Kevin Wilkinson - Ps.-Hieronymus ad Marcellam (Cod. Sangallensis 190) and the Evolution of Advent in the West

Codex Sangallensis 190 (late VIII or early IX) uniquely preserves an interesting letter purportedly written by Saint Jerome to the Roman senatorial widow Marcella. While Marcella might be a possible (if imperfect) fit for the letter’s recipient, both style and persona exclude the possibility that Jerome was its author. Nearly a century ago, G. Morin argued that the sender was in fact a female monastic (though perhaps with the Spanish monk Bachiarius acting as her secretary) and that the letter was a product of Spain c. 400. Among the very few who have taken notice of this document since, none has seriously challenged Morin’s opinion, but it is quite simply impossible. The letter advocates an advanced discipline (acknowledged to be an observatio novellae utilitatis) for the Advent-Nativity-Epiphany cycle. This season was notoriously late to develop in the western liturgical calendar, with the first clear evidence for anything remotely resembling what is advocated by Ps.-Jerome deriving from the sixth century. Among several variants in regional custom, there is one that provides a perfect match to that attested in the letter – the practice enjoined on monastics by bishops at the Council of Tours (567). It is probable, therefore, that the letter was written in Merovingian Gaul in the last third of the sixth century; indeed there are reasons (though none of them is decisive) for thinking that it is to be connected with the convent of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers. The ascription to Jerome was perhaps manufactured in order to lend an air of authority and antiquity to a recent liturgical innovation, or perhaps simply to conceal the fact of female authorship, but the document was not composed as a deliberate forgery. Rather, it is a genuine letter addressed to a female religious, and it was only at some later point that an editor borrowed Jerome’s authority to sanction its contents. This reconstruction allows for a plausible explanation of how the letter came to be included in Sangallensis 190. The vast majority of this manuscript is devoted to what was once a family archive of correspondence between Gallo-Roman clergy and monastics from roughly 475 until 650, perhaps ultimately compiled into a single dossier around the middle of the seventh century (Mathisen 1998). In the case of our letter, which is embedded in this dossier, either its author or its recipient (who is indeed identified as belonging to a sacerdotalis familia) or both were very likely connected to the family of ecclesiastical notables in Gaul that maintained the archive.