Beschreibung:

The Walton Cicero fragment, with parts of the Verrine Orations, in Latin, manuscript on parchment [probably northern France or Low Countries, mid-ninth century]cutting from across the top of a bifolium, each leaf with remains of 7 lines in a fine and rounded Carolingian minuscule with the et-ligature used integrally within words, a strong st-ligature, and the common mistake of writing HS for 'sesterce' (following Ancient exemplars use of an abbreviation of two downward strokes followed by an 'S' for this, denoting 'unus et unus et semis' as a sesterce was two and a half asses), reused in late sixteenth or seventeenth century at head of spine to reinforce attachment of boards to the spine and hence now with scrawled title Severini .... Medicina (ie. Petrus Severinus [Danus], Idea Medicinae Philosophicae, printed Basel, 1571) of that date in space between columns once forming gutter in bifolium, this space also with old tear (now closed), torn lower edges, some concomitant cockling, scuffs and small areas of paper adhering, overall in good and solid condition, overall: 302 by 50mm. (with original leaf approximately 185mm. wide); set in glass on both sidesTHIS IS A SISTER FRAGMENT OF THOSE IN BAMBERG, HOFBIBLIOTHEK AND EINSEDELN ABBEY; ENTIRELY SECULAR AND CLASSICAL IN CONTEXT, AND THE EARLIEST SURVIVING WITNESS TO THIS PART OF THIS IMPORTANT TEXT; MOREOVER, DURING THE DECADES SPENT IN AMERICA, IT WAS THE OLDEST SURVIVING WITNESS TO ANY TEXT BY CICERO IN THE UNITED STATESProvenance:1. From an elegant Carolingian codex of Cicero, probably copied in northern France or the Low Countries in the mid-ninth century. It was examined by D. Ganz in March 2010 and identified by him as a hitherto unknown cutting from the same lost parent manuscript as single fragments now in Bamberg Hofbibliothek and Einsedeln Abbey (those catalogued in Bischoff, Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts, I, 1998, no 245, p. 55), and observed that while it is transalpine, and most probably northern European, it is obviously not the product of Tours, Corbie or Reims. It may have been written outside of a large monastic centre by a cleric attached to a Carolingian courtier or ecclesiastic. The text was common in Antiquity as a teaching tool, but the numbers of copies known in the Carolingian period were few. The most famous was perhaps that associated with the court school of Charlemagne, recorded in the lists of Classical texts in Berlin, Diez, B. Sant. 66 (c. 800). This list was once thought to be those of the Carolingian court library (see B. L. Ullman in Scriptorium, 8, 1954; B. Bischoff in Karl der Große, II, 1965, pp. 42-62; and D.A. Bullough, Early Medieval Europe, 12, 2003), but has since been linked to the Cathedral School of Verona (W. Berschin in Journal of Medieval Latin, 11, 2001; C. Villa in Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 51, 1995), which was itself closely associated with the Carolingian court. Another was requested by the Carolingian Classical text-hunter Lupus of Ferrières in 856-858 from an unnamed source. Other ninth-century copies are known from surviving fragments of them in (i) British Library, Additional MS. 47678 (formerly Holkham Hall 387)+Geneva lat. 169 (single leaf), and (ii) Paris, BnF., lat 7774A (partly annotated in the hand of Lupus of Ferrières), both from Tours. However, records of those two witnesses suggest that they included only part of the Verrines, wanting at least two entire books. In 1982, M. Reeve hypothesised that a lost early witness to the entire text had once existed, and while this had included the northern European tradition it had somehow produced an Italian exemplar in the fourteenth century ('A lost manuscript of Cicero's Verrines', Revue d'Histoire des Textes, 12-13, 1982-3, pp. 381-5). The present manuscript may well be from that lost copy of the text, perhaps the only complete copy known to the Carolingian renaissance.2. The parent manuscript then appears to have