Collectio canonum in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 713

The collection on fol. 117r–192v of the Ms Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 713 (Somerville calls it 713B) is now bound together with a copy of the Panormia (Somerville: 713A). The most recent text in the collection is a canon from the council of Benevento (1108). The one surviving copy of the Arsenal collection was made in the second quarter of the 12th century. The collection has much in common with the Collectio Britannica and the Ivonian Decretum but is not divided into books or titles and has no rubrics. The manuscript came to the Arsenal from the library of Saint-Victor, which contains a number of Chartrain manuscripts. Until recently no one paid close attention to it, although Gérard Fransen did suspect that it was not a mere derivative of the Decretum and Peter Landau recognized that some of the canons were transmitted in a fuller form than in the Decretum itself. The present analysis has as its key LP. [193]

It was not until Robert Somerville examined the texts of pope Urban II in the collection that anyone realized that the assembled material was an important source for the Decretum. A fruitful cooperation with Martin Brett resulted, Brett concentrating on the sources and influence of the collection and Somerville on the excerpts from papal decretals. Somerville edited the excerpts from Urban.

The Arsenal collection also contains many texts found in the Britannica. Somerville found 32 letters of pope Alexander II in the Arsenal collection, all of them in the Britannica. He found 22 extracts from letters of pope Urban II, all from the beginning of his papacy. Sixteen of them are in the Britannica. Nine of the letters of Alexander II and three of those of Urban II are found only in the Britannica and the Arsenal collections. The Arsenal collection is, as Brett was to say in 1988, an independent witness to a considerable number of texts known otherwise only in the Britannica.

Brett added that the material had not been merely collected (as it was in the Britannica), it was sorted systematically into meaningful blocks. The Arsenal collection contains long series of texts also found in books 1, 4–5, 7–14 and 16 of the earliest form of the Ivonian Decretum. Brett has shown the direct use of the collection for the Panormia (57 canons in all eight books) and the Caesaraugustana (80 canons). He has shown that none of the texts in the Ivonian Decretum taken from Burchard are in the Arsenal collection. This, he argues, would not have been necessary, because the compiler, who was perhaps Ivo bishop of Chartres himself, without a doubt had a copy of the Liber decretorum of Burchard and could work directly from that copy.

Literature

See Brett, The sources, pp. 149–167. Also Robert Somerville, Papal Excerpts in Arsenal MS 713B: Alexander II and Urban II, in: Proceedings of the 9th ICMCL, pp. 169–184. In that article Somerville identifies the letters of pope Alexander II in the collection. Idem, Pope Urban II, passim. – See Landau, Das Dekret, p. 33; reprinted in his: Kanones und Dekretalen, p. 149*.

Categories

• key is LP
• belongs to: Ivonian Collections
• large (1000 to 2000 canons) collection
• from Chartres
• saec. XI
• Collection
• once updated (Arsenal I vs Arsenal II) the article should perhaps be split