespread. It can help us understand, for example, which books of the Bible were considered most important, how medieval scholars thought about their collections, and how the Glossa ordinaria was received and understood in the Middle Ages. I also hope this essay will add to our understanding of the role of cathedral libraries in the Middle Ages.

Although now just a provincial capital about a half hour north of Milan, Monza was a major center of Italian culture during the Middle Ages. Queen Theodelinda, wife of King Agiluf of the Lombards, chose Monza as her summer residence, and in 595 endowed a church there, dedicating it to John the Baptist.¹³ This oratory grew into the present Duomo di Monza (where Theodelinda’s treasures are housed today, and where she and other Lombard royalty are buried) and into the site of the adjacent Biblioteca Capitolare di San Giovanni Battista. Several centuries later, Berengar I, king from 850 to 924, made Monza his capital. In the Middle Ages, this rich royal city had a major community of Augustinian canons in the cathedral; by the year 1000, this community boasted a notable library, for which we are fortunate to have an excellent modern catalogue edited by Annalisa Belloni and Mirella Ferrari.¹⁴ The collection increased dramatically in the twelfth century, when over sixty volumes were added.¹⁵ Many of these books are glossed part-Bibles, giving the Monza cathedral library copies of the Glossa ordinaria to almost the entire Vulgate Bible. This collection of glossed Bibles, as it exists today, includes forty-two manuscripts, including all books of the Bible except Ruth and Maccabees, with some interesting multiple copies. At Monza, one can find four copies of the Glossa ordinaria to the Pauline Epistles;¹⁶ three copies each of Peter Lombard on the Psalms and the Glossa ordinaria to Job (one a fragment);¹⁷ two copies each of the gloss to Genesis, Numbers, Kings, Daniel (one with Esdras), the Psalms with the Old Testament Canticles, and the Gospels of Mark and John;¹⁸ and a single copy each of the glossed Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Chronicles, Esdras, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah, Jeremiah with Lamentations, the minor prophets, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Matthew, Luke, John, the Acts, and the Apocalypse.¹⁹ To the modern scholar, these volumes certainly appear to be a set, since they are of uniform quarto size, and uniformly bound in red calf. The bindings, though, are specified in the Monza catalogue as “legatura napoleonica,” suggesting that they also appeared to be a set to the librarians and bookbinders of early nineteenth-century Paris, where these books were taken in the Napoleonic period, and from whence they were returned in 1851.²⁰ But how were they understood by medieval readers?

Fortunately, numerous medieval attribution notes in the manuscripts tell us that several canons of Monza were recognized as owners and/or donors of manuscripts to the cathedral library. First of all, Monza a-3, a late twelfth-century codex containing the glossed Psalms and the Old Testament Canticles (i.e., the Canticles of Hezekiah, Hannah, Moses, and Habakkuk) carries an inscription in a thirteenth-century hand that reads: “This was once a book of Michael of Besuzio, who gave it to the Church of Saint John for the salvation of his soul.”²¹ Michael Besuzio (probably from Besozzo, a town near Varese) is listed as a canon of the cathedral in documents of 1194 and 1200.²² It seems that Besuzio actually owned a total of seven books in the collection, since the Obituario Monzese notes: “In 1216, Dominus Michele of Besuzio died; he gave to this church four Gospels, and the Canonical Epistles, and a Glossed Psalter [Psalterium intercisum], and a Song of Songs, for the salvation of his soul.”²³ Besides Monza a-3, the glossed psalter, codices of the four Gospels, and the canonical epistles that belonged to Besuzio have been identified,²⁴ but the Song of Songs manuscript may be one listed in the library catalogue of 1275 that is now lost, since the only Song of Songs manuscript now in the collection, Monza b-3, is in a different hand than the other six, and bears a notation, “This is a book of dominus Guillelmus of Malzate.”²⁵ That attribution in itself does not disprove Besuzio’s original ownership, since Guillelmus of Malzate is listed as one of the canons who served as witnesses for the list of the treasures of the cathedral on 1 July 1275,²⁶ and so may have inherited that book after Besuzio’s death in 1216 However, the fact that this manuscript is so different from the other six suggests that it is not the one Besuzio was said to have donated. It is also worth noting that all six of the surviving manuscripts donated by Besuzio are of Italian origin,²⁷ one is characterized as Lombard, and one was probably copied in the scriptorium at Monza.

