Hastings (2013 Congress)

Justin Hastings
(Loyola University Chicago),
“Newberry Library MS Case 2.5 and the Investiture Controversy”
Abstract of Paper at the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, 2013)

Session on “Medieval Manuscripts in North American Collections”
Sponsored by King Alfred’s Notebook LLC and the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
Organized by Scott Gwara (King Alfred’s Notebook LLC / University of South Carolina — Columbia)

[First published on our first website on 22 May 2013]

An eleventh-century French codex, now Chicago, Newberry Library, MS Case 2.5 represents an eclectic collection of eight texts, written in Caroline hands of varying quality on parchment of equally variant quality and even size.  So confused and unconventionally beautiful is the collection of texts preserved between the bindings of this manuscript that it is not even listed in Paul Saenger’s A Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Western Manuscript Books at the Newberry Library (1989).

Despite its unassuming appearance, it is my argument that a tantalizing detail on folio 43v of Newberry MS Case 2.5 suggests a context for the manuscript that places it at the center of the late-eleventh century Investiture Controversy.  This paper further argues that, based on material evidence, there is reason to believe that the Newberry manuscript and Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS. N. 118 superiore, which contains the sole extant copy of Manegold of Lautenbach’s Liber contra Wolfhelmum, together form the textual apparatus of the pro-Gregorian polemical response to the accusations leveled by the imperial polemicists against the papacy.

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Note: The Abstract for another Paper by Justin Hastings at our Congress Sessions appears here:

Hastings (2018 Congress).

We thank him for his contributions to our Sessions, both sponsored and co-sponsored, as well as to other Events.

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