Ɵ Summa Sententiarum, ascribed to 'Master Odo', in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment [France, twelfth century (probably first half)]

87 leaves, complete, collation: i-x8, xi7 (last leaf a blank cancel), traces of eighteenth-century foliation ending on last leaf as '88' (thus perhaps once including an endleaf at front as well), single column of 26 lines in a small and angular early gothic bookhand, written above topline and with some lateral compression causing occasional biting curves, capitals touched in red, red rubrics, one-line initials in red or blue, larger initials in same colours in long and tall designs, some with baubles mounted in their bodies or floral flourishes to their feet (as with ornamental capitals in codices such as Dijon, Bibl. mun. 132, from Citeaux: W. Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1996, no. 63; Paris, Bibl. de l'École des Beaux-Arts, 12-16, from Liessies on the Belgian border: ibid. no. 107; and Strasbourg, Grand Séminaire 37: ibid. no. 146), two leaves with a large original flaw in parchment, volume once water damaged at front with first 13 leaves with modern parchment repairs to vertical edges (only first 5 leaves with substantial affect to text), a few small holes and stains on last leaves, a small amount of marginalia, some discolouration in places, edges trimmed, overall in good condition, 190 by 140mm.; in German binding dated 1501 (inscription on pastedown; see below) of bevelled wooden boards with tooled leather spine, parchment cutting from another binding reused as back pastedown, perhaps a remboîtage or this binding refreshed and added to later (see below), a few wormholes in boards, overall sturdy in binding

Provenance:
1. Written and decorated in France, perhaps the eastern part of that country. If this binding has always been with this book, then it was once in the library of Tegernsee Abbey where an inscription on the front pastedown states it was bound in 1501 (naming S. Q[ui]rini in Tergernsee). The house was founded in the mid-eighth century by monks from St. Gallen, and became an imperial abbey under Otto II in the late tenth century, growing to be a cultural hub for the region and a place of resettlement for other Bavarian monasteries. It was secularised in 1803 and its goods and library widely scattered (see S. Krämer, Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelaters, 1989, II: 753-55). The Tegernsee catalogue of 1483 does not list any volume in the library under the name Odo, but does include a Sentencie under Hugh of St. Victor, and that additional authorial information may have once been on the missing front endleaf here (Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz, IV:2, 1979, p. 787).

2. The pastedown also recording the book in the ownership of a collector in Thüngen, Bavaria, in 1886.

Text:
This text provided the building blocks and inspiration for Peter Lombard's Libri Quatuor Sententiarum, and was almost certainly written by Peter's friend and patron, Odo (or Otto), bishop of Lucca. It was published by J.P. Migne in Patrologia Latina 126 (1854), cols. 41-174, among the works of the leading theologian Hugh de Saint-Victor (c. 1096-1141), however, several manuscripts ascribe the work to one Magister Odo (as here at head of fol.1r), or Odo episcopus de Luca. It is clear from the work itself that this Odo had spent some time in the new cathedral schools of northern France, where his greatest written influences were Anselm of Laon and Hugh of St. Victor (see R.W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 1997, II: 138-39). This work is his sole known composition - a systematising of theology along scholastic lines, designed for teaching the subject in the new schools. Strangely, it appears not to have been finished, and perhaps it was set aside by its author on his return to Italy to take up the episcopacy of Lucca from 1138 until his death in 1145/6. The work then passed to Peter Lombard, who, after re-editing and augmenting Anselm of Laon's commentaries on the Psalms and Pauline Epistles, used it in the years 1146-58 to form the basis for his celebrated 'Sentences'. That work formed the central textbook of scholastic theology for the next two centuries.

Odo's Summa Sententiarum survives in about twenty-five recorded manuscripts (Southern, p. 138; H. Weisweiler, 'La Summa Sententiarum, source de Pierre Lombard', in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 6, 1934, pp.181-82, n. 72; and R. Baron, 'Note sur l'enigmatique Summa Sententiarum', ibid., 25, 1958, pp. 42-58), all in institutional libraries. To these should be added the Barrois-Ashburnham copy (ascribed wrongly to Hugh of St. Victor), a thirteenth-century manuscript last seen in J. & J. Leighton's catalogue of c. 1901: 'Catalogue of early-printed, and other interesting books, manuscripts and fine bindings', part VIII ('Si-T'), no. 5686; as well as a twelfth-century English copy from St. Osyth's, Essex (again ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor; last appearing in the posthumous sale of the stock of H.P. Kraus, in Sotheby's, New York, 5 December 2003, lot 66).

Of individual note here, is the fact that the seventh and final tract in this copy (foot of fols. 79v onwards) is in an apparently truncated or variant form to that published by Migne.

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