The redoubtable Irishman Columbanus (c.543–615) established the monastery of Bobbio at the northern tip of the Apennines south of Pavia and Piacenza about the year 613. He had received his monastic initiation at Bangor (County Down) but eventually parted from his homeland and monastery with a few companions to embark on Irish monastic peregrinatio, the ascetic renunciation of ties of blood and affection to family and clan. Arriving in Francia, Columbanus successfully petitioned the Merovingian king Childebert to grant him land for a monastery, which became the kingdom's most famous Celtic foundation, Luxeuil. There he imposed a rule of monastic life notorious for its severity: the slightest of failings (even coughing at the wrong time) was punished with lashings, whose number depended on the severity imputed to the offence. Columbanus placed heavy demands on the monks' stamina in prayer. While the number of psalms at most offices was fixed, the number at matins depended on the varying length of the night from season to season. The heaviest burden fell on winter weekends, when the entire Psalter was recited at matins over the course of Saturday and Sunday (in addition to the approximately fifty psalms required by the other offices).

Columbanus was inclined to speak his mind, heedless of the consequences. He berated Gregory the Great over the question of the date of Easter and implied that his successor, Boniface IV, vacillated in the face of heresy. His excoriation of sexual misconduct at the Merovingian court did not endear him to the dowager Queen Brunhild, who managed to have him driven from the monastery he founded. Monks of Gallic birth had to remain at Luxeuil, but an indeterminate number of others chose to follow their abbot into exile. Probably some of those left behind were only too pleased at the departure of their severe abbot-founder.

Columbanus, at an advanced age, renewed his wandering, heading east as far as Lake Constance, where a companion, Gallus, parted from his revered mentor to found a monastery in present-day Switzerland. Named after its founder, the monastery of St Gall became a centre of culture, noted among music historians for the development of a distinctive system of notation and as a ‘nursery’ for the art of tropes and sequences.

Surprisingly, the orthodox Columbanus finally decided to settle in a region controlled by the Lombards, heretical Arians and antagonists of the papacy.Footnote ¹ As it happened, King Agilulf's wife, Theodelinda, was a Catholic, and the king himself appears to have had Catholic sympathies. He had encouraged Columbanus to preach against heresy and now bestowed on him a church dedicated to St Peter ‘sita in loco qui nuncupatur Bobio’ that became the nucleus of the most celebrated monastery in the kingdom. Following Columbanus's death, the monks of Bobbio revolted against the extreme severity of his Regula coenobialis, as had happened previously at Luxeuil, where a ‘mixed rule’ was introduced after his departure. This observance combined the rules of Benedict and Columbanus in proportions that suited the local foundation. Something similar must have been in force at Bobbio. The practice was widely imitated until Carolingian monastic reforms of the early ninth century imposed the Rule of Benedict in its entirety.

A document dated 972 indicates that Bobbio had amassed considerable wealth and vast tracts of land that produced estimable quantities of agricultural products. When the bishops of the adjoining dioceses of Piacenza and Tortona looked out of their windows, they coveted what they saw, as did their brethren in the local aristocracy. The monks tried to defend their rights by producing forgeries that invoked imperial privilege or papal exemption, but to no avail. The absence for many years of an elected abbot left the monastery without a defender who could oppose the expropriations of secular and ecclesiastical lords. Inevitably, there began a decline in monastic discipline and number of vocations. The most glorious era of Bobbio's existence was inaugurated during the abbacy of Agilulf (883–96), with whom four or five of the surviving manuscripts may be linked. The vicissitudes of fortune were not especially kind to Bobbio from the eleventh century onwards. Despite a brief revival in the fifteenth century, when the monastery was reorganised by the Congregation of Santa Giustina, its decline continued until the eventual dissolution in 1801.

Codice e liturgia a Bobbio can be divided into two large sections: a review of the liturgical books produced at Bobbio, the specifics of its liturgy, and the musical notation of the codices bobbienses, followed by a detailed catalogue of the surviving sources that covers nearly 300 pages. The author's historical survey (Chapter 1) focuses appropriately on the abbey's book production. She cites an inventory of the library produced around the time of Abbot Agilulf that lists 666 books (of which forty-three are extant). Classical authors and grammars are well represented, but the thirty-three liturgical books seem rather modest for a large monastery, perhaps indicating that portions of the inventory have been lost, or else that these books were not considered part of the official ‘library’. By the time another inventory was prepared (c.1461) only 243 codices remained. This inventory, which groups books by category, gives a summary of their contents and occasionally describes their bindings, many of which can be attributed to the ‘opera di restauro’ carried out by the monks of S. Giustina. The entries in this detailed catalogue are analysed very carefully, enabling Scappaticci to identify ten surviving missals of the twenty-two listed in the 1461 inventory.

Scappaticci chronicles the gradual dispersal of the library, which was ransacked by the first generation of humanists for manuscripts of classical authors. Many volumes were removed to Milan or Rome. In 1686 Jean Mabillon ‘borrowed’ two volumes later incorporated into the collection of St-Germain-des-Prés. One of these is the celebrated ‘Bobbio’ Missal (c.700), not mentioned in the present volume because its creation does not fall within the timespan covered, nor was it written at Bobbio.

