The so-called Homiliary of Luculentius is an early medieval text with an unfortunate fate. Already known in fragments since the seventeenth century, it became part of the history of Latin medieval literature only at a very late stage of research due to incorrectly attributed dates and locations. The work is missing in all global, national and regional handbooks and surveys of Medieval Latin literature, since it was qualified as the product of a patristic author working at some point in time between the fifth and seventh century. Because of a lack of manuscript studies, the author’s location was also uncertain. Previous research favoured an Italian author. Angelo Mai, the discoverer of the first 18 homilies of this collection, already formulated this geographical hypothesis in the early nineteenth century. He edited the homilies from two manuscripts preserved at Roman libraries: Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 6081 and Roma, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Tomus XX, which mention the name “Luculentius” without further information about his position in the Latin Church. Both manuscripts are supposed to have been written in Central Italy in the late twelfth or even the first half of the thirteenth century.
Yet, the history of the text and its early transmission is quite different. In 1914, the German philologist August Eduard Anspach, a specialist of Isidore of Seville, discovered the two oldest, more or less complete copies of the work in Madrid and tried to identify their texts. Because of the importance of this homiliary, Anspach was chosen as its official editor for the prestigious series “Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum” (CSEL) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. These copies, Madrid, Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Ms. 17 and Ms. 21, are mid-tenth-century products of the Catalan Benedictine monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès and are, at present, the two oldest known manuscripts from its scriptorium. In these copies, the collection comprises 156 homilies with the majority on the Gospels and Epistles, starting the annual cycle with the Christmas vigil. Both roughly contemporary copies had seemingly the same model. Despite the mutilated state of conservation of these copies, the Catalan palaeographer Anscari Manuel Mundó i Marcet could at least decipher the colophon of Ms. 17 on fol. 241va, so that we know that the priest Truitari copied this manuscript in 956/957 under Abbot Landericus of Sant Cugat. Following the Spanish Jesuit and Church historian Zacarías García Villada, who already postulated an author working in the so-called Spanish March because of the Carolingian script and content of these manuscripts, we know today – after the intensive manuscript research accomplished by Joseph Lemarié, Raymond Étaix and especially Francesc Xavier Altés i Aguiló – that the two copies from Sant Cugat del Vallès represent the oldest text version, available in two further fragmentary manuscripts from tenth-century Catalonia and one fragment of twelfth-century Catalonia. A second version with characteristic text features and variants, datable to the middle of the tenth century, is transmitted in 91 further early Catalan manuscript fragments. The complete text transmission of Luculentius’s Homiliary thus starts in the north-eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula with a strikingly early core area forming in the diocese of Vic, whereas the peripheral and late Italian transmission shows common text features with the second version and offers only a small text selection of the whole work.