Regino of  Prum 

Regino of Prüm (Latin: Regino Prumiensis, German: Regino von Prüm; died 915) was a Benedictine churchman, who served as abbot of Prüm (892–99) and later of Saint Martin's at Trier, and chronicler, whose Chronicon is an important source for late Carolingian history.


















 

Biography

According to the statements of a later era, Regino was the son of noble parents and was born at the stronghold of Altrip on the Rhine near Speyer at an unknown date. From his election as abbot and from his writings, it is evident that he had entered the Benedictine Order, probably at Prüm itself, and that he had been a diligent student. The rich and celebrated Imperial Abbey of Prüm suffered greatly during the 9th century from the marauding incursions of the Norsemen. It had been twice seized and ravaged, in 882 AD and 892 AD. After its second devastation by the Danes, the abbot Farabert resigned his office and Regino was elected his successor in 892 AD. His labours for the restoration of the devastated abbey were hampered by the struggle between contending parties in Lorraine.

In 899 AD Regino was driven from his office by Richarius, later Bishop of Liège, the brother of Count Gerhard and count Mattfried of Hainaut. Richarius was made abbot; Regino resigned the position and retired to Trier, where he was honourably received by Archbishop Ratbod and was appointed abbot of St Martin's, a house which he later reformed. He supported the archbishop in the latter's efforts to carry out ecclesiastical reforms in that troubled era, rebuilt the Abbey of St. Martin that had been laid waste by the Norsemen, accompanied the archbishop on visitations, and used his leisure for writing. Regino died at Trier in 915 AD and was buried in St. Maximin's Abbey, Trier, his tomb being discovered there in 1581.

Works

Regino's works are edited in volume 132 of Migne's Patrologia Latina.

De harmonica institutione and Tonarius

Regino's earliest work was Epistola de harmonica institutione, a treatise on music which he wrote in the form of a letter to Archbishop Radbod. Its primary objective was to improve the liturgical singing in the churches of the diocese and probably to ensure Radbod's support for this. He also wrote the Tonarius, a collection of chants.
 

Chronicon

Regino's most influential work is his Chronicon, a history of the world from the commencement of the Christian era to 906, especially the history of affairs in Lorraine and the neighbourhood. It was dedicated to Adalberon, bishop of Augsburg (†909).

The first book, which ends in the year 741 AD with the death of Charles Martel, consists mainly of extracts from Bede, Paulus Diaconus and other writers. Of the second book (741-906 AD), the first part is a long excerpt of the Royal Frankish Annals down to 813, the latter part - from 814 AD onwards - being original and valuable, although suffering from faulty chronology. If the author's own statement is to be believed, he has here relied chiefly upon tradition and hearsay for his information. The work was continued to 967 by a monk of Trier, possibly Adalbert, archbishop of Magdeburg.

Regino's chronicle is an important source on Bulgarian medieval history in that it is the only contemporary text hinting at the organisation of the Council of Preslav ("… [Boris I] gathered his entire empire and placed his younger son [Simeon I] as prince…").

Historians who made use of Regino's chronicle include Cosmas of Prague.

The chronicle was first printed at Mainz in 1521.
 

De ecclesiasticis disciplinis

Regino also drew up, at the request of his friend and patron Radbod, Archbishop of Trier (d. 915), a collection of canons, Libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis, dedicated to Hatto I, Archbishop of Mainz. It was a work on ecclesiastical discipline for use in ecclesiastical visitations. The work is divided into 434 sections. The title of the work in Migne's edition is Libellus DE ECCLESIASTICIS DISCIPLINIS ET RELIGIONE CHRISTIANA, COLLECTUS Ex jussu domini metropolitani Rathbodi Trevericae urbis episcopi, a Reginone quondam abbate Prumiensis monasterii, ex diversis sanctorum Patrum conciliis et decretis Romanorum pontificum. Substantial portions of this work were included in the Decretum Burchardi of 1012.

Section 364 (corresponding to Burchard 10.1) is the so-called Canon Episcopi (after its incipit Ut episcopi episcoporumque ministri omnibus viribus elaborare studeant) dealing with popular superstition.

 

 

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Ratpert of St Gallen 

Ratpert of St Gallen (ca.855 - ca.911) was a scholar, writer, chronicler and poet at the Abbey of Saint Gall. He wrote in Medieval Latin and in Old High German.