Chapter 2 of Codice e liturgia a Bobbio expounds the history of the liturgical manuscripts written in the scriptorium of the abbey from the end of the tenth to the end of the twelfth century. Amply demonstrated is the fact that the scriptorium could still, despite diminishing resources, continue to turn out elegantly written (and in some cases illuminated) manuscripts. Many of the manuscripts surveyed had not escaped the eyes of scholars in the early twentieth century and, more recently, Giacomo Baroffio (who contributed a ‘presentazione’ to this volume) but Leandra Scappaticci has examined them far more closely than hitherto, revising several datings along the way. For example, she proposes dating the missal Turin, Bibl. Naz. Univ. F IV 2 to the late ninth and early tenth century, rejecting the previous consensus that attributed it to the eleventh century. She would, moreover, add to this missal several fragments (some palimpsest) still at Turin, three of them in the Archivio di Stato. In fact, the author has uncovered a considerable number of fragments and has brought together membra disiecta that were once part of complete manuscripts. All these findings about the chronology and constitution of the Bobbio manuscripts are conveniently summarised in three tables (pp. 45–55).

Chapter 3, devoted to the liturgy, offers a brief overview of the Office prescribed by Columbanus in his Regula coenobialis, which ceased to be observed at Bobbio long before the manuscripts that constitute the core repertory treated in Codici e liturgia a Bobbio were written. These books represent exclusively the Romano-Frankish liturgy of the Middle Ages. The most significant contribution of this chapter concerns the observance of the feast of St Columbanus and his two sainted successors, Attala and Bertulfus, and the dissemination of their offices. The three abbots were honoured at St Gall, evidence of a continuing relationship with Bobbio, which in turn honoured Gallus on two separate occasions during the liturgical year: his feast with its vigil, and the translation of the saint's relics.Footnote ²

The capsule history of notation that introduces Chapter 4 will be helpful to non-specialists, but the chapter consists mainly of tables in which the neumes of individual manuscripts are categorised according to the familiar late medieval terminology. The greatest variety of neume shapes is found in a well-known gradual–troper–sequentiary–processional (Turin, Bibl. Naz. Univ. G V 20; early eleventh century) and in a monastic breviary from the middle of the same century (F II 10). Scappaticci's survey of musical notation in Bobbio manuscripts reveals that throughout much of its history Bobbio remained a western outpost of St Gall notation. While this can easily be accounted for by the intimate ties that bound the respective founders, it is nonetheless surprising to find such an enduring enclave in this distant corner of Italy. Only with the advent of diastematic notation did a shift to ‘neumi propri dell'area emiliana’ occur. It seems that the neume tables in this chapter were reduced from a larger format, much to the detriment of the clarity of both neumes and text labels.

The centrepiece of the present volume is an impressive catalogue of thirty-six manuscripts and fragments written at Bobbio, listed alphabetically according the cities and libraries where the manuscripts are deposited (mostly in Turin). This is followed by a shorter catalogue (four entries) of membra disiecta that the author has united on palaeographical grounds. The brevity of this latter listing conceals the considerable palaeographical sleuthing that must have been required to recognise and bring together the remains of these (still fragmentary) manuscripts.

The catalogue description of each source is preceded by a summary tabulation that identifies its typology, date, number of folios, etc. This is followed by a meticulous codicological description and palaeographical analysis of the source, in several cases identifying multiple hands. The acuity that characterises these observations indicates how the author was able to identify so many hitherto unrecognised manuscripts as bobbiesi.

The degree of completeness in the description of contents varies, but for good reasons. Fragments (nos 1–13, 15, 25, 37–40), most of which are here identified for the first time, are accorded a full description of their contents. All the chants, prayers and readings are identified by incipit and supplied with references to published sources of the complete texts (Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex, Corpus Antiphonalium Officii, Corpus Orationum).Footnote ³ The liturgical context in earlier sources is left to the reader to determine. Homiliaries and collections of vitae sanctorum are exhaustively analysed, a significant feature that makes Codici e liturgia a Bobbio especially valuable for historians of these books. Each entry in the catalogue is complemented by a detailed bibliography and a list of published facsimiles of the manuscript, if any exist.

The first part of the closing section of ‘appendici e strumenti’ (pp. 457–511) offers a table with selected facsimiles of the copyists' hands identified by Scappaticci. Unfortunately, the letters and words appear against a dark grey background, thus making several of the examples virtually illegible. Four tables of ‘concordances’ indicate the dates of the Temporale and Sanctorale represented in manuscripts for the Mass and Office. Most of the columns in these tables are blank, since the liturgical tradition of the monastery from the tenth to the twelfth century is transmitted complete by very few sources. A final index lists the incipits of the large number of homilies preserved in the Bobbio sources. A bibliography, list of manuscripts and general index (of places and persons) precede indexes of loci textuales: biblical citations, hagiographical literature, chants (according to genre) and prayers of the Mass and Office.

Given the palaeographical emphasis of Codici e liturgia a Bobbio, it is only to be expected that there would be facsimiles of selected manuscript pages. Indeed, the reader is treated to twenty-nine full-page reproductions of high quality, all in full colour, eleven of which have neumes.Footnote ⁴ Plate VII reproduces a folio from G V 20 (146^v) with the introit for the natale of St Columbanus and the trope Divini fuerat. Particularly handsome are the two folios (140 and 127^v) from the twelfth-century gradual–troper–sequentiary–kyriale F IV 18 (plates XIX–XX) and a twelfth-century monastic antiphoner–lectionary (Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Varia 186 bis; plates XXIII–XXIV). The caption for Plate XII, from F II 10, a monastic breviary, promises fol. 231^v (St Columbanus), but reproduces instead fol. 87^v (Sts Protase and Gervase [end] and St John the Baptist [beginning]).

Such a generous provision of visual material and the overall production quality of this volume is a testament to the high standards of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The volumes available in the Monumenta Studia Instrumenta Liturgica series are listed at the end of this book. Its cover price of €39 is quite a bargain, for which one might also thank the Banca di Piacenza, under whose patronage it was published.