The rediscovery of the Homiliary of Luculentius shows the full potential of our HERA project on the role that Carolingian culture played in an early medieval transcultural frontier society such as the Spanish March (Catalonia). Yet our new research project, which is preparing a critical edition of the full text of this work, of which only 49 of 156 homilies, thus less than a third of the whole text, have been published, faces some new multi-disciplinary challenges.
Beside the transcription and comparison of the two above-mentioned mid-tenth-century copies of the Homiliary from Sant Cugat del Vallès, we still need an exact codicological and palaeographical qualification and a textual classification of all other testimonies of the Homiliary (manuscripts and fragments). The possible reunification of the many fragments scattered in archives and libraries, particularly in Catalonia, will allow us to reconstruct further homiliaries and their rich typology of monastic and clerical copies of the full collection or selections of it. Consequently, we will be able to understand these manuscripts’ daily use in the individual contexts of monasteries, clerical communities or parish churches. For this purpose we are currently going through the Catalan collections. The surprisingly high number of early testimonies of the Homiliary from the tenth and earlier eleventh century show the typical Catalan palaeographical features we know from other contemporaneous copies from Vic and Ripoll. Compared to the currently-known overall transmission of the homilies, a strikingly large part of fragments stem from churches of the diocese of Vic which further strengthens our hypothesis that this was the earliest region of production and transmission of Luculentius’s Homiliary. In addition, we are also consulting the rich tradition of medieval library catalogues and book endowments of the parish churches, cathedrals and monastic and canonical houses in Septimania, Catalonia and other parts of the Iberian Peninsula in order to identify further lost copies or even to link preserved manuscripts and fragments of the Homiliary with these medieval mentions. This work will enable us to contextualise the Homiliary’s fate in its original and later monastic, religious and political frameworks.
With the establishment of the apparatuses of variants and the identification of the sources of the work, we will gain a deeper insight into the range of classical, patristic and early medieval sources used for the Homiliary – only partially uncovered by Hildegund Müller – and identify its proper text material. Moreover, we will also lay the base for a detailed analysis of the Homiliary’s Latin language which shows specific phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical features. All these observations strengthen our impression that Luculentius’s Homiliary belongs to the emerging early medieval Catalonia.
Certainly, our following brief summary of some linguistic features of Luculentius’s Latin cannot be exhaustive, but it is highly-representative: it allows us to emphasise that the Latin vulgarisms of this work uncover the existence of a Proto-Romanic language that, due to its characteristics, could be well described as a language very close to the Catalano-Provençal family.
As far as the phonology features of this Homiliary is concerned, some of the most characteristic ones are, for example, the absence of permutation between the bilabial plosive “b” and the labiodental fricative “v” (“b-v”); otherwise, consonant gemination of liquid and occlusives is highly attested, whereas at the end of the word, voiced dental “d” becomes unvoiced “t”.
Regarding the nominal morphology, the evidence for the loss of opposition between masculine and neuter is numerous, as later in Romance. As for the syntax of cases, the most striking feature is the loss of the opposition between accusative and ablative, especially with prepositions. Concerning the verbal morphology, we also find a trend to transitivise some verbs, as will be attested later in some Romance languages. Regarding the periphrastic verbal forms, the pleonastic uses already found in Vulgar Latin are now used, such as “fuisset creata” or “completa fuisse”.
As far as the syntax of the sentences is concerned, the participium coniunctum is used, sometimes being interpreted as an independent sentence, as the Romance languages will also later do. Otherwise, the ablativus absolutus construction is sometimes also used where a participium coniunctum would be possible.
With regard to the vocabulary, one can find special lexical uses with their own meaning in this Latin homiliary, as later attested in Romance languages, such as for example the substantive “causa” with the meaning of Latin “res” (Catalan “cosa”) and “secretarius” with the meaning of ‘confident’. There are also new lexical constructions and meanings, such as the adjective “pr(a)estus” for ‘ready’. In the Homiliary of Luculentius one can also find some hapaxlegomena such as the substantive “ingluvio” with the meaning of ‘eater’ or the adjective “induster” for ‘skillful’ (from Latin “industria”). Another Vulgar Latin trend in this Carolingian homiliary is the replacement of the basic word by the diminutive in apparently the same meaning, as it can be seen in the use of “cultellus” instead of “culter” or “latrunculus” instead of “latro”.
Almost all the linguistic phenomena described above belong to the field of Vulgar Latin features, but can also be found later in some of the old Romance languages like Old Catalan. A detailed study of the Latin language attested in the Homiliary of Luculentius will allow us to support our codicological and palaeographical hypothesis that the author of the homilies, our enigmatic Luculentius, wrote his work in the region of the emergent Catalan counties, evidenced by the great wealth of early testimonies from the Bishopric of Vic which can be dated from the first quarter of the tenth century onwards.