)
The manuscript is an interesting example of the assembly of various small books of different nature, provenance, and production, but of similar hagiographic content, probably with the intent to ensure better conservation of separate sheets or groups of sheets, which, taken individually, were small in size. The assembly was executed around the middle of the 9th century. The manuscript appears in the St. Gallen library in much the present form in the inventory completed between 841 and 872, […]. The Vita Gregorii included in the manuscript was written by two copyists in the first half of the 9th century in a miniscule usually attributed to the Rhaetian – Germanic area and is the oldest specific biography of the great pontiff, excluding the brief laterculus, which figures in the Liber pontificalis. An anonymous monk at Whitby Monastery in Northumbria wrote the text in the early 8th century, highlighting Gregory’s relations with England in the central part of the work. It is in this work that we find the anecdote, also told with some variants by the Venerable Bede, of the meeting in Rome between Gregory and a group of extraordinarily beautiful young Angles, after which he was divinely inspired to send the famous mission to christianise England. Despite the fact that the tradition has been reduced to this one manuscript, the Vita by the Anonymous Author of Whitby was enormously important as a vehicle of information and legend about the figure of Gregory. In the second half of the 9th century, it served as the source for the more complete biography written by John Immonides and was used by an unknown interpolator to augment the Vita Gregorii, written by Paul the Deacon in the previous century, and to produce an enlarged edition of the work […].
PAOLO CHIESA
Reproduced here: p. 75 at the beginning of the Vita Gregorii.
The complete record can be found in the exhibit catalogue Gregorio Magno e l'invenzione del Medioevo, ed. Luigi G. G. Ricci, Florence, SISMEL - Edizioni del Galluzzo 2006 (Archivum Gregorianum, 9).