Untitled

Documents: 2. 1 243
it is faded and consequently a little dicult. There are initials in red and
blue, in both the main script and the glossing script.
On fo. 1 there are tables of contents in later medieval hands. The
Decretals and Hostiensis’s apparatus on them in the form of a gloss take
up fos. 2R–241R. ‘The back flyleaf (fol. 242) is the text of a commentary
on X. 1. 3. 32–1. 3. 37. Several glosses are signed Johannes Andreae’
(Pennington).
A2
A parchment manuscript, 440ÿ285 mm., 2 columns, the final folio numbered
320, initials and paragraph marks in red and blue.
Writing is below the top line. The script or scripts (see below) could be
Italian to judge from the ‘u’-shaped superscript ‘r/‘re’, but otherwise it
would be hard to say whether the scribe was Italian and he may not have
been. It is a pecia manuscript, produced by the university stationers. See
e.g. ‘finitur hic li’ in the margin on fo. 253VB, alongside what looks like a
change of handwriting.
The manuscript is taken up with Hostiensis’s Lectura on the first two
books of the Decretals of Gregory IX.
The discoveries of Kenneth Pennington have shown that it is desirable
to compare manuscripts of the two authorial ‘editions’ of this
commentary. I use the early recension, transmitted in O. Pennington
says of this manuscript that it ‘will be an indispensable text for those
whowishtostudyHostiensis’sideas....Ihavecheckeditsreadingsin
many passages, and they are most often as good or better than the best
manuscripts we have of his second recension. With it we will be better
able to understand his thought and trace its development’ (86). It was
apparently completed between1254 and 1265 (ibid. 81); the terminus post
quem may be pushed a little later, to 1262.
To compare the passages in question in this manuscript with the
second edition, which was the version most people would have known, I
have given variants from MS BL Arundel 485 in the apparatus (ignoring
orthographic variants, transpositions, a few silly errors, and other trivia).
As noted above, it is a pecia manuscript—a further reason for using it,
since it was probably representative of an important proportion of the
transmission of the text.
The early printed editions of Hostiensis’s Lectura on the Decretals are
Description based on personal inspection.
Pennington, ‘An Earlier Recension’, 82, 85.
K. Pennington, ‘Henry de Segusio (Hostiensis)’ (1993), repr. in id., Popes,
Canonists and Texts, no.xvi (paginated 1–12) at 8. For the dates of the other great
synthesis of Hostiensis, see ibid. 5–6. Note that the information about the dating of
the two syntheses in J. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London etc., 1995), 214,
does not correspond to Pennington’s findings and may be mistaken.