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Paper short abstract:

León, Archivo Capitular MS 22 (9th cen) is a Spanish theological compilation that has never been exhaustively catalogued. Thus, one excerpt was thought to be from the pseudo-Isidorian 'Liber de numeris'. This paper demonstrates that this is not the case and situates it in its intellectual context.

Paper long abstract:

León, Archivo Capitular MS 22 (also known as Codex Samuelis) is a Spanish compilatory manuscript primarily containing excerpts from Patristic works, epistolary writings, and other theological texts that is datable in its present form to 839. Because the codex contains a vast number of excerpts, there has been no published effort to comprehensively and exhaustively catalogue it, even though León MS 22 has been described a handful of times in previous scholarship primarily through Spanish publications. Notably, León MS 22, which presents several excerpts from Isidore’s 'Etymologies' throughout, has been thought to have carried an excerpt of the eighth-century pseudo-Isidorian Hiberno-Latin 'Liber de numeris', which itself was likely originally composed at the Irish monastic intellectual centre at Salzburg.

This paper will demonstrate that this excerpt in question (fols 16vb-17ra) is not in fact from the 'Liber de numeris', contrary to previous published efforts to catalogue León MS 22. Then, it will reassess the excerpt compared to several similar texts from manuscripts from the same period, including an excerpt from the pseudo-Bedan 'Collectanea'. This reassessment will help us to understand the significance of this Isidorian excerpt in León MS 22 as well as better appreciate the relationship between the excerpt, the 'Liber de numeris', the 'Collectanea', and other roughly contemporaneous Hiberno-Latin texts of the period.