Life

Ratpert probably entered the monastery as an oblate while still a child. The monastery operated two schools in parallel: the "inner school" prepared pupils for the monastic life while the "outer school" trained boys for the secular priesthood. Ratpert attended the St Gallen monastic "inner school", so was destined by his schooling to become a monk.

Ratpert's contemporaries in the "Inner School" included Notker the Poet and the charismatic poet-polymath Tuotilo of St Gallen: the three later became close colleagues in the monastery. Meanwhile an "outer school" contemporary was the combative Salomo, later Bishop of Constance and Abbot at St Gallen itself. Ratpert's teachers were Iso and the (by provenance Irish) Moengal. Moengal had originally arrived with his uncle Marcus, an itinerant bishop, when they turned up at St Gallen as pilgrims, visiting the shrine of their compatriot, Saint Gallus. The uncle, Marcus, had moved on while Moengal had stayed at St Gallen and entered the monastery. Here the monks renamed him Marcellus (Little Marcus), recalling the name of his departed uncle.

Ratpert took his own monastic vows some time round 873. The earliest surviving example of his writing than can be firmly dated is a legal deed dated 29 May 876. He himself taught at the Monastery School for many years. The last example of his work as a deed writer that can be dated was produced on 10 February 902. His precise year of death is not known, but has been placed by recent research around 911. The month and day of his year were 25 October, and his name is recorded under this day in the monastery's Book of the Dead.
 

Works

In addition to his duties as monastery school master and his activities as a writer of legal records, Ratpert produced poetry and chronicled the History of The Abbey. Little of his poetry has survived.

His other works include the All Saints' Day Litany, "Ardua spes mundi" (*The World's highest hope"),) the Eucharist song "Laudes, omnipotens, ferimus" ("We bring you praise, all powerful one"), an Old High German "St Gallen Song" and his Chronicle of the Monastery, "Casus sancti Galli" (literally "The Matter of St Gallen"). The Chronicle of the Monastery was subsequently, in the eleventh century, continued by Ekkehard IV (ca.980 - ca.1056) who at the time was also in charge of the Monastery School. Ratpert's original "St Gallen Song" survives today only in the form of its Latin translation, which was also penned by Ekkehard IV.

 

 

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Notker the Stammerer 

Notker the Stammerer (Latin: Notcerus Balbulus) (c. 840 – 6 April 912), also called Notker I, Notker the Poet or Notker of Saint Gall, was a musician, author, poet, and Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Saint Gall in modern Switzerland. He is commonly accepted to be the "Monk of Saint Gall" (Monachus Sangallensis) who wrote De Carolo Magno, a book of anecdotes about the Emperor Charlemagne.











 

Biography

Notker was born around 840, to a distinguished family. He would seem to have been born at Jonschwil on the River Thur, south of Wil, in the modern canton of Saint Gall in Switzerland; some sources claim Elgg to be his place of birth. He studied with Tuotilo at Saint Gall's monastic school, and was taught by Iso of St. Gallen (de), and the Irishman, Moengall. He became a monk there and is mentioned as librarian in 890 and as master of guests in 892–4. He was chiefly active as a teacher, and displayed refinement of taste as poet and author

Ekkehard IV, the biographer of the monks of Saint Gall, lauds him as "delicate of body but not of mind, stuttering of tongue but not of intellect, pushing boldly forward in things Divine, a vessel of the Holy Spirit without equal in his time". He died in 912. He was beatified in 1512.
 

Works

He completed Erchanbert's chronicle, arranged a martyrology, composed a metrical biography of Saint Gall, and authored other works.

In his martyrology, he appeared to corroborate one of St Columba's miracles. St Columba, being an important father of Irish monasticism, was also important to St Gall and thus to Notker's own monastery. Adomnan of Iona had written that at one point Columba had through clairvoyance seen a city in Italy near Rome being destroyed by fiery sulphur as a divine punishment and that three thousand people had perished. And shortly after Columba saw this, sailors from Gaul arrived to tell the news of it. Notker claimed in his martyrology that this event happened and that an earthquake had destroyed a city which was called 'new'. It is unclear what this city was that Notker was claiming, although some thought it may have been Naples (previously called 'Neapolis' - new city). However Naples was destroyed by a volcano in 512 before Columba was born, and not during Columba's lifetime.

