Un nuovo testimone del commento al Cantico dei Cantici di Alcuino: Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 1398a

The late ninth-century manuscript Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 1398a contains a fragmentary commentary on Song of Songs. A close analysis of this manuscript has permitted to identify in its four long segments (pp. 19-30) the surviving sections of the Compendium in Canticum Canticorum by Alcuin of York (its critical edition was published by R. E. Guglielmetti in 2004). This new witness does not provide any further element to the establishment of the text of Alcuin’s commentary, for it belongs to a well-represented subfamily of the stemma and does not contain emendations to the innovations which are specific to each of the various levels of the stemma: whether to its family, to the subarchetype from which it derives or to the archetype common to the whole tradition. Yet, this manuscript helps to reconstruct the text’s transmission regarding both a time not too distant from its composition and a well-defined geographical area (this can be either the Rhineland or the South of France). This article offers a critical apparatus which complements that of the edition of Alcuin’s work: it reports all the representative lectiones of the manuscript, whether they are unique or shared with its family or branch.