Meeder's study aims to explore how Hiberno-Latin scholarship spread over Europe in the Carolingian eighth and ninth centuries, especially to St Gall, and how it was received, perceived and valued by continental scholars. Throughout the book the author maintains the possibility of intermediate steps on the continent as sources for Irish manuscripts in St Gall. He stresses that institutional and personal networks between intellectual centres played an important role in the so-called Carolingian renaissance. His claim that almost all of them were brought to St Gall by peregrini, or ‘centres with strong Irish connections’ on the continent, has not yet been proven by historians. By a detailed reassessment of the extant manuscript material he wants to determine the relationship between the different extant witnesses.
Chapter 1 analyses the place of Irishness within the developments in the abbey's corporate identity, especially in the different versions of the Vita Sancti Galli where Gallus's Irishness is only cursorily noted, as an additional exotic element. The second chapter gives a rather neutral account of the famous group of bilingual manuscripts connected somehow with the circle around Sedulius Scottus. We do not get a deep insight into the vivid and quite controversial discussion in research; in general, it is often difficult for the reader to discern the results of existing research from Meeder's own findings, especially when it is about variant readings of manuscripts.
In Chapter 3 Meeder analyses the library catalogues of St Gall, in particular the famous list of libri scottice scripti in MS 728. As he points out, none of the titles represent an identifiable Hiberno-Latin scholarly work, and some of the libri may have been even insular manuscripts from Britain. Remarkably, his comments on those clearly Irish manuscripts and fragments which have survived in St Gall are very short (there are only three lines on the gospels in MS 51); their significance cannot be invalidated by the sweeping remark that it is not clear whether they were in St Gall already in the period under discussion.
Chapter 4 deals with De duodecim abusiuis saeculi, a far-reaching Irish work on the twelve main evils. Meeder demonstrates that the St Gall scholars did not recognise the Irish origin of the text, but thought it was a work of Cyprian of Carthage. Based on an analysis of the associated contents of the four St Gall witnesses, Meeder concludes that there is no evidence of the involvement of Irish scholars or peregrini in the transfer of De XII abusiuis to St Gall, but one finds hints at an exchange with the centres of learning in Bavaria, Hesse and north-eastern France.
The Irish provenance of the work discussed in chapter 5, the Collectio canonum Hibernensis, must have been evident for the monks in St Gall. MS 243 contains an epilogue (which may have been copied from the exemplar) by someone called Eadberct whose Anglo-Saxon name can be found also in a library catalogue. Either he was the composer, he brought the manuscript to St Gall, or the cataloguers thought he was the author of the collection. The question is left unanswered, with the claim that it is unlikely that Irish peregrini brought the collection to St Gall because the Hibernensis copy in St Gall shows many similarities with a manuscript written on the Reichenau.
Chapter 6 discusses likewise close relatives of Irish exegetical and penitential texts found in manuscripts from St Gall and Reichenau; as for Ailerán's Interpretatio, Meeder proposes a text transmission via Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus and Walahfrid Strabo, while the text transmission of some penitentials reveal close scholarly traffic between eastern France and Alemannia. There is some redundancy in the indices: all titles in the notes are quoted with their full bibliographic data when they are mentioned for the first time though there is a broad list of references as well. We find a list of manuscripts (with no page numbers) although all manuscripts are mentioned in the index also.
On the basis of these six little studies it might seem quite plausible that St Gall did not have a gateway function connecting Ireland with medieval Europe, but had close connections with continental centres, especially north-eastern France and southern Germany. Unfortunately, Meeder chose only those examples which fit quite well into his scenario – remarkably, the famous St Gall Priscian (MS 904) is not even mentioned. Connections with other continental centres (why not to those with strong Irish connections, too?) and visits by peregrini are not mutually exclusive.
