Freculph of Liseux, Historiarum libri XII, in Latin with a single word in Greek, manuscript on vellum [France or Germany, ninth century]

cutting from the upper half of a leaf, 174mm. by 155mm., with the remains of a single column of 18 lines (with losses of only 16 characters from the vertical edges of the text, and some 19 or 20 lines from the base of the text) in a fine and early Carolingian minuscule, which slightly slopes to the right and has an ‘et’ abbreviation with a long and trailing foot and a closed ‘g’ with a pronounced horn, rubbing to reverse with abrasion to areas of text through reuse on a binding, some stains and small wormholes, else good condition

Freculph of Liseux was a Frankish ecclesiastic and politician, who studied at the palace school of Aachen during the reign of Charlemagne. He was appointed bishop of Liseux in 824 and held the office until his death in 850/52. He embraced the cultural reforms of the Carolingian Renaissance, and may have been a humanist book collector, presenting a manuscript of Vegetius, De rei militari to the young Charles the Bald. This is his magnum opus, one of only two Carolingian universal chronicles, the first composed in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire and the only ones before the late twelfth century. It was dedicated to the wife of Louis the Pious, the Empress Judith, as a gift