Corbie

CORBIE. - Small town situated near the confluence of the Encre with the Somme, 15 km. from Amiens, in the department of the Somme, in Picardy (France). Clotaire III (657-61) and his mother Bathilde founded there an abbey in honore sancti Petri et sancti Pauli principum apostolorum et sancti Stephani protomartiris, as is read in the founding diploma itself, which also contains the privileges immediately received, such as immunity and exemption. It was subjected to Luxeuil by the abbot Waldebert, and from Luxeuil it received its first volumes. The church of the monastery was consecrated in 667 by the bishop Bertefred. A diploma of Chilperic II dated 29 Apr. 716 refers to the works of the monastic library. The abbey obtained privileges from the popes Benedict III (855-58) and Nicholas I (858-67). Its prestige grew in the Carolingian period; Desiderius, king of the Lombards, was held prisoner there and died there (774). Great fame was attained by the monastic school of C. under the ninth abbot, St. Adalhard, who sent a group of his monks to Westphalia, where the emperor Louis the Pious founded the Benedictine monastery of Corvey or New C. (diocese of Paderborn).

In 1137 a fire destroyed the monastic buildings, which were however immediately rebuilt on a large scale.

Philip Augustus (1165-1223) endowed C. with a communal charter. In 1550, as the abbey declined, commendatory abbots were appointed; from 1618, however, it flourished again when it was incorporated into the new Benedictine Congregation of St. Maur.

On 15 Aug. 1636 C. was occupied by the Spaniards and then retaken by Louis XIII on 14 Nov. of the same year. Louis XIV (1638-1715) had the city's fortifications demolished. The library was in danger of being confiscated, and so the Congregation of St. Maur decided to transfer it to St-Germain-des-Prés; about 400 manuscripts were deposited in Paris, the Saint-Germain collection (nos. 11504-14231). Around 1791 a secretary of the Russian embassy, Peter Dubrovsky, had about fifty Latin manuscripts removed from St-Germain-des-Prés, among them twenty-five of the best; all of them went to the imperial library of St. Petersburg. In 1790 the abbey was suppressed; the following year four hundred volumes were sent to Amiens, to the municipal library, and 75 entered the National Library of Paris in 1803. After the suppression, part of the abbey buildings was demolished, and today only some enclosure walls remain, a monumental gate, a well, and remains of 18th-century buildings; the church of St. Stephen has become a parish church.

The history of the library of C. was summarized by L. Delisle (Recherches sur l'ancienne Bibliothèque de C., Paris 1861; id., in Le Cabinet des mss. de la bibliothèque Nationale, II, ibid. 1874, pp. 104-41, 427-40). In the 8th century the scriptorium Corbienne had Anglo-Saxon monks who used insular script, especially in abbreviations (W. Lindsay, The old Script of C., its abbreviation symbols, in Revue des bibliothèques, 22 [1912], pp. 405-29).

Mabillon had already classified a characteristic type of script of C., under the name "Lombardic," which Traube changed to "ancient script of C."; two codices of this type, however, are dated between the years 810-20. Subsequently other types were brought to light, likewise of the 8th century. Of these the oldest, type b, is that offered by a group of codices of the first half of the 8th century (E. A. Loew, Studia palaeographica, Munich 1910, p. 36; S. Tafel, Un type français de minuscule précarolingienne, in Revue Charlemagne, 2 [1912], pp. 105-15; A. Wilmart, L'index liturgique de St-Thierry, in Revue Bénédictine, 30 [1913], p. 439, n. 11; another type, called that of abbot Leuticarius (751-68), offers characteristics of both semi-uncial and minuscule (P. Liebaert, Some early script of the C. scriptorium, in Palaeographia Latina, 1 [1922], p. 62). The type called that of abbot Mordramnus (772-80) presents round and regular letters like Carolingian minuscule; famous is the Bible now in the municipal library of Amiens (ms. 6, 7, 9, 11, 12), which was made to be written by the said abbot (cf. Ph. Lauer, La réforme carolingienne de l'écriture latine et l'école calligraphique de C., in Mémoires de l'Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, 13 [1924], p. 19). Also to be remembered are type e-n (8th century), and type a-b (first half of the 9th century). Lindsay wished to distinguish a type a, which however reduces to a variety of Merovingian. It seems that Beneventan exerted a certain influence on the script of C. in the 8th century (for the script of C. see also the entry CAROLINA, SCRITTURA: scritture précaroline).

More recent studies in the scriptorium of C. are those carried out by O. Dobiache-Rojdestvenskaia (Un codex insulaire des VIIe-IXe siècles à C., in Bulletin de l'Académie des sciences de l'U.R.S.S. Classe des Humanités, Leningrad 1930, pp. 183-95; id., Questions corbiennes, in W. Stach and H. Walter, Studien zur lat. Dichtung des M. A., Ehrengabe für Karl Strecker, Dresden 1931, pp. 18-28). The same author then gave a systematic treatment of the manuscripts of the scriptorium Corbienne now in the library of Leningrad in her study: Histoire de l'atelier graphique de C. de 651 à 830 reflété dans les manuscrits de Leningrad (in Académie des sciences de l'U.R.S.S., 2nd series, fasc. XLIII (Leningrad 1934).

L. W. Jones finally, in 1947, summarized the whole activity of the school of C. (The scriptorium of C., in Speculum, 22 [1947], pp. 191-204).

The scriptorium still flourished in the 9th century, as is shown by the sacramentary of Rodradus of 853 (in that century one of the most famous scholars of C. was Paschasius Radbertus, d. in 865), and it continued its activity until the 13th century, as the catalogues of its manuscripts attest.

The oldest catalogue, of the 11th century, fragmentary, comprises 45 numbers (Cod. Vat. Lat. Regiments, 520); the second, earlier than the end of the 11th century, is found in ms. Phillips 1865 in the royal library of Berlin; the third, from the beginning of the 13th century, is the most complete. With the decline of the monastery, however, the library was several times robbed of many of its manuscripts; during the 16th century some ended up in other libraries, such as Berlin, Leiden (Philippici 1669, 1735, 1776, 1865; and Lat. 30), Oxford (Canonici, script. eccl. 112), Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale; the De Thou, Dupuy, Notre-Dame collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale, now lat. 5730, 6796, 8051, 8777, 17655, 18311, 18315), and the Vatican (Cod. Vat. Lat. 340 and Vat. Regim. 133).

From the catalogues cited and the surviving manuscripts one can gain an idea of the wealth and importance of the Corbie library, which comprised biblical manuscripts, calendars, martyrologies, sacramentaries, missals, antiphonaries, evangeliaries, lectionaries, books of hours and breviaries, lives of saints, rituals, obituary books, liturgical literature, musical manuscripts, etc.

Enrico Josi