LIBER DIURNUS OF THE ROMAN PONTIFFS. - This title (not original) designates a collection of formulas of ecclesiastical documents, for the most part pontifical, preserved in two different redactions in three manuscripts of the 9th century, which offers singularly important information on the administration and the discipline of the Church in the 6th-9th centuries.
It was believed to be a formulary of the pontifical Chancery, used daily for the drafting of documents: very recent studies have shaken this conviction and, although research is still in progress, there is at present a tendency to consider it a canonical collection of a private character, which does not diminish the documentary value of the individual texts.
I. DISCOVERY AND FIRST EDITION
In 1646 the famous Vatican librarian Luca Holste rediscovered in Rome, among the codices of the monastery of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, an ancient manuscript whose exceptional importance he understood. On the very day of the discovcovery (23 July) he gave notice of it to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, his illustrious friend.
LIBER DIURNUS ROMANORUM PONTIFICUM. - The Decretum of the election of the Pope and the Professio of the newly elected in the different redactions of the Vatican (f. 69°) and Ambrosian (p. 132) codices: the text of the V. probably refers to the election of Gregory II (715) and that of the A. probably refers to Leo III (795) - Vatican Archive and Ambrosian Library.
Immediately lively controversies began to arise around this text, which had become famous. Having obtained permission from the abbot of S. Croce, Ilarione Rancati, Holste made a copy of it, certainly thinking of a prompt publication. It was later fabled that this copy was executed in the space of a single night and "against the faith given," but A. Ratti has definitively debunked the legend.
Fr. Sirmond sent to Rome the other manuscript, recently become known, which was to be found in the Jesuit College of Clermont, and the edition was being prepared: but Holste was held back by the worry that the condemnation of Pope Honorius expressed in the Professio fidei of the Pope would be exploited, if it were not properly understood, by the enemies of the Church. It was a time of polemical tension between France and the Pope, in which the claims of the Gallican Church and pontifical infallibility were questions of political currency. The authority attributed to the Formulary was undisputed: it was held to be an official book of the pontifical Chancery and to have been written in the 7th-8th centuries. Lacking a title, it was derived from the Collectio canonum of Deusdedit, which reported eleven formularies, three of which with the indication "Ex libro Romanorum Pontificum qui dicitur (vocatur, appellatur) Diurnus."
It seems that Holste hoped to publish it by 1650, according to a small sheet written in his own hand, in which the title page thus prepared may be read: Diurnus sive vetus formularium, quo S. Rom. Ecclesia ante annos M. utebatur. Lucas Holstenius edidit cum notis. Romae, typis Lud. Griniani, MDCL. The approval of the censors was lacking, and at Holste's death (2 Feb. 1661) the work, for the most part printed, was unfinished. Cardinal Barberini, his universal legatee, hastened to solicit permission to print; Fr. Giovanni Bona, consultor of the Index, expressed the judgment (extra congregationem, that is, without official character) that, since the announced notes had not been found and since the condemnation of Pope Honorius "pravis
Haereticorum assertionibus fomentum impendit, praestat non divulgari opus." The edition was therefore suspended, not suppressed; the printed sheets were kept in a room of the Vatican Palace until 1685 when, completed with the title page and the missing pp. 225-32, they were put into circulation with a false date: L. D. R. P. ex antiquissimo codice ms. nunc primum in lucem editus studio Lucae Holstenii. Romae, typis Iosephi Vannacci, 1658. A few years earlier, in 1680, the Jesuit Fr. Garnier had published the L.D.R.P. from Sirmond's codex. The vicissitudes of this laborious edition and the suspicion that greeted Garnier's edition show the atmosphere of fear of political repercussions. In 1662 even the apostolic nuncio in Paris intervened to have delivered to him by Msgr. Pietro de Marca, archbishop of Toulouse and later of Paris, the few sheets that Holste had sent him two years earlier. Such misgivings have in part lasted until the last decades of the past century, when the progress of historical criticism overcame unjustified susceptibilities. It is no longer the question of Pope Honorius that is at the center of interest in the L.D.R.P., but the body of precious information that it offers and its very nature, its internal formation, the date of its composition, its use.
