400 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



regular half-uncial could be old, and kept them from recognizing that a great 

 variety of script was current at the same period in the same scriptorium. 



Now that the excellent practice has begun of devoting a whole volume of 

 plates or even a series of volumes to the Mss. of a single centre, this variety 

 of current script is revealed, and un -calligraphic script is getting some 

 recognition ; for an editor, finding himself able to offer more than one 

 photograph from tlie same MS., is able to let us see the writing at its worst 

 as well as at its best. The Bobbio mss. at Turin have been exhibited in 

 Cipolla's "Codici Bobbiesi," vol. i (1907). One of them, Turin Bibl. 

 Nat. G V. 26, Augustine's Letters to Pascentius, is written in good half-uncial 

 script, which Chatelain and CipoUa both assign to the sixth centviry. On 

 fol. 5^ (see Plate 21 of Cipolla) the scribe, in order to finish the Epistle at the 

 foot of the page, and perhaps also through hurry, has contracted the last 

 eight lines into a kind of cursive minuscule. No palaeographer of last century 

 would ha\e dated these eight lines, if he were shown a separate photograph 

 of them, as early as the half-uncial of the other pages. Vol. ii of the " Codici 

 Bobbiesi " is to exhibit the Bobbio mss. at the Ambrosian Library, Milan, and 

 will give plenty of examples of the variety of scripts of which a single scribe 

 was capable, and of the contemporaneousness of formed and unformed types 

 of a " more majuscule " and a " more minuscule " appearance. A similar 

 collection from Veronese mss. was announced for 1911, but has not yet 

 appeared: "Atlante paleografico artistico della Capitolare di Verona." Its 

 editor, Canon Spagnolo, the Verona librarian, writing recently of one of 

 the earliest' dated specimens of half-uncial, no. xxxviii in his library 

 (Sulpicius Severus, written in 517 by Ursicinus at Verona), assigns to the 

 Ursicinus school no. xxxiii Augustinus de Agone Christiano. No palaeographer 

 of last century would liave dated the rude " minuscule " found in no. xxxiii as 

 early as the beautiful half-uncial of no. xxxviii. But when the " Atlante 

 paleografico " appears, we shall probably all agree with Canon Spagnolo. 



It is wrong, therefore, to lay too much stress on palaeographical verdicts 

 of a time when aU this evidence had not been produced. The eminent palaeo- 

 graphers who pronounced them would now be the first to retract them. Each 

 fresh issue of our New Palaeographical Society's publications may bring 

 reason for a re-casting of old formulas. Por instance, the last part exhibited 

 the Cambrai half-uncial Philippus' conmientary on Job, a MS. which the 

 Society's editors assign (conjecturally, it is true, but by no means unreason- 

 ably) to " the end of the sixth or the beginning of the seventh century." It 



' The earliest is a Verona palimpsest (no. Iv) of the Fasti Consulares, or rather the last 

 part of them, continuing the list from 486 to 494, and therefore written about 494. 



