Volume 2

Universal palaeography, or, Fac-similes of writings of all nations and periods, copied from the most celebrated and authentic manuscripts in the libraries and archives of France, Italy, Germany, and England / by M.J.B. Silvestre ; accompanied by an historical and descriptive text and introduction by Champollion-Figeac and Aimé Champollion, fils ; translated from the French and edited, with corrections and notes, by Sir Frederic Maddan ... in two volumes.

Joseph-Balthazar Silvestre

Date:: 1849-1850

Credit: Universal palaeography, or, Fac-similes of writings of all nations and periods, copied from the most celebrated and authentic manuscripts in the libraries and archives of France, Italy, Germany, and England / by M.J.B. Silvestre ; accompanied by an historical and descriptive text and introduction by Champollion-Figeac and Aimé Champollion, fils ; translated from the French and edited, with corrections and notes, by Sir Frederic Maddan ... in two volumes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

317/458 page 675

PLATE CCXLIV. GERMANO-LOMBARDIC MINUSCULE WRITING. IX™ CENTURY. FRAGMENT OF ST. ISIDORE, TRANSLATED INTO THE THEOTISC LANGUAGE. The manuscript from which the bilingual fragment in the present Plate has been taken, contains, in the judgment of the most learned German philologists, the oldest monument of Teutonic literature; and they have affirmed it to be two centuries earlier than the Ghristiad of Otfrid, the contem¬ porary of Charlemagne. We may therefore easily conceive how great is the value of the volume in which this text is preserved, more especially as there is no other copy of it in existence**. This Teutonic text, however, was not the chief subject of the volume, when it was first written, but only an accessoryf, which, from its age, and the scarcity of linguistic documents of this class, now constitutes the real value of the manuscript, which belongs to the Bibliotheque Royale at Paris (No. 2326). It contains the work which Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, composed in the form of a letter to his sister Florentine, against the opinions of the Jews and Arians. The Goths, established in the sixth and seventh centuries in southern Gaul and in Spain, were inclined towards the doctrines of Arius, notwithstanding the piety of their King, Recared I., Schilter, Thesaurus Antiquit. Teutonicarum: Joannis Frickii prcefa- tio generalis, page xiv. [Ulm, 1738, fol.]—Palthenius, Tatiani Alexan¬ dria Ilarmonia, Theotisce. [Greifus. 1706, 4to.]—G. Gley, Langue et litterature des anciens Francs. [Paris, 1814, 8vo.] f But contemporaneous with the Latin text.—Ed.

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