Another canon who is listed as a witness to the cathedral treasures in 1275, Bosco of Terzago, is associated with a thirteenth-century copy of a glossed codex of the minor prophets, Monza b-4, by the inscription on the first folio: “1279, the last day of the month of September, the priest Bosco of Terzago, for 30 solidi, six pennies a month, which money was for.”²⁸ The eighteenth-century historian of Monza A. J. Frisi also noted an inscription of Bosco of Terzago on the first folio of a glossed Gospel of Matthew at Monza; this may have been one of the manuscripts donated by Michele of Besozzo, but if so, the inscription was lost when the manuscript was rebound.²⁹

Even more interesting testimony to the ownership of these manuscripts are the internal attributions to a certain canon Guidottus (or Guidotto), who is linked in this way to at least ten, perhaps a dozen, of the Glossa ordinaria manuscripts of Monza. Two glossed books, copies of Exodus and the Gospel of Mark, bear the inscription: “This book was left to the church of Saint John of Monza by the Archpriest Guidotto for the cure of his soul.”³⁰ Eight other codices, glossed books of Joshua, Judges, Chronicles, Daniel with Esdras, Ecclesiastes, Apocalypse, Numbers, and Jeremiah with Lamentations, say they were actually commissioned by Guidotto, as they bear the inscription: “The Archpriest Guidotto had this book made to the honor of God and the church of Saint John of Monza, for the salvation of his soul.”³¹ Two other codices, glossed Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira), have traces of this inscription on cropped pages, and are so similar to the other manuscripts in this category that Belloni and Ferrari also place them among the books Guidotto ordered copied for his library.³²

The Obituario Monzese says about Guidotto: “In the year of the Incarnation 1182 Guidotto the Archpriest died; he gave many good things, books and possessions, to this church for Masses of remembrance.”³³ In spite of

Figure 2.

Glossa ordinaria to Joshua (late twelfth century) with a thirteenth-century note of commission and ownership by the canon Guidotto and a nineteenth-century stamp of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Monza, Biblioteca Capitolare a-10, fol. 70r. © Biblioteca Capitolare del Duomo di Monza. Reproduced by kind permission of the Biblioteca Capitolare del Duomo di Monza.

the fact that all of these manuscript notes and the Obituario refer to Guidotto as archipresbiter, Belloni and Ferrari state categorically that Guidotto could never have been archpriest, since this title passed from Liprando III to Oberto da Terzago in 1168, and Oberto held that position until he became archbishop of Milan in 1194, when Guidotto had been dead for over a decade.³⁴ In notary documents from his lifetime, Guidotto is called, or calls himself, “magister” and “presbiter,” but never “archipresbiter.”³⁵ Belloni and Ferrari note that the inscriptions that give Guidotto this title are all from a later period, as is evident from their high Gothic script. The editors suggest that the title may have been assigned to Guidotto because Oberto was called archpriest for political reasons, specifically because, during the struggle between the papacy and the empire, the clergy of Monza took the side of Barbarossa, and therefore sided with the antipopes Victor IV (1159–64) and Pascal III (1164–68). Oberto was, therefore, caught in a difficult situation, and may have relied on the collaboration of Guidotto to the extent that Guidotto was considered “archipresbiter.”³⁶ Along these lines, they suggest that Guidotto may have been one of the clergymen who accompanied Pope Alexander III into exile in France from 1161 to 1165, thus strengthening his credentials as a defender of orthodoxy.³⁷

Although this is only a working hypothesis, it may explain the presence of eight twelfth-century Glossa ordinaria codices in Monza that are of French origin; one of these is Monza a-6, the Exodus codex that bears the inscription that it was left (dimisit) by Guidotto for the sake of his soul.³⁸ Is it perhaps possible that Guidotto brought the first copies of glossed Bible books to Monza after spending time in exile in France? This remains a hypothesis, albeit an attractive one that can be supported by several ancillary pieces of evidence.