II. MANUSCRIPTS
In 1889 a third ancient copy was found by Msgr. Antonio Ceriani, so that there are in all three manuscripts on which knowledge of the text is based: 1) Codex Vaticanus (=V), the oldest, attributed to the end of the 8th century or rather to the beginning of the 9th; it is the one discovered by Holste at S. Croce, where it remained until the end of the 18th century, then passing to the Vatican Archives: following the fate of the latter it was taken to Paris in 1810 and returned to Rome in 1815. It seems certain that the codex, before being at S. Croce, belonged to the monastery of Nonantola. 2) Codex Claromontanus (=C), brought by Fr. Sirmond from Italy in 1608 and deposited in the College of Clermont, disappeared after 1746 with the sale of the Library that followed the suppression of the Jesuits. It was thought lost; in 1937 it was donated to the Benedictine monastery of Egmont, in Holland. It is attributed to the middle of the 9th century. 3) Codex Ambrosianus (=A), purchased for the Ambrosian Library by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1606, comes from Bobbio; it seems to correspond to the Diurnus sancti Gregorii liber mentioned in a 10th-century catalogue of Bobbio.
To the 17th and 18th centuries belong six other manuscripts, copies made by scholars. In addition to this, eleven formularies are also handed down through the Collectio Canonum of Deusdedit, dedicated in 1087 to Victor III (v. the ed. of Wolf von Glanvell, Paderborn 1905, bk. II, pp. 109-12; bk. III, pp. 145-50; bk. IV, p. 427); one formulary is included in the Decretum Gratianum, c. 8, dist. XVI.
III. THE TEXT
The collection is made up of documents and parts of documents reduced to formularies, with the date suppressed and proper names replaced by the pronoun ille; only a few escape this rule by retaining proper names. The number and order of the formularies is not the same in the three manuscripts: cod. V contains 99 formularies, though incomplete at the end; cod. C contains 100, of which 92 are in common with V and 8 are new; cod. A contains 106 (117 in the Ratti edition, because formulary I of cod. V bears the numbers I-XII), of which the last three are not included in the other manuscripts.
All three codices begin with a series of examples relating to the manner of expressing the superscriptio and the subscriptio in letters addressed by the pope to various persons. The following formularies up to XXX are likewise in the same order in the three codices; the remaining ones are in a different order; in cod. V texts on related subjects recur at intervals, while in cod. A and C there is a more orderly distribution of subjects, rightly regarded as proof of a later redaction; the order of C is not entirely known, but it seems to agree in general with cod. A. In citations it is customary to refer to the numbering of the Sickel edition, which follows the order of cod. V, adding at the end eight formularies from cod. C (from the Garnier edition).
IV. DATE OF THE COLLECTION AND DATE OF THE INDIVIDUAL FORMULAS
The terminus post quem non for the formation of the collection is evidently given by the age of the manuscripts; that is, for the redaction of codex V, the end of the 8th century or the early years of the 9th, and for the redaction of codices C and A respectively the first half and the beginning of the second half of the same 9th century. The other terminus, the post quem, is derived from the text itself, which attributes the most recent formula to the year 795.
Far more complex and in many respects more important is the dating of the individual formulas, since they do not belong to one and the same period. A good number of them undoubtedly go back to St. Gregory the Great (Peitz); perhaps some are pre-Gregorian, such as formulas 73 and 85, which Peitz traces back to the beginning of the 5th century; formula 87 refers to the restoration of the monastery of St. Stephen at St. Paul Outside the Walls carried out under Gregory II (715-31); many name the Emperor with reference to the Empire before Charlemagne, and the Exarch of Italy, which ceased in 751; formula 93 names Queen Cynegidra with reference to the years 787-88.
It is certain, therefore, that the L.D.R.P. does not represent the historical conditions of a given moment, but is made up of documents from different periods, some of which were no longer current at the time when the manuscripts were copied.
V. NATURE OF THE WORK
Until the studies of Th. Sickel there had been no doubts about the unitary character of the collection, which was regarded as the work of an unknown compiler. Sickel recognized in it a successive formation in three stages: the Collectio I (formulas 1-63 of cod. V), the oldest nucleus, formed around the year 625; the Appendix I (formulas 64-81), added at the end of the 7th century; the Collectio II (formulas 82-99) from the time of Adrian I, and the Appendix II (formulas 100-107), added shortly after the year 800, at the same time when an unknown compiler gave a new order to the four parts (redaction of cods. C and A). The question of its formation is linked to the other, more important one of the value of the book, whether official or private.
