Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures
i + 495 + i leaves on paper, in folio; four watermarks present in the paper stocks: (a) a pair of the type Piccard, Ochsenkopf, VI 279 (1429-1436), alone in quires i-ix, xvi-xvii, xxi, xxiv-xxxi and xxxviii-xliii, mixed with (c) in quires xix-xx and xxii-xxiii; (b) a pair most similar to the types Piccard, Ochsenkopf, XI 117+118 (1430-36) and XI 132+133 (1432-34), in quires x-xv; (c) a pair of the type Piccard, Ochsenkopf, VI 257 (1419-36), in quires xix-xx and xxii-xxiii, always mixed with (a); (d) a pair of the type Piccard, Ochsenkopf, XIII 34+35 (1427-35), alone in quires xxxii and xxxiv-xxxvii, mixed with (a) in quire xxxiii, modern foliation in pencil, top, outer corner, collation, lacking at least six leaves (i8 [the product of modern restoration, in which ff. 1-5 are remnants, set into modern paper leaves] ii-vi12 vii11 [f. 79 a singleton] viii-xii12 xiii13 [f. 147a a half-sized singleton] xiv12 xv11 [wants 1 leaf after f. 174, with loss of text] xvi11 [wants 1 leaf before f. 175, with loss of text] xvii9 [wants 3 leaves before f. 187, with loss of text] xix-xxii12 xxiii10 xxiv-xxviii12 xxix10 + xxx11 [singleton indeterminable] xxxi-xxxii12 xxxiii11 [f. 373 a singleton] xxxiv11 [wants 1 leaf after f. 386, cancelled with no loss of text] xxxv11 [wants 1 leaf before f. 393, with loss of text] xxxvi-xxxvii12 xxxviii11 [singleton indeterminable] xxxix12 xl11 [singleton indeterminable] xli-xliii12), copied by two hands, both forms of the semi-hybrida libraria, the first (ff. 1-264) more rapid than the second (ff. 266-495), routinely on 38-40 lines in two columns of c.65-70 mm. in width, outline frames ruled only, red rubrics, 3- to 4- line red initials, ff. 264v-265v, 386v-392v and 495v blank, ff. 1-5, 118, 148, 150, 152, 186, 210, 248 and 489 partly or largely torn away or damaged, most subsequently restored. Bound in blind-stamped and tooled white alum-tawed skin over thick card boards, 20th-century work re-using the outer skin of an earlier seventeenth-century binding (see below, Provenance), with green fabric ties, sewn on four cords, without endbands, modern paper pastedowns. Dimensions 295 x 220 mm.
The unusual text in this manuscript, which pairs a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew with scholastic questiones (questions) on the same text, is unedited and largely unstudied. It is by the influential theologian Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl (d. 1433), who led a distinguished career not only at the University of Vienna, but in the service of Duke Albrecht of Austria. The text is rare on the market (only one sale, from 1972, recorded in the Schoenberg Database). This early copy of the text is securely localized to the Benedictine Abbey of Altenberg in Austria.
1. Copied in Austria c. 1427-1438 as supported by the evidence of the script and watermark. The watermarks present in the paper stocks indicate a date of production for the manuscript, conservatively, in the period c.1427-38, assuming paper to be used within two to three years of its production, and most likely in the early to mid-1430s.
By the seventeenth century the manuscript was certainly owned by the Benedictine Abbey of Altenberg in Austria, but it was likely in their library as early as the fifteenth century. The blind-stamped white alum-tawed skin re-used in the restored binding reveals, in the central roundel, the figure of a saintly abbot (a tonsured figure with halo holding a crozier). This is the work of Ludwig Conradt in Vienna, who was contracted in 1678 to rebind the entire library of the Benedictine abbey of Altenburg near Horn in Lower Austria. The abbot represented in the central roundel is St Lambert of Maastricht, the founder of Altenburg. (For an example of an Altenburg binding of 1678, see Online Resources below; on the rebinding itself, see Schweighofer, 1958, pp. 119-20).
The manuscript’s production post-dates the devastation that Altenburg suffered from Hussite attacks in 1427 and 1430, which also marked the end of a period of active book production in Altenburg itself (see Schweighofer, 1958, pp. 113-116). The books from the Altenburg library dating to the mid- to late fifteenth century were, to judge by surviving colophons, much more frequently copied by individuals external to the abbey than produced within it. These were books either purchased by the abbey or donated by former students of the University of Vienna (see Schweighofer, 1958, p. 118). Given that broader context and the particular academic content of this manuscript, it is probable that it was not first copied at Altenburg, but acquired in the course of the fifteenth century, perhaps by donation.
