fact or two from what is said about the latter, but his account is altogether irreconcileable with the notice of the Old Saxon. It is the combination of the two persons mentioned by Asser, derived from the spurious authority of Ingulf, that has misled the modern critics, and induced most of them to discredit the narrative of William of Malmesbury, as though it depended upon that late forgery. William's account may therefore be judged by itself, and accepted or rejected just as we may rate the historian's general credibility: there is no reason for excluding these particular passages from that respect which those scholars who know William best are ready to pay to his honest, conscientious labours.[1]
III. Note on a supposed Theological Exposition by
Gerbert.
In Bernard's Catalogi librorum manuscnvtorum Anqliae et Hiberniae, the Bodleian manuscript 2406, now known as Bodl. 343, is described as containing at f. 170b an Expositio in Canticum Gereberti Papae in Spiritum sanclum. Oudin by mistake quotes the title as in Canticum Canticorum. The Histoire littéraire de la France says that Gerbert 'composa un Cantique sur le saint Esprit, qui avec son commentaire faisoit autrefois partie des manuscrits de Thomas Bodlei, sous le nombre 1406. [sic] 10,' and the writer speculates as to its date and contents. The manuscript itself, however, at the place indicated, contains, at the end of a volume of Anglo-Saxon homilies, a page filled up in a thirteenth-century hand with glosses upon a sequence for the feast of saint Michael the Archangel, which is known from the Sarum Missal, and of which the authorship is apparently claimed by the glossator for Gerbert,[2] Whether
- ↑ 'A steady attempt,' says Stubbs in his preface to the Gesta regum, 1 p. x, 'to realise the position of the man and the book has had, in the case of the present Editor, the result of greatly enhancing his appreciation of both.'
- ↑ [My friend the late Dr. H. M. Bannister informs me that this prose appears in a service-book of Saint Martial's of Limoges written between 988 and 996 in the Bibliothèque nationale at Paris, MS. 1118, and in an Autun troper written between 996 and 1024 in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, MS. 1169. It was widely current before 1050.]