Already in 1680 Fr. Fr. Marchesi (Clypeus fortum..., Rome 1680, p. 276) had denied that the L.D.R.P. was composed in the pontifical Chancery for its own use, but without solid arguments; more soundly Cardinal Pitra (Analecta novissima, 1 [1885], pp. 103-105) observed that the subjects are too few compared with those treated by the popes in their letters; besides this, "more than half of the formulas concern episcopal chanceries, models for writing to the pope, for corresponding among bishops, for drawing up capitular, episcopal and monastic acts concerning an oratory, a baptistery, a reliquary, for a foundation, an oblate, etc." In reality more than 15 formulas are from non-pontifical documents.
The studies of Th. von Sickel and the authority of his edition gave new credit to the older theory: on the premise that the formulas of certain pontifical documents (especially those on the election of the pope, including the Professio fidei) could interest only the pontifical Curia, it was taken as certain that the L.D.R.P. had been written and actually used in the Chancery of the popes; and since cod. V (then the only surviving one) is in Carolingian minuscule, given its antiquity, the theory thus arose of the Roman origin of this script. It was, however, a hypothesis based on another hypothesis.
Sickel's theory on the origin and nature of the L.D.R.P. was considered definitive until, between 1936 and 1939, a series of new studies subjected many aspects of the question to revision. Already the discovery of cod. A and then the recovery of cod. C modified the state of the manuscript tradition, since both are of monastic origin; the presumption that V must be of chancery origin thus fell away. The new studies have not resolved all the questions, but certain points may now be considered certain. Santifaller established that only 6 or 7 formularies were actually used as models in the drafting of pontifical privileges from the 9th to the 11th century: too few to regard the L.D.R.P. as the official formulary. Fr. Peitz insisted on considering the L.D.R.P. as an official book of the chancery, which had undergone successive evolutions within the chancery itself, but he came to admit that the three manuscripts represented for it a literary tradition, that is, they were not the codices actually used, but copies of them. Fr. Mohlberg observed that the misunderstanding lay already in the title, because the only source is Deusdedit, who cites a Liber Romanorum Pontificum, where the addition qui dicitur Diurnus derives from the erroneous monastic tradition of a supposed Diurnum B. Gregorii: he therefore considered it a private collection, similar to other famous ones that arose between the 6th and 7th centuries, such as the Leonine Sacramentary.
It seems certain that the L.D.R.P. is a private collection composed for canonistic interest, perhaps for the use of the school, and therefore copied and studied in monasteries and subject to additions and reworkings. It is certainly of Italian origin; it cannot be excluded that it was composed in Rome, but it does not constitute the formulary of the pontifical Chancery. In any case no doubt remains about the historical authenticity of the individual texts of which it is formed.
VI. EDITIONS
The first edition, prepared by L. Holste and left unfinished at his death, later published with the false date of 1658, has been described above; it reproduces codex V, making partial use of C. The second was based on codex C: I. Garnerius, L.D.R.P. ex antiquissimo codice ms. nunc primum in lucem editus (Paris 1680). In 1687 J. Mabillon published in the Museum Italicum (I, II, p. 32 ff.) the Libri Diurni R. P. Supplementum with 8 formulas from codex V to complete Father Garnier's edition. All the editions prior to Sickel are devoid of scholarly value with respect to the text, because they are derived from the preceding ones: Chr. God. Hoffmanus, in Nova scriptorum... collectio (II, Leipzig 1733); Jo. Dan. Schoepfinius, in Commentationes historicae et criticae (Basel 1741); P. G. Riegger, L. D... editus opera et studio I. Garnerii... recusus (Vienna 1762; PL 105); E. de Rozière, L. D. ou Recueil des Formules usitées par la Chancellerie pontificale du Ve au XIe siècle (Paris 1869). Critical edition based on codex V, then the only one: Th. ab Sickel, L.D.R.P. ex unico codice Vaticano (Vienna 1889). Codex A reproduced integrally in facsimile in: L. Gramatica and G. Galbiati, Il codice Ambrosiano del L. D. (Milan 1921); a new critical edition of the text prepared by A. Ratti has remained unfinished.
Bibliography5 works
Giulio Battelli