2. In comparison with the records pertinent to the seventeenth-century rebinding exercise and an inventory of the library from 1924, some 37 paper manuscripts in 49 volumes, or 17% of the total stock of paper manuscripts rebound in 1678, are no longer in the abbey collection (see Schweighofer, 1958, p. 123). These losses, for the most part, took place during and after the Second World War. In 1945-1946 the abbey was occupied by Soviet troops, who used the library as a theatre and removed many of the books; a large collection was found only some years later in a greenhouse on a nearby farm (see Mittendorfer in Online Resources below). The present manuscript is the second in a two-volume set, and the first volume remains in Altenburg.
3. The manuscript has suffered considerable losses of leaves, often at the beginning and end of quires, and some remaining leaves in those positions are extremely dirty. This pattern of damage suggests that the book had fallen into a state of severe disrepair, with the quires detached from the binding, prior to the twentieth-century restoration of the manuscript. Re-stretching the white skin cover over card boards of insufficient strength to withstand the resultant tension has caused the boards to bend away from the book-block. A note in an earlier sale description, kept alongside the manuscript, records that the manuscript was found pressed under a heavy weight – perhaps in an attempt to flatten the boards – on a cupboard shelf in a stable. The heirs to the property, described only loosely as being in “southern Lower Saxony or northern Hessen,” had no knowledge of how its prior owner had come by it.
ff.1-386, (ff. 1-5 fragmentary; f. 6, beginning mid-way through c. 8), incipit, “//nostrum Ad hoc autem non fuisset ydoneus nisi naturam defectibilem … [f. 12, c. 9] ET ascendens in nauiculam transfretauit et venit in ciuitatem suam … [Mt 9, 1-2]. In precedenti capitulo posita sunt quidam miracula … [c. 28, f. 385v] … sunt in eternum mansura quorum bonorum nos participes efficiat Jesus christus dominus noster qui cum patre et sancto spiritu viuit et regnat vnus deus in secula benedictus”; [f. 385v, Postscript], incipit, “In superioribus sepe facta est mencio de quodam Judeo religionis christiane penitus ignaro qui in quodam libello suo conatus est … Sic ergo postquam ad dictum christianorum de christi incarceratione non sequitur contradictio seu aliud inconveniens ut Judeus voluit inferre et c.”; [ff. 386v-392v, blank];
Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, Commentarius in Matthaeum, c. 8-28; unedited; Stegmüller Online, no. 5710 (without the postcript). The postscript discussing the Incarnation and directed against “the short treatise” (libello) “of a certain Jew” (quodam Judeo) is in the autograph, and Alois Madre (1965, p. 54) regarded it as integral to the work, although he did not note how many other manuscripts of Nikolaus’s commentary on Matthew have it as well.
Amongst the most significant theological works of the Vienna theologian Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, his commentary on Matthew combined scriptural exegesis with occasional scholastic quaestiones dealing with matters of moral theology, pastoral issues, and contemporary dogmatic debate. It is thought to be the product of three phases of work during Nikolaus’s long career: first, during his tenure as cursor biblicus in 1397-98, when he had to lecture on a book of the New Testament, and chose or was assigned Matthew; second, in his early years as a Master of Theology, in 1412-14; third, in the years of intensive scholarly and literary activity following the Council of Konstanz, through to c.1425, while he was resident in the Benedictine abbey of Melk (Madre, 1965, pp. 60-62).
Nikolaus’s own autograph survives still in the same institution to which he left it upon his death in 1433 (Melk, Benediktinerstift, Cod. 504, ff. 1-263r); around a dozen further manuscripts of the complete work are known (Madre, 1965, pp. 52-55). The present copy is very early, perhaps even written during the author’s lifetime. The work was frequently copied in two-volume sets, and this present manuscript is the second volume of just such a set. Although there has been damage to its start, the manuscript volume only ever began at c. 8; its second half contains exactly that portion of Nikolaus’s Quaestiones in Matthaeum pertinent to c. 8-28 of the Commentarius. This form of dividing the Commentarius and Quaestiones between two volumes is very unusual (more common was to copy the works in two or three volumes with the entire Commentarius followed by the entire Quaestiones). There is just one other manuscript with the same pattern of division. It is the first volume of a set, with c. 1-7 of the Commentarius and the pertinent Quaestiones to c. 1-7 (qq. 1-30), namely Altenburg, Benediktinerstift, AB 14 C 15. The present manuscript is almost certainly its original companion.
