Arian fragment

Last updated March 11, 2019

The so-called Arian fragment of the Vatican Library, MS 5750, [1] found at the monastic library at Bobbio, is part of a series of fragmented fifth-century palimpsests of fifth-century Arian texts, erased and overwritten in Latin in the ninth century.

The Vatican Apostolic Library, more commonly known as the Vatican Library or informally as the Vat, is the library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City. Formally established in 1475, although it is much older, it is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. It has 75,000 codices from throughout history, as well as 1.1 million printed books, which include some 8,500 incunabula.

Bobbio is a small town and commune in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy. It is located in the Trebbia River valley southwest of the town Piacenza. There is also an abbey and a diocese of the same name. Bobbio is the administrative center of the Unione Montana Valli Trebbia e Luretta.

In textual studies, a palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document. Pergamene was made of lamb, calf, or goat kid skin and was expensive and not readily available, so in the interest of economy a pergamene often was re-used by scraping the previous writing. In colloquial usage, the term palimpsest is also used in architecture, archaeology, and geomorphology to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another, for example a monumental brass the reverse blank side of which has been re-engraved.

Notes

↑ Illustrated in Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeacet al. , M.J.B. Silvestre, Universal Palaeography or fac-similes of Writings of All Nations and Periods: vol I. Oriental writing. Greek writing. Latin writing 1849: p. cxvi.; Daniel H. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the end of the Nicene-Arian conflicts, 1995:83.

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[1] Illustrated in Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeacet al. , M.J.B. Silvestre, Universal Palaeography or fac-similes of Writings of All Nations and Periods: vol I. Oriental writing. Greek writing. Latin writing 1849: p. cxvi.; Daniel H. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the end of the Nicene-Arian conflicts, 1995:83.