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.bullough/f2/1-124 8/27/03 9:17 AM Page 5050 in defence of the biographical approach.the sourcesalmost certainly to some other person in his immediate circle andplausibly to the scribe himself.113 The first three and last two aregenerally accepted as having been sent during the summer andautumn of 798, the latest of them probably some time in October:although it may be that one of them (ep.no.158) should be ante-dated to October 797.The fourth letter in the group (ep.no.165),written when Alcuin was still impatiently waiting to hear how thework of strengthening the church in the south-east was progressing,is certainly later than these.On internal evidence, including Alcuin shope of a full oral report during Lent, Dümmler dated it to (late)January 799; Wilhelm Heil, as part of his radical revision of thechronology of the years 798 800 (mid) and of the Alcuin letters thatare the principal evidence, wanted to put it more than a yearlater.114 The fifteen-month interval, at least, between this and thenext-latest letter in the collection is troublesome; Alcuin only knowsof rumours that the king may pay a visit to St.Martin s orationiscausa, and there are no grounds for thinking (with Heil) that it wasprompted by Northmen s raids on the Atlantic coast, supposedly in799.Moreover, Arn s letters have previously reported his reversio (fromItaly) but given no hard information about how long he wouldbe in the north, whether at the Court or at St.-Amand and in113Epp.nos 156, 158, 146, 165, 150, 153.The address-clause of no.153 reads:Carissimo filio in vere caritatis dulcidine salutem.Dümmler surprisingly prints Clarissimo,the reading of Vienna 808 fol.108, even though this part is a direct copy of Vienna795 and clarissimus is a form of address used by Alcuin only once in his extant let-ters; and he goes on to suggest that the vir clarissimus [sic] is Arn rather than, asSickel thought, Candidus.This is most improbable: neither in language nor in tonedoes this letter resemble those written to Arn in these months; and its addressee isevidently in north Francia, Arn being at that time almost certainly in his archdio-cese.For some of the same reasons, as well as on chronological grounds, it isunlikely that it was directed to Candidus.The recipient was evidently someonehighly placed in the St.-Amand community and/or Arn s familia: it is very tempt-ing, therefore, to identify him with Bischoff s scribe (1) (Sickel s  gamma ), whosefinal letter from Alcuin this is and the only one without a named addressee; forhis scribal career, see above, n.99.Equally to be rejected are Dümmler s  correc-tions of the manuscript readings to dulcedine (in the address), despicias (ms.disp-)and probably profectu (ms.-fecto), since there is other evidence that Alcuin treatedthe noun in the sense of  success, outcome as a neuter.114W.Heil, Alkuinstudien I (Düsseldorf, 1970), pp.46, 71.The dating of ep.no.158 ( 798 Oct.med. : Dümmler) is not discussed by Heil; but if his re-dating of ep.no.193 is correct (and I believe it is), the October referred to in ep.no.158 s open-ing lines cannot be 798 but must be a year earlier.bullough/f2/1-124 8/27/03 9:17 AM Page 51in defence of the biographical approach.the sources 51January/February 800 Arn was, again, in Rome!115 The re-dating inthis instance is to be rejected.The three letters that follow the last of those from Alcuin (usquehic Albinus magister on fol.197v) and with which the manuscript appar-ently originally concluded, have all had the names of both authorand addressee eliminated.The former is identified in a marginalentry by the scribe Bischoff s (1), Sickel s g, the copyist both of thepreceding letters and of this group of three although apparently onlyafter an interruption, as it[em] Ang[e]lb[er]t[us].The manuscript con-text implies that the recipient was Arn, and the first of them refersto the intercessions of the St.-Amand community on his behalf: inwhich case they were almost certainly addressed to the bishop inthe summer of 797 (as I prefer to believe) when Arn was apparentlyin his diocese, less probably in the summer of 798 when he was try-ing to meet up with the king in eastern Francia after his first returnfrom Rome, and subsequently transmitted to St.-Amand as a groupin formulary form.116 The incomplete text (incomplete only becausea further leaf has been lost?) of the poem sent to Candidus whilehe was on his way to Rome, may, however, have been added on thepreviously blank fol.199 (after l.14) 199v when the book was alreadyat Salzburg, even though the hand is probably that of one of themajor contributors to the earlier part of the manuscript (Bischoff  sscribe (5)).117Salzburg Copies of the LettersWhat is beyond question is that, very soon after  completion , theSt.-Amand manuscript (or manuscripts, if fols 1 20 + 192 199 stillconstituted a unit separate from the now-intervening quires) was115To which, indeed, ep.no.186 was declaredly sent at the end of 799, andperhaps also the slightly earlier no.185, although until recently Alcuin had beenuncertain where Arn was.With other letters to Arn datable to 799, these two arein the main Salzburg collection of the letters (S1), the second also in what I believeis Alcuin s  personal collection (H), for which see below.116Epp.147, 151, 152.Beginning with the words usq[ue] hic Albinus magist[er] addedin a blank half-line at the end of ep.153, scribe (1) writes in a slightly smaller handand with fewer spaces between words; and the final binio (fols 198 199v) was takenfrom a different pile of unlined parchment.117So Bischoff, Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen, 2, 117.bullough/f2/1-124 8/27/03 9:17 AM Page 5252 in defence of the biographical approach.the sourcestaken to Arn s archiepiscopal see, Salzburg, and remained there.Adecade previously, Arn had commissioned a detailed record (notitia)of his church s acquisitions of land, tenants and dues, now imper-illed by the Bavarian duke Tassilo s overthrow; and at about thesame time the earliest known Salzburg-area formulary-book was beingcompiled from recent letters.118 In 802/3, not long after the prepa-ration of new Breves Notitiae of the church s property,119 the arch-bishop or the master of the cathedral scriptorium organized theproduction of a codex of one-hundred-and-thirty-four folios entirelydevoted to works of Alcuin: the two letters that name the king astheir  author were almost certainly Alcuin s compositions.The let-ter-collection of sixty-two (or sixty) different texts occupies the foliosnow numbered 101 221 in the composite manuscript Vienna,Nationalbibl.cod.lat [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]