Volume / Number: S / 1744

• Paris France Bibliothèque Nationale de France Lat. 5018 (foll. 78–93)
• Paris France Bibliothèque Nationale de France Lat. 7906 (59, 59 bis–88)

Written in Western Germany, presumably in the same area, not far from Lorsch, which produced Vienna MSS 1556, 2141, and 2147 (CLA 10.1502, 1505, 1506). Apparently the manuscript was designed to contain the origins and history of the Franks. On fol. 81v of Lat. 7906 the Franconian humanist Sebastian de Rotenhan (†1534) noted that he had transcribed part of the text ‘preter iussum domini prepositi’; fol. 59, which had served as a jacket of a book, was discovered at Basel and presented by Max Bider in 1877 to the Basel University Library which in turn donated it to the Bibliothèque Nationale. The Bede part in MS Lat. 5018 (foll. 78–93) is bound together with an eleventh-century manuscript, which had belonged to Pierre Pithou (†1596) and to J. A. de Thou (†1617); this may be true also of the Bede, and a sixteenth-century note on fol. 93v ‘gratia cum Francisco’ may possibly refer to François Pithou (†1621).

Script, by at least two hands, is a tiny variety of a type found in Vienna MSS 1556, 2141, 2147 (CLA 10.1502, 1505, 1506): both a and open a, d and ꝺ are used; h in the first hand has the shaft leaning to the left; v-shaped u occurs suprascript at line-end; the cedilla of e resembles a small ornate 9. In Lat. 7906 on fol. 84 the somewhat distorted Nota Tironiana ‘hinc’ in the midst of the minuscule; a sixteenth-century hand partially transcribed interlinearly the text of fol. 81v.

☛Index Tironianorum here and here.