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Bodin e Schiavitù PDF
Bodin e Schiavitù PDF
Bodin e Schiavitù PDF
of the purest gold for anyone interested in the vagaries of mankind. While some
of the most fascinating items, such as the existence of an extensive industry in
ninth-century Verdun engaged in manufacturing eunuchs, seem based on rather
slim evidence, the material is full of delightful incidents which are well established
if sometimes obscure in purpose. Perhaps some reader of this review can figure
out why an official of the king of Aragon should buy a female slave with the
understanding that he would marry her after three years, five months and
twenty-six days. Then there was the monarch who presented a fair Saracen,
condemned to slavery for adultery with a Christian, as a gift to his chaplain.
Another girl, who had had the good taste to commit her offense with a royal
official, was given to him with the king's compliments.
In short, every student of the Middle Ages should read Professor Verlinden's
conclusions. If he can resist the sources, he is a dull fellow and no true historian.
SIDNEY PAINTER
The Johns Hopkins University
ROBERT WEBER, O.S.B., Le Psautier romain et Us autres anciens psautiers latins. (Collectanea Biblica
Latina, x.) Rome: Abbaye Saint Jerdme; Vatican City: Libreria Vaticana, 1953. Paper. Pp. xxiii,
410.)
SLOWLY and majestically the restoration of the critical edition of the Vulgate
achieves publication; Biblia Sacra iuxta latinam vulgatam editionem versionem, x :
Liber Psalmorum is dated Rome, 1953. Volume Ten in the accompanying Col-
lectanea Biblica series is a critical edition of the so-called Roman Psalter. It is
edited by Dom Robert Weber of the Roman abbey that has the Vulgate text in
hand, and is printed with the joint imprint of the abbey and the Vactian Press.
I t is a scholar's tool of reference.
The text, set out in clear, well-spaced type in a left-hand column down the
page, is based on sixteen manuscripts from the eighth to the twelfth century,
and on several previously-printed editions of the work, the variant readings of
which are (practically) all indicated in the right-hand column under elaborate
sigla-references. By way of further control and erudition, about a dozen other
ancient psalters, whole or partial, and ranging through Gallican and Mozarabic
sources, are collated in the footnotes in an apparatus criticus of marvelous typo-
graphical compactness.
Thus, the whole tradition of the Latin Psalter is laid open, word for word,
covering the entire period prior to printed texts. A painstaking Index verborum
of fifty pages follows the text.
Readers of SPECULUM, who are not Scripture scholars, may be interested in
knowing that the basic manuscripts here compositely edited are the following:
(1) London, British Museum, MS. Cotton Vespas. A 1, Psalter probably written at St
Augustine's, Canterbury, in eighth-century uncial, with Mercian English interlinear
added at the end of the ninth century;
(2) Berlin, Preussische Staatsbibliothek, MS. Hamilton 555, eighth-century majuscule
script;
(3) Montpellier, Faculty de Medicine, MS. Jfi9, a pre-Carolingian minuscule from the
North of France. In the so-called coronation laudes occurs the name of Festrada, wife of
Charlemagne (783-795), and the copy was probably made for her coronation: