FRAGMENT OF THE STATE ACCOUNTS OF THE ABBEY OF... Lot 14

FRAGMENT OF THE STATE ACCOUNTS OF THE ABBEY OF SAINT MARTIN OF TOURS - FRAGMENT OF A GREEK POEM ON THE LIFE OF SAINT JOSEPH BY EPHRAIM THE SYRIAN (C. 306-373) Tours, 7th century - Egypt, 6th or 7th century In Latin, manuscript fragment on parchment and papyrus. Parchment leaf laminated to papyrus leaves (probably made to reinforce and reduce the curvature of the parchment leaves; Sati, 'Merovingian Accounting Documents', pp. 147-51) in two columns of 22 and 24 lines (225 x 195 mm, justification), carbon ink, unruled with dividing line between the two columns drawn without the aid of a ruler, late foliation '3a' unrelated to the text (probably evidence of belonging to an old nineteenth-century collection from Amansa's collection). from the collection of Amans-Alexis de Monteuil), Merovingian cursive, tironic notes - Greek uncials of Coptic type, several hands(?) of the same period intervened in this document (tironic notes, crosses, notes in margins and strikethrough). Leaf trimmed on all sides, mainly in the left, upper and lower margins with missing text in the first column. A descriptive manuscript leaf in the hand of Alexis de Monteuil accompanies the document. Conservation case. A leaf from a Merovingian manuscript identified as coming from the largest French cultural center of the seventh century, the Abbey of Saint Martin de Tours, preserving part of the only surviving papyrus of a classical text north of the Alps. Merovingian fragment of an archive identified as coming from the largest cultural center in France in the seventh century, the Abbey of Saint Martin de Tours. Document written at the Abbey of St. Martin, Tours, founded in the fifth century by St. Brice, becoming a Benedictine in the seventh century and then a lay cathedral under Charlemagne in 806. Several fragments identified as belonging to the same group by Pierre Gasnault are now in Paris (see art. de Sati) and mention the abbot Agrycus of St. Martin. He concluded that this set, to which our leaflet surely belongs, was certainly written there. - The Merovingian document contains a list of names with the royalties due to the domain of St. Martin of Tours. It lists the first names, mainly Germanic in sound, of the forty-six inhabitants who were tenants of the abbey, with the volumes of the different grains due (wheat, rye, barley, ...) and their measure in muid (modium) or half-muid (semodium). The transcription of the text was published by Gasnault (pp. 310-14): among the 24 legible names which appear there, one finds Childoberthus (col.2, l.3), Domoramnus (col.2, l.5), Dignon (col.2, l.6), Flanoberthus (col.2, l.7), Lupogisel (col.2, l.9), Genoaldus (col.2, l.13) and Taheuderamnus (col.2, l.21, etc. To understand the exact nature of this document, it is necessary to go back to the origins of the administration of clerical goods. The abbeys during this period had no autonomy for the management of their domain and had to refer directly to the dioceses according to the Council of Chalcedon in 451. It is therefore curious to observe here a direct departure from papal recommendations, is it a derogation or a follow-up document? According to Sati, the exact role of this document within the administration of the abbey domain remains to be studied, as there is little documentation on the matter. The hypothesis of the origin of the sheet was proposed by Pierre Gasnault, in his article dedicated to the two fragments that appeared at the Sotheby's sale in 1989 ('Deux nouveaux feuillets de la comptabilité domaniale de l'abbaye Saint-Martin de Tours à l'époque mérovingienne' (see bibl.). According to him, these leaves were reused to form the cover of a binding of a copy of Philippus on Job in the library of St. Martin, MS 88 in the catalog drawn up, apparently, in 1700 of the Fonds de Saint-Martin enriched with the observations made by Chalmel in 1807 (Tours, BM, ms 1296) (see: L. Delisle, "Notice sur les manuscrits disparus de la bibliothèque de Tours," Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibl.Nationale, 31, 1884, Appendix VII). They were seen there at the beginning of the 18th century in situ by the Maurist Bernard de Montfaucon (1665-1741) who published a description of them accompanied by an engraving of the script on papyrus in his Palaeographica graeca, 1708, pp. 214-15, quoting a letter in the hand of Dom Léon Chevalier, c. 1706, on these "Nobilia fragmenta inter membranas varias conglutinae" (Bréquigny's Papers, vol. XXXIV and XXXV). These are the only manuscripts on papyrus that Montfaucon has ever seen. During the revolution, the cathedral manuscripts were transferred to the Bibliothèque Municipale de Tours and many volumes were lost or sold around 1830 in Paris by merchants such as Techener or Monteuil. This episode of