The Festschrift volume Classica et Beneventana, presented to Virginia Brown on the occasion of her 65th birthday, brings together twenty-one insightful new essays by leading scholars devoted to the fields of classical reception and Latin palaeography. The authors investigate a wide-range of topics such as the development and application of the Beneventan script, comparative codicology, uses of early liturgical manuscripts, medieval artes and biblical texts and their readers, and the reception and dissemination of classical texts during the Italian Renaissance. Since 1970, Virginia Brown has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. She is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities in classical reception and Latin palaeography. Her numerous publications on the Beneventan script have dramatically altered our knowledge of the dissemination of this southern Italian book hand from 800 to 1600. Her editorial work for the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, as a member of the Editorial Board and since 1985 as Editor-in-Chief, has resulted in several learned volumes tracing the fortuna and study of classical authors from antiquity to the year 1600. As editor of Mediaeval Studies from 1974 to 1988, she single-handedly produced tomes noted for their scholarly rigor and acumen. This collection of essays serves as a fitting tribute to a scholar who, via her scholarly research and editorial work, has done so much to advance the fields of palaeography, codicology, and the history of classical scholarship.

The area whose capital was the southern Lombard city of Benevento developed a culture identified with the characteristic form of writing known as the Beneventan script, which was used throughout the area and was brought to perfection at the abbey of Montecassino in the late eleventh century. This repertory, along with other now-vanished or suppressed local varieties of music, give a far richer picture of the variety of musical practice in early medieval Europe than was formerly available. Thomas Forrest Kelly has identified and collected the surviving sources of an important repertory of early medieval music; this is the so-called Beneventan Chant, used in southern Italy in the early middle ages, before the adoption there of the now-universal music known as Gregorian chant. Because it was deliberately suppressed in the course of the eleventh century, this music survives mostly in fragments and palimpsests, and the fascinating process of restoring the repertory piece by piece is told in the studies in this book. A companion volume to this collection also by Professor Kelly details the practice of Medieval music.

This study of Santa Maria del Gualdo Mazzocca, a Benedictine priory, and then abbey, directly dependent upon the papacy, offers a remarkable glimpse into the nature of monastic life in the middle ages.

Latin books are among the most numerous surviving artifacts of the Late Antique, Mediaeval, and Renaissance periods in European history; written in a variety of formats and scripts, they preserve the literary, philosophical, scientific, and religious heritage of the West. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography surveys these books, with special emphasis on the variety of scripts in which they were written. Palaeography, in the strictest sense, examines how the changing styles of script and the fluctuating shapes of individual letters allow the date and the place of production of books to be determined. More broadly conceived, palaeography examines the totality of early book production, ownership, dissemination, and use. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography includes essays on major types of script (Uncial, Insular, Beneventan, Visigothic, Gothic, etc.), describing what defines these distinct script types, and outlining when and where they were used. It expands on previous handbooks of the subject by incorporating select essays on less well-studied periods and regions, in particular late mediaeval Eastern Europe. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography is also distinguished from prior handbooks by its extensive focus on codicology and on the cultural settings and contexts of mediaeval books. Essays treat of various important features, formats, styles, and genres of mediaeval books, and of representative mediaeval libraries as intellectual centers. Additional studies explore questions of orality and the written word, the book trade, glossing and glossaries, and manuscript cataloguing. The extensive plates and figures in the volume will provide readers wtih clear illustrations of the major points, and the succinct bibliographies in each essay will direct them to more detailed works in the field.

Bringing together contributions from art history, architectural history, historiography and history of law, this volume is the first comprehensive exploration of the manifold meanings of foundation, dedication and consecration rituals and narratives in early modern culture.

The goal of Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods is to plunder ancient and medieval literary sources to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. This is volume 1 of a three-volume set of Boccaccio’s complete 15-book work. It contains a famous defense of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a Christian world.

The liturgical chant sung in the churches of Southern Italy between the ninth and thirteenth centuries reflects the multiculturalism of a territory in which Romans, Franks, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, Jews, and Muslims were all present with various titles and political roles. Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas examines a specific genre, the prosulas that were composed to embellish and expand pre-existing liturgical chants. Widespread in medieval Europe, prosulas were highly cultivated in southern Italy, especially by the nuns, monks, and clerics of the city of Benevento. These texts shed light on the creativity of local cantors to provide new meanings to the liturgy in accordance with contemporary waves of religious spirituality, and to experiment with a novel musical style in which a syllabic setting is paired with the free-flowing melody of the parent chant. In their representing an epistemological 'beyond', and in their interconnectedness with the parent chant, these prosulas can be likened to modern hypertexts. In this book, author Luisa Nardini presents the first comprehensive study to integrate textual and musical analyses of liturgical prosulas as they were recorded in Beneventan manuscripts. Discussing general features of prosulas in southern Italy and their relation to contemporary liturgical genres (e.g., tropes, sequences, hymns), Nardini firmly situates Beneventan prosulas within the broader context of European musical history. An invaluable reference for the field, Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas provides a new understanding of the phonetic and morphological transformations of the Latin language in medieval Italy, and clarifies the use of perennially puzzling features of Beneventan notation.