His Liber Hymnorum, created between 881 and 887, is an early collection of Sequences, which he called "hymns", mnemonic poems for remembering the series of pitches sung during a melisma in plainchant, especially in the Alleluia. It is unknown how many or which of the works contained in the collection are his. The hymn Media Vita, was erroneously attributed to him late in the Middle Ages.

Ekkehard IV wrote of fifty sequences composed by Notker. He was formerly considered to have been the inventor of the sequence, a new species of religious lyric, but this is now considered doubtful, though he did introduce the genre into Germany. It had been the custom to prolong the Alleluia in the Mass before the Gospel, modulating through a skillfully harmonized series of tones. Notker learned how to fit the separate syllables of a Latin text to the tones of this jubilation; this poem was called the sequence (q.v.), formerly called the "jubilation". (The reason for this name is uncertain.) From 881–7 Notker dedicated a collection of such verses to Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, but it is not known which or how many are his.

The Monk of Saint Gall

The "Monk of Saint Gall" (Latin: Monachus Sangallensis; the name is not contemporary, being given by modern scholars), the ninth-century writer of a volume of didactic eulogistic anecdotes regarding the Emperor Charlemagne, is now commonly believed to be Notker the Stammerer. This monk is known from his work to have been a native German-speaker, deriving from the Thurgau, only a few miles from the Abbey of Saint Gall; the region is also close to where Notker is believed to have derived from. The monk himself relates that he was raised by Adalbert, a former soldier who had fought against the Saxons, the Avars ("Huns" in his text) and the Slavs under the command of Kerold, brother of Hildegard, Charlemagne's second wife; he was also a friend of Adalbert's son, Werinbert, another monk at Saint Gall, who died as the book was in progress. His teacher was Grimald von Weißenburg (de), the Abbot of Saint Gall from 841 to 872, who was, the monk claims, himself a pupil of Alcuin.

The monk's untitled work, referred to by modern scholars as De Carolo Magno ("Concerning Charles the Great") or Gesta Caroli Magni ("The Deeds of Charles the Great"), is not a biography but consists instead of two books of anecdotes relating chiefly to the Emperor Charlemagne and his family, whose virtues are insistently invoked. It was written for Charles the Fat, great-grandson of Charlemagne, who visited Saint Gall in 883. It has been scorned by traditional historians, who refer to the Monk as one who "took pleasure in amusing anecdotes and witty tales, but who was ill-informed about the true march of historical events", and describe the work itself as a "mass of legend, saga, invention and reckless blundering": historical figures are claimed as living when in fact dead; claims are attributed to false sources (in one instance, the Monk claims that "to this King Pepin [the Short] the learned Bede has devoted almost an entire book of his Ecclesiastical History"; no such account exists in Bede's history – unsurprisingly, given that Bede died in 735 during the reign of Charlemagne's grandfather Charles Martel); and Saint Gall is frequently referenced as a location in anecdotes, regardless of historical verisimilitude (Pepin the Hunchback, for example, is supposed to have been sent to Saint Gall as punishment for his rebellion, and – in a trope owed to Livy's tale of Tarquin and the poppies – earns a promotion to rich Prüm Abbey after advising Charlemagne through an implicit parable of hoeing thistles to execute another group of rebels). The Monk also mocks and criticizes bishops and the prideful, high-born incompetent, showy in dress and fastidious and lazy in habits, whilst lauding the wise and skillful government of the Emperor with nods to the deserving poor. Several of the Monk's tales, such as that of the nine rings of the Avar stronghold, have been used in modern biographies of Charlemagne.

The Monk of Saint Gall is commonly believed to be Notker the Stammerer: Louis Halphen has delineated the points of similarity between the two: the Monk claims to be old, toothless and stammerering; and both share similar interests in church music, write with similar idioms, and are fond of quoting Virgil. The text is dated to the 880s from mentions in it of Carloman (died 880), half-brother of Charles the Fat, the "circumscribed lands" of Carloman's son Arnulf, who succeeded as King of the Germans in 887, and the destruction of Prüm Abbey, which occurred in 882.

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