First, regarding the library at Durham Cathedral, Lesley Smith has shown that eleven of the glossed Bible books surviving there were given as bequests: eight by Master Robert of Edington (or Adington), and three by John de Rana. Master Robert had studied theology in Paris in the 1180s, and John de Rana probably studied in Paris in the 1150s.³⁹ If bright young men who were exposed to the early Glossa ordinaria in Paris could bring codices of the text back to England, and subsequently bequeath these books to their communities, the same could have happened with Italian canons, such as Guidotto of Monza. If so, we can imagine that Guidotto came back to Monza with glossed Bible books in 1165 and, when Oberto became the formal archpriest in 1168, served alongside him in a house of dissident canons (followers of the emperor and antipope) until his death in 1182, at which point the books passed to the Biblioteca Capitolare of Monza. In this way, Guidotto was like the English canons Robert and John, but I would argue that he played a more deliberate role than his English contemporaries in collecting the glossed Bible for his community, for Guidotto is also named as the person who commissioned (fecit fieri) at least eight, perhaps ten, more glossed Bible books copied for the Monza cathedral library. It is worth noting that the provenance of all but one of these manuscripts is Monza, and that the remaining one, e-13, the book of Jeremiah, is also of Lombard origin. In this effort, Guidotto appears quite different from Robert of Adington and John de Rana.

This evidence can lead us to the following possible scenario: Guidotto, Canon of Monza, came back from France in 1165 with a copy of the Glossa ordinaria to Exodus, the latest thing in biblical learning for his generation. He left this book, now Monza a-6, and perhaps other manuscripts imported from France, along with a glossed Gospel of Mark copied in Lombardy, now Monza a-22, to the cathedral library. A later hand marked them both as books that were bequeathed (dimisit) by Guidotto to the community for the salvation of his soul. Over the next twenty years, according to later notes in eight, perhaps ten, other manuscripts, Guidotto ordered (fecit fieri) copies of the Glossa ordinaria to Joshua, Judges, Chronicles, Daniel with Esdras, Ecclesiastes, Apocalypse, Numbers, and Jeremiah with Lamentations, all copied locally and all but one in Monza, which he also left to the library when he died in 1182. If Belloni and Ferrari are correct about the cropped attributions, Guidotto also had copies of Proverbs and the deutero-canonical Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira) copied at Monza, and also bequeathed them to the library. We have no evidence about the exemplars from which these copies were made, but they were most likely codices on loan from other libraries, perhaps even brought by Guidotto from France, and then sent back to their home libraries.

Further evidence shows that Guidotto was only the first link in a chain of canons of Monza who collected copies of the Glossa ordinaria to various books of the Bible. As we have already seen, a slightly later contemporary, Michael of Besozzo, added another seven glossed books to the Monza library at his death in 1216: four Gospel books, a psalter, the canonical epistles, and a Song of Songs. One of these, the glossed Song of Songs, may be lost; the other six were all copied in Lombardy, one probably at Monza. This suggests that two canons of Monza were involved in the production of Glossa ordinaria texts in Lombardy. Yet another canon, Guillelmus of Malzate, who was still alive in 1275, owned a glossed Song of Songs, also from late twelfth-century Italy.⁴⁰

Taken together, this evidence suggests that the fine set of Glossa ordinaria manuscripts at Monza was collected by several canons of the cathedral in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The most striking difference between this collection and the Glossa ordinaria manuscripts described by Smith at Lanthony is not the overall number of glossed Bible manuscripts in the collection (at Lanthony, twenty-five or twenty-six; at Monza, nineteen to twenty-one), nor the relative representation of books of the Bible (both are largely complete series of Bible part-books, but we have no evidence of a glossed Song of Songs at Lanthony, nor of a glossed Ruth or Maccabees at Monza), but rather the fact that the Glossa ordinaria manuscripts at Monza can be traced to the collecting habits of particular canons of the cathedral.

