The consolation of philosophy

I have to have a wisdom tooth removed. I don't think my dentist has quite understood that I am an enormous coward, and I don't deal well with pain. I'm not one of those smiles-bravely types. I make everyone around me's life a misery and mope about being melodramatically defeated.

But I am being soothed from this thought by looking at a manuscript in the library. It's a tenth-century book of the sort of stuff intellectuals liked at that period: Book IV (De arte dialectica) of Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii; pseudo-Augustine's Categoriae decem, translated from Aristotle; pseudo-Apuleius's Liber peri hermeneias; Boethius's translation of Porphyry's Isagoge in Categorias Aristoteles, plus some more Boethius; Alcuin, De dialectica; and pseudo-Augustine, Dialectica. (I have entitled the whole manuscript "Philosophical works by Martianus Capella, Aristotle, Boethius, and others"; suggestions on whether I should have got the word "dialectic" in there would be welcome.) I have learnt, among other things, that to be a human is to be risibile, because even if you're not laughing right then you might laugh at some point; while to be a horse is to be hinnibile. Horses don't laugh, and people don't whinny. I used to whinny and pretend to be a horse on my way to Brownies causing my mother much embarrassment; I think Boethius wouldn't have approved either.

What's really engaging my attention however is the script. (Though I ought just to be checking the foliation and recording incipits and explicits.) It's Caroline minuscule; but it is absolutely packed with Insular and late Celtic abbreviations: including two ticks above a t for tra; the Insular secundum, autem, enim, and even per; bird-shaped v with o above for uero; and N with a bar through for nam, which is supposed to be specifically Welsh (though I would take that with a pinch of salt, personally). It was certainly in England at the end of the eleventh century or start of the twelfth, when its opening page was rewritten with a nice initial, probably at Canterbury, and it may be identifiable with a manuscript which Leland saw at Malmesbury in the 1530s. But whether it was written in England or on the Continent remains unclear; people have noted the huge number of Insular abbreviations, but I don't think anyone has really looked properly at their overwhelmingly Celtic, especially late Celtic (= post-850ish) character. Although the Irish, for example, hung on to Insular script for a ridiculous length of time (I think it was finally given up in 1952), my theory is that a better understanding of Caroline minuscule in England would depend heavily on sorting out the Celtic dimension, and the idiosyncratic abbreviations would be a way into this. I made a tentative start on saying this for an article for the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain which I wrote in 2003, and I do wish they'd hurry up and print it because while it's in limbo I feel like I can't quite move on. People often look at Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent; but Anglo-Saxon England and the Celtic-speaking world have tended to be studied in very different sorts of university course, Celtic studies versus History/English, and I'm very lucky to have had an education which has pointed out the importance of that other side of things. It's not a good idea to characterise nations, as Thomas Browne pointed out, but one does get the sense with the Irish and other Celtic-speaking peoples in the early to mid-Middle Ages that there was a tendency to an intense intellectual curiosity. Also they had this concept of self-exile from their homeland as a particular way of serving God, like being a hermit but abroad instead of in the wilderness. Even though things Caroline didn't stick back home, I'd bet the movement of Celtic-speaking peoples was a big catalyst for change in England; like the Irish who taught St Dunstan at Glastonbury, and Iorwerth the Welshman at Winchester. Hurray for palaeography! It beats dentistry in the paper, rock, scissors of life.