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30 Chapter 1
å the homilies of Gregory the Great (much used for preaching
in the early Middle Ages).
One may probably add MS Laon, Biblioth›eque Municipale 265.
I have not seen this directly but there is a fairly full analysis in
a study of Laon Cathedral School by John Contreni, which does
not suggest that it contains marriage symbolism, apart perhaps
from a few lines which are not enough to a·ect the argument being
developed here. Of the ‘Mondsee Homiliary’ (of Abbot Lantperhtus
of St Michael of Mondsee) only the summer portion has
survived (the marriage feast of Cana reading comes in the winter).
One cannot exclude the possibility that these collections contain
some marriage symbolism in other places. I have mostly worked
from beginnings of sermons (incipits) in compiling the list in the
preceding paragraph, and it is always conceivable that pockets of
marriage symbolism lurk in the body of the sermons or homilies,
without the incipit giving a clue, as is the case with the fifteen lines
or so of spousal symbolism in the last of the ‘five sermons of Abbo’
of St-Germain printed in Migne, or with paragraphs 4 and 5 of
MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 3883, transcribed
below as Document 1. 1. WemayalsonotethataWolfenb•uttel
collection analysed by Reginald Gr‹egoire contains a sermon by Augustine,
again not on the Cana reading, where marriage symbolism
is an important part of the structure. Even so, it is hard to ima-
citing W. Levison, ‘Eine Predigt des Lupus von Ferrieres’, in id., Aus rheinischer
und fr•ankischer Fr•uhzeit (D •usseldorf, 1947), 561–4 (not seen, but I have read the
sermon in MS BL Royal 8. B. XIV, fos. 131V–133V).
DeLeeuw, ‘Gregory the Great’s “Homilies on the Gospels” in the Early Middle
Ages’. Marriage symbolism is only rather slightly represented, to judge by the old
but full index: see Migne, PL 76. 1414.
Analysis of the manuscript in J. J. Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from
850 to 930: Its Manuscripts and Masters (Munich, 1978), 130–3. In his list of the
contents of this composite manuscript he includes (131) ‘texts on matrimony and
baptism, an excerpt from Isidore of Seville’s De ecclesiasticis ociis’. Contreni does
not give a reference, but this work by Isidore does have a section on marriage at
2. 20, and this includes short passages of marriage symbolism, for which see Migne,
PL 83. 810, 812–13.
Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 203–4.
For the five sermons, see Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian
Sermon’, 206, 229 nn. 36–7, and Migne, PL 132. 761–78. The passage in question
is at 775. 9–24.
Augustine, sermon 238, Migne, PL 38. 1125–6: see R. Gr‹egoire, ‘La collection