MS 1391, Bibliothèque municipale, Rouen, France
Texts available:
Confessio of St Patrick
Incipit: None
Explicit: None
About the manuscript:
The R-text is preserved in a manuscript that was originally from the Benedictine abbey of Jumièges, and is now in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rouen (Ms 1391). The online catalogue of the BnF titles the codex as Vitae sanctorum et S. Clementis Romani recognitiones and dates it to the twelfth century. The manuscript description and the index of the codex provided by this online catalogue, like in the case of the Arras manuscript witness, is based on a nineteenth-century catalogue by Ormont. However, the issue in this case is that the nineteenth-century print catalogue did not list St Patrick's epistles among the texts in the codex. Consequently, there is no mention of Patrick or his writings in the index provided by the online catalogue.
The manuscript is dated by all recent editors to the eleventh century rather than the twelfth century as suggested by Ormont. The eleventh-century dating was first proposed by the Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye in a letter to White in 1903. In 1904 the Bollandists published a list of hagiographical codices from Rouen. This time Patrick's Confessio is listed in the index and the dating of the manuscript is corrected. Today the eleventh-century date is widely accepted, meaning that the twelfth-century date provided by the online catalogue of the BnF is now considered outdated.
The codex is entitled Vitae sanctorum et S. Clementis Romani recognitiones and contains twenty-seven hagiographical texts. Unfortunately it was damaged by fire and only the beginning of Patrick's Confessio can be found on the last four folios. Roughly the first half (fol. 3 to fol. 83) is composed of two Pseudo-Clementine texts, the Clementis Romani recognitiones, or Clementine Recognitions, and the Epistola beati Clementis pape ad Jacobum, Clement’s second letter, also called the Letter to James. Both of these texts were originally written in Greek and translated into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia.1 The second half of the codex is a collection of saints' lives. Bieler pointed out that the miracles of St Gertrude are in the collection what supports his theory of the arrival of the texts on the continent. However, there are also other local saint in the collection, such as St Vigor, bishop of Bayeux, who was educated in Arras and a student of St Vedast. These texts hint at the provenance of the codex. The area of north-eastern France, probably somewhere around Rouen, was proposed by Bieler.
- L. Bieler, Libri epistolarum sancti Patricii episcopi: part I. introduction and text (Irish Manuscripts Commission (Series), Dublin, 1952).
- F. Fischer and A. Harvey, Saint Patrick’s Confessio HyperText Stack (2011) (http://www.confessio.ie/).
- P. Freeman, A transcription of the Latin writings of St. Patrick from seven medieval manuscripts), (Dublin, Paris, London, Rouen, Aaras, Salisbury) (Hors serie, Lewiston, N.Y, 2008).
- Bibliothèques nationale de France, Bibliothèque municipale. Rouen, Seine-Maritime, in Catalogue collectif de France (Online) (17 Nov. 2014).
- H. Omont, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements, Rouen (Paris, 1886), pp 373–5.
- J.F. Kenney, The sources for the early history of Ireland: ecclesiastical (New York, 1929; repr. Dublin, 1993), p. 165