Outside the work of Eriugena, the most important philosophical work of the later ninth century is found in what may seem to contemporary historians a strange place - the glosses written in the margins of manuscripts. These are not, in the case of some of the main school texts, simply readers’ notes. Although the glosses in one manuscript are rarely exactly the same as those in another, there are strong family resemblances, and one can speak of a ‘‘standard set of glosses’’ (or in some cases a variety of sets of standard glosses) which a considerable number of manuscripts share more or less, often adding some nonstandard material. Of central importance for early medieval philosophy are the glosses found in manuscripts of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae Decem, Porphyry’s Isagoge, Boethius’ Opuscula sacra, and the gloss and commentary tradition on Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. (Another important school-text was the commentary by Macrobius on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, but little is known as yet about the extent ofglossing and commentary as early as the Carolingian period.) An important figure in connection with these gloss traditions is Remigius of Auxerre (cf. Jeudy 1991). Remigius was born in c. 840, became a monk of Auxerre and, in 893, took charge of the cathedral school at Rheims. He wrote commentaries on a wide variety of works - classical grammarians and poets and, of the works listed above, the De nuptiis and De consolatione (and perhaps also Boethius’ Opuscula sacra). But Remigius did not strive to be original, and his commentaries seem - especially from the evidence of the one on De nuptiis - to be compiled by merging together material from various gloss traditions.
Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis is a fifth-century encyclopedia in prose with verse interludes, of the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) preceded by two books in which the allegorical marriage between Mercury (divine reason) and Philology (the human soul). Despite (or because of?) its rebarbative style of Latin, De nuptiis became a very popular textbook in the ninth century. Philosophically, the most interesting gloss material is that attached to Book IV and some of that to Books I and II. The relations between the different traditions of glosses have yet to be properly established. Eriugena is known to have taught De nuptiis at Charles the Bald’s palace school, and editions of two different versions of his commentary have been published (John Scottus Eriugena 1939; Jeauneau 1978; the glosses to Book IV are better edited in Von Perger
2005). It is not certain that all this material is his (the basis for identifying the work as John’s are some comments in Remigius’ commentary, which attribute certain ideas to him), but most of it probably goes back to him, and his comments on logic show that - in what is very probably work from his earlier years - he is beginning to think along some of the lines which will be developed in his Periphyseon (cf. Von Perger 2005:264-301; Marenbon 2008:26-27). There are also glossed manuscripts that belong to an earlier tradition (Teeuwen 2008), and another tradition, which has been associated with a writer called Dunchad, Martin of Laon, or Heiric of Auxerre (Pseudo-Dunchad 1944).
The Categoriae Decem, already Alcuin’s favorite, seems to have been the most intensely studied logical text in the ninth century. Of the two manuscripts which date from the last decades of this century, one (Milan Ambrosiana B 71 sup.) is not very fully annotated, but the glosses it contains are in many cases obviously linked to the teaching of Eriugena and have little to do with the logical content of the text. The other set of glosses in Sankt Gallen 274 is much fuller. It contains more material which would be standard in tenth and eleventh-century glossed manuscripts. Unlike all the other glossators of the Categoriae Decem, however, the Sankt Gallen glossator knows Boethius’ commentary on Aristotle’s Categories and uses it to help him gloss the pseudo-Augustinian text (Marenbon 1981:116-138).
It also seems that the tradition of glosses to Boethius’ Opuscula sacra was begun in the ninth century. There have been attempts to link the glosses to a specific individual - Eriugena himself or, more recently, Remigius of Auxerre (Cappuyns 1931), but such attributions are unreliable and the complexities of this gloss-tradition have yet to be unraveled. Boethius’ discussions in these little treatises provided early medieval authors with a chance to think about some basic metaphysical issues, such as individuation, and how they related to doctrinal problems.
The glosses to Boethius’ De consolatione Philosophiae have perhaps the richest tradition of all. Pierre Courcelle (1967) distinguished two strands of a commentary tradition, one linked to Sankt Gallen and one from Remigius of Auxerre (extracts, but he acknowledged that some manuscripts contained glosses that belonged to neither tradition.) The most recent research (Godden 2003; Jayatilaka
2006) suggests that the position is as complicated for this work as for the other textbooks. Each manuscript contains a different assortment of glosses, and the main groupings have not yet been properly established. Boethius’ De consolatione faced the early medieval authors with a special challenge. Although Boethius was a Christian, he wrote De consolatione without including any explicit references to Christianity, and in some passages - most obviously Book III, metrum 9, an epitome of Plato’s Timaeus - he proposes, through the mouthpiece of the personification Philosophia, ideas which seem to be at odds with Christian doctrine. Different Carolingian exegetes had different approaches to resolving the tension. The late ninth-century glosses to Book III, metrum 9 in one manuscript (Vatican lat 3663; edited in Troncarelli 1981) - which seem to be distinct from the Remigius or the Sankt Gallen set - give the impression, at first, of accepting without demur the pagan nature of the material, since they consider the stars and their properties and do not avoid astrology. But what may seem like a daringly pagan moment - the equation of the World Soul with the sun - turns out to be a quotation from the very soberly orthodox Bede. Both the Sankt Gallen commentator’s and Remigius’ attitude fit with a line of interpretation found in Alcuin and, it has been argued (Troncarelli 1981) in the way the De consolatione was presented even shortly after Boethius’ death: the work is interpreted in an explicitly Christian way, with the figure of Philosophia transformed into the Biblical Sapientia, and any passages which, taken literally, seem to go against Christian doctrine, read allegorically with a Christian meaning. There is, however, one short, continuous commentary, just of Book III, metrum 9, which takes a very different approach (edited in Huygens 1954). It was written by Bovo, a monk of Corvey. Bovo died in 916, and so this piece of writing comes from the closing years of what can be considered the Carolingian period, if not later. Bovo recognized both that Boethius was a Christian author but that, in this metrum especially, he said much that was “contrary to the Catholic Faith.’’ Using Macrobius’ commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, he gives a remarkably penetrating interpretation of the Neoplatonic allusions in this poem, although he does so only - at least ostensibly - in order to condemn these pagan doctrines.
World History
