Adémar de Chabannes was a monk, composer, scribe and literary forger. He was associated with the Abbey of Saint Martial, Limoges, where he was a central figure in the Saint Martial school, an important center of early medieval music. Much of his career was spent copying and transcribing earlier accounts of Frankish history; his major work was the Chronicon Aquitanicum et Francicum. He is well-known for forging a Vita, purportedly by Aurelian of Limoges, that indicated Saint Martial was one of the original apostles. Though he successfully convinced the local bishop and abbot of its authenticity, the traveling monk Benedict of Chiusa exposed his forgery and damaged Adémar's reputation.
The Vergilius Augusteus is a manuscript from late antiquity, containing the works of the Roman author Virgil, written probably around the 4th century. There are two other collections of Virgil manuscripts, the Vergilius Vaticanus and the Vergilius Romanus. They are early examples of illuminated manuscripts; the Augusteus is not illuminated but has decorated initial letters at the top of each page. These letters do not mark divisions of the text, but rather are used at the beginning of whatever line happened to fall at the top of the page. These decorated initials are the earliest surviving such initials.
The Ravenna Cosmography is a list of place-names covering the world from India to Ireland, compiled by an anonymous cleric in Ravenna around 700 AD. Textual evidence indicates that the author frequently used maps as his source.
The Saint Martial School was a medieval school of music composition centered in the Abbey of Saint Martial, Limoges, France. Most active from the 9th to 12th centuries, some scholars describe its practices, music, and manuscripts as 'Aquitanian'. It is known for the composition of tropes, sequences, and early organum. In this respect, it was an important precursor to the Notre Dame School. Adémar de Chabannes and his nephew Roger de Chabannes were important proponents of this school.
A correctory is any of the text-forms of the Latin Vulgate resulting from the critical emendation as practised during the course of the thirteenth century.
The Liber glossarum is an enormous compendium of knowledge used for later compilations during the Middle Ages, and a general reference work used by contemporary scholars. It is the first Latin encyclopedia whose items are alphabetically ordered. It has alternatively been referred to as an encyclopedia, a glossary, and a dictionary.
The so-called Vatican Mythographers are the anonymous authors of three Latin mythographical texts found together in a single medieval manuscript, Vatican Reg. lat. 1401. The name is that used by Angelo Mai when he published the first edition of the works in 1831. The text of the First Vatican Mythographer is found only in the Vatican manuscript; the second and third texts are found separately in other manuscripts, leading scholars to refer to a Second Vatican Mythographer and a Third Vatican Mythographer.
In Biblical studies, a gloss or glossa is an annotation written on margins or within the text of biblical manuscripts or printed editions of the scriptures. With regard to the Hebrew texts, the glosses chiefly contained explanations of purely verbal difficulties of the text; some of these glosses are of importance for the correct reading or understanding of the original Hebrew, while nearly all have contributed to its uniform transmission since the 11th century. Later on, Christian glosses also contained scriptural commentaries; St. Jerome extensively used glosses in the process of translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible.
Minuscule 850, Κι20, is a 12th-century Greek minuscule manuscript of the New Testament on parchment. The manuscript has no complex content.
The Cleopatra Glossaries are three Latin-Old English glossaries all found in the manuscript Cotton Cleopatra A.iii. the glossaries constitute important evidence for Old English vocabulary, as well as for learning and scholarship in early medieval England generally. The manuscript was probably written at St Augustine's, Canterbury, and has generally been dated to the mid-tenth century, though recent work suggests the 930s specifically.
The Vatican Terence, or Codex Vaticanus Latinus 3868, is a 9th-century illuminated manuscript of the Latin comedies of Publius Terentius Afer, housed in the Vatican Library. According to art-historical analysis the manuscript was copied from a model of the 3rd century.
The Leiden Glossary is a glossary contained in a manuscript in Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, Voss. Lat. Q. 69. The lemmata (headwords) come from "a range of biblical, grammatical, and patristic texts". It is based on an Anglo-Saxon exemplar, and was prepared c. 800 in the Abbey of Saint Gall in modern-day Switzerland.
The Harley Glossary is an Anglo-Saxon glossary, mostly providing glosses on Latin words. It mostly survives in the fragmentary British Library, MS Harley 3376, but fragments are also found in Lawrence, University of Kansas, Kenneth Spenser Research Library, Pryce P2 A: 1, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Lat. Misc. a. 3., fol. 49. The manuscript was produced in western England in the eleventh century, and has been argued to have been produced at Worcester Cathedral.
The Leyden manuscript is the name usually given in Breton studies to a four-page leaflet ("bifolio") kept in the library of Leiden University in the Netherlands. It is a fragment of a Latin medical treatise dating from the 9th or late 8th century in which two Irish words appear and about thirty Old Breton words.
The collection of the Marciana Library contains 4,639 manuscripts and 13,117 manuscript volumes. Its historical nucleus is the private collection of Cardinal Bessarion, which was donated to the Republic of Venice in 1468.
The Frankish Table of Nations is a brief early medieval genealogical text in Latin giving the supposed relationship between thirteen nations descended from three brothers. The nations are the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Gepids, Saxons, Burgundians, Thuringians, Lombards, Bavarians, Romans, Bretons, Franks and Alamanni.
The Proverbia Grecorum is an anonymous Latin collection of proverbs compiled in the seventh or eighth century AD in the British Isles, probably in Ireland. Despite the name, it has no known Greek source. It was perhaps designed as a secular complement to the Hebrew Bible's Book of Proverbs.
De raris fabulis is a collection of 23 or 24 short Latin dialogues from 9th- or 10th-century Celtic Britain. The dialogues belong to the genre known as the colloquy. These were pedagogical texts for teaching Latin in monastic schools.
The Fragmenta Vaticana are the fragments of an anonymous Latin work on Roman law written in the 4th century AD. Their importance to scholars stems from their being untouched by the Justinianic reforms of the 6th century.
