Tenth-century expectation management: the Admonitio Synodalis in southern Italy

What were the standards by which local priests were measured in the long tenth century, between the Carolingian Empire and the revival of papal authority in the late eleventh century? There are different ways of approaching this question, but one is through a text known as the Admonitio Synodalis, designed as a sermon to be delivered to local priests.

The sermon is made up of a series of around 80 injunctions about what priests should, and should not, do.[1] These injunctions are mostly taken from earlier instructions for priests, compiled in Carolingian Francia. Amongst the Admonitio’s sources was the legal collection of Regino of Prüm, a work which it quoted in an interpolated form, made after 906.[2] And the earliest manuscripts of the Admonitio date from the mid tenth century.[3] So we can be fairly sure that the Admonitio dates to the earlier tenth century, although the precise origins of the text are still unclear.[4]

The Admonitio was extremely popular; I have so far counted 136 manuscripts, mostly from the 11^th and 12^th centuries (with a few from the 10^th century, as just mentioned). It circulated in England, Italy, France and Germany, integrated into liturgical and legal compilations as well as in standalone format. And it continued to influence episcopal legislation into the later Middle Ages.[5] If we want to see a list of what local priests were supposed to do, then this text is not a bad place to begin.

But despite the Admonitio’s general appeal, scribes sometimes did not hesitate to adjust its content to fit individual local needs. This blog is on a manuscript which illustrates this point, Biblioteca Vallicelliana D 5 (I am very grateful to Eduardo Fernández Guerrero for his help in accessing this ms).[6]

This manuscript is a pontifical, one of a large group collectively known as the ‘Romano-German Pontifical’, many manuscripts of which contain the Admonitio Synodalis. The Vallicelliana manuscript was produced in or around Monte Cassino in southern Italy in the mid eleventh century, according to Gyug under Abbot Theobald; it is very close to a sister manuscript, Monte Cassino 451, which seems to have been copied from the same exemplar. However, as Henry Parkes has argued, we should remember that each manuscript of the ‘Romano-German Pontifical’ family was copied for its own merits, and should not just be treated as a witness to an imaginary model. As his concordance tables show, each manuscript was unique.

None of these emendations can be paralleled in other surviving versions of the Admonitio. Rather than being copied in from some vanished archetype, it seems more likely that the scribe wanted to bring the instructions of the Admonitio into line with their own opinions about clerical expectations. This suggests that the Admonitio in this pontifical was not just ‘part of the package’, but a text that someone took quite seriously.

Yet while they did not shy from making some changes, they were evidently happy with the overwhelming majority of the text’s instructions. Precisely because they made a few discrete changes, in other words, we might infer that expectations around rural priests in southern Italy were not really so different from those in, say, northern France, other than on specific matters such as dividing up churches, alienating church property, and having a drink on the road.

Of course that is not to say that the priests themselves actually led similar lives. But how many of the differences in tenth-century local church organisation in Italy and north of the Alps are rooted in historiographical, rather than historical, divergences?

CW, August 2021

[1] The Admonitio Synodalis has been edited dozens of times. Semi-critical edition: Amiet, ‘Une admonitio synodalis’. Edition of Rather’s version: MGH. Edition of Ordo 14 version: MGH. Recent lit: Hamilton, Practice of penance, pp. 64-67; Hartmann, Kirchenrecht, 299-300; Miller, Clothing, p. 12. English translation: Reid, Complete Works, pp. 124ff.

[2] Pokorny, ‘Nochmals zur Admonitio’.

[3] The earliest manuscripts appear to be three tenth-century mss made in Verona for Rather of Verona from the 960s and 970s (Munich Clm 6340, Laon BM 274 and Berlin Phill. 1676), followed by two Mainz Regino manuscripts, c. 1000, in which the Admonitio text has been inserted by the same scribe (!) – Hoffmann, Buchkunst, pp. 262-3, 266.

[4] Parkes’s recent redating of the RGP to the eleventh century has significant implications for the transmission history of the AS. See Parkes, ‘Henry II, liturgical patronage and the birth of the 'Romano-German Pontifical’. Rather of Verona is now the earliest known witness to the work: could he have been involved in its compilation?

[5] Avril, ‘Les instructions’.

[6] On the manuscript, see Newton, Scriptorium, p. 144; Reynolds, 'South Italian ordination allocution'.

[7] Amiet says this was “une cinquantine d’années après sa transcription”, but I am not sure how precise we can be, given the fairly informal nature of the scribal interventions. These edits are not present in the Monte Cassino 451 sister manuscript (my thanks to Henry Parkes for assistance on this point).