A significant proportion of glossed Bibles at Monza appears to have been deliberately gathered, as can be deduced from the fact that we know exactly who donated about half of the glossed Bible books in this collection. Adding up the seven volumes given by Michael of Besozzo, two by Bosco of Terzago, and the earlier gift of ten or twelve from the elusive Guidotto, we get a total of nineteen to twenty-one of the extant glossed Bibles in that collection, with a trace of at least one lost codex. More work on the remaining twenty or so unattributed Glossa ordinaria codices at Monza might lead to other clues about how this collection came together. But the evidence gathered to date is enough to lead us to see the Glossa ordinaria collection at Monza as a deliberate effort on the behalf of several members of the community to collect a glossed Bible.

In any case, and in spite of the contrasting evidence from St. Victor and England, it should not be totally surprising that such an important medieval cathedral chapter had a consciously collected set of codices of the Glossa ordinaria, the newest and most important tool of biblical scholarship in the later Middle Ages.

The selection of biblical books in the Monza Glossa ordinaria collection is especially interesting. Not only did Guidotto, Michael, and Bosco collect (as might be expected) the Glossa ordinaria to the most important liturgical books of the Bible—the Gospels, the Pauline epistles, and the Psalms—but they also included books of both the major and minor prophets and some examples of wisdom literature, including the deutero-canonical Ecclesiasticus. Perhaps most striking, though, is the number of what Christians understand as historical books of the Bible among the glossed Bible books at Monza. Guidotto owned a copy of the glossed Exodus made in France, and he ordered, along with prophetic books and the Apocalypse, the Glossa ordinaria to Numbers, Joshua, Judges, and Chronicles (the latter two known in the Latin Middle Ages as III and IV Kings).

Although this focus on historical books of the Bible may seem strange to modern readers, it resonates with the exegetical interests of the canons of the famous School of St. Victor in Paris. For example, Guidotto’s slightly older contemporary, Andrew of St. Victor, wrote commentaries on the Octateuch (the first eight books of the Hebrew Bible), including Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Kings, and Chronicles, as well as on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.⁴¹

Twelfth-century canons regular were especially interested in advancing a reading of the Bible according to the “historical sense,”⁴² so it makes sense that the historical books of the Hebrew Bible should have been particularly interesting to them.

The question of collections of glossed books of the Bible in cathedral chapter libraries overall remains a more problematic question. Lesley Smith’s finding that neither the canons of St. Victor in Paris nor those in English cathedral chapters had particularly extensive collections of the Glossa ordinaria stands in contrast to the situation of the cathedral library in Monza. Why did Guidotto and his successors undertake this enterprise of collection? Perhaps the answer lies at the intersection of intellectual and political ambitions and accessible resources. That is, a cathedral school like Monza was not at the center of the university movement, as was St. Victor, but, unlike the English houses, was the community attached to the cathedral of an important royal city. I know of at least one other cathedral library for which the same conditions apply, and for which we have similar evidence of a large collection of Glossa ordinaria manuscripts—the library in Toledo, the Imperial City of Spain. Since the Toledo Cathedral library has also been expertly catalogued,⁴³ a comparative study of the Glossa ordinaria manuscripts available to the canons of the two communities would be a good place to begin a more comprehensive study of the fate of the Glossa ordinaria among the Augustinian canons of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Since the Augustinian canons were both the propagators of the new methods of reading the Bible in late medieval Europe, and (not coincidentally) the community of Luther, Calvin, and other leaders of the Protestant Reformation, their reception and use of the Glossa ordinaria is an especially important clue to the history of this remarkable artifact of biblical exegesis and its method of passing on traditional interpretations of scripture into the modern period.