ff. 393-495, incipit, [beginning mid-way through q. 31] “//de diuicijs in quantum bonum vtile et non delectabile bonum …; [f. 395v, q. 32], Utrum sint solum septem dona spiritus sancti. Sine argumentis respondetur … [q. 56] Alio modo potest intelligi predicacio ewangelij in vniuerso orbe cum pleno effectu … Sed hoc facto veniet consummacio mundi. Et sic est finis et c.”; [f. 495v, blank].
Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, Quaestiones super Matthaeum, ad c. 8-28 (qq. 31-56); unedited; Stegmüller Online, no. 5711. As a companion text to his commentary on Matthew, which itself contained scholastic quaestiones, Nikolaus produced a separate work in which he treated a long series of theological issues arising from Matthew’s Gospel in the form of scholastic quaestiones. The composition of the Quaestiones is thought to have followed the same chronology as the Commentarius; one quaestio (q. 26) is known to have been written in 1425 and repeats material from Nikolaus’s consilium delivered during the council of Konstanz against the Dominican friar Johannes Falkenberg. An autograph copy of the Quaestiones survives, in the same manuscript as that of the Commentarius (Melk, Benediktinerstift, Cod. 504, ff. 265r-382r); around ten further manuscripts are known with the complete work (see Madre, 1965, pp. 55-60).
The unusual combination of scriptural exegesis and scholastic quaestiones in the treatment of one text, Matthew’s Gospel, reflects the biographical circumstances of the author. Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl was equally committed to the scholarly enterprise of the University of Vienna as he was to pastoral preaching and monastic reform; he had long-standing personal associations with the great abbey of Melk, the driving force in central Europe in the fifteenth-century Benedictine reform. (For Nikolaus’s biography, see Madre, 1965, pp. 7-43). The first half of the fifteenth century saw the production of some truly enormous biblical commentaries by lecturers at the University of Vienna. This was a product of its distinctive institutional emphasis on offering cursory lectures (in the sense of ‘comprehensive courses’) on individual books of the Bible. Doctors of Theology, like Nikolaus, continued to lecture on individual books of the Bible, now at a much greater depth, until they died. At the same time, lecturers were also expected to engage in a culture of debate and disputation with their peers. This explains the tendency for these commentaries to include scholastic quaestiones. In the case of Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, this principle was extended to his writing of the Quaestiones super Matthaeum as an independent work. (See Courtenay, 2015, pp. 272-274 and 282; on the culture of biblical exegesis at Vienna in the fifteenth century more broadly, see Courtenay, 2012, pp. 573-77.)
Courtenay, William J. “The Bible in Medieval Universities,” in Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter, eds., The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, From 600 to 1450, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 555-578.
Courtenay, William J. “From Dinkelsbühl’s Questiones Communes to the Vienna Group Commentary. The Vienna ‘School’, 1415-1425,” in Monica Brînzei, ed., Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl and the Sentences at Vienna in the Early Fifteenth Century, Studia Sententiarum 1, Turnhout, 2015, pp. 267-315.
Madre, Alois. Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl. Leben und Schriften. Ein Beitrag zur theologischen Literaturgeschichte, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 40/4, Münster, 1965.
Schweighofer, Gregor. “Die Altenburger Klosterbibliothek,” Biblos. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Buch- und Bibliothekswesen, Dokumentation, Bibliographie und Bibliophilie 7 (1958), pp. 110-23.
Bibliografie Benediktiner Altenburg
http://www.armarium.eu/startseite/niederoesterreich/benediktiner-altenburg-osb/bibliografie-benediktiner-altenburg-osb/
Incunable with 1678 Altenburg binding
https://www.ketterer-rarebooks.de/kunst/kd/details.php?obnr=418001250&anummer=491&detail=1
Klaus Graf: identification of the 1678 Altenburg binding
https://archivalia.hypotheses.org/103368
Melk, Benediktinerstift, Cod. 504
https://manuscripta.at/hs_detail.php?ID=40378
Mittendorfer, Konstanze: Bibliothek des Benediktinerstiftes Altenburg. Fabian-Handbuch
http://fabian.sub.uni-goettingen.de/fabian?Benediktinerkloster_(Altenburg)
TM 1106
