University of Virginia Library

THE TEXT

Adalhard's Directives survive in the two tenth-century manuscripts (bound together at Corbie before the thirteenth century),
in Dachery's printed edition of 1661 drawn from an early (ca. A.D. 900?) manuscript now lost, and some fragmentary copies
made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries essentially from the previous items. Four printed editions preceded
Semmler's. The two surviving early manuscripts agree with each other neither in contents nor arrangement, nor with
Dachery's edition.[39]

Professor Émile Lesne (1925, 385-420) proposed that Adalhard had originally prepared separate directives for each of
his major officials:

"The brevis dictated by Adalhard in 822 was composed of a considerable number of separable items, though forming a continuous
series. Presumably, either because of the natural disruptions among the separated letters as sent to each monastic official concerned, items
which quite possibly consisted of small gatherings or detached sheets, or simply because of the deterioration of the archetype or its early
copies, the text has come down to us in the shape of fragments very diversely chopped up by the scribes, who doubtless had at hand only torn
or partially illegible folds. [p. 418] . . . the three manuscripts together preserve, despite some easily identifiable additions, each partially
and in different grouping, the essential contents which Adalhard drafted in 822 [p. 419]."

Professor Semmler, in preparing his excellent edition ("Consuetudines Corbeienses," Corp. Cons. Mon. I, 1963, 355-422),
adhered to Lesne's proposals while altering important details in the light of convincing evidence. He relegated the later
interpolations to an appendix and changed some parts of Lesne's suggested arrangement.[40]

I have translated Semmler's edition without alteration. "The Rubrics (Capitula) of the Abbot, Dom Adalhard" (below,
pp. 121-122) are not to be found in an extant manuscript, but were published by Dachery's co-worker, Jean Mabillon,
in the Acta (saec. IV, pars prima), 1677, 757-58. Mabillon transcribed them from Dachery's manuscript, now lost; the
consensus is that they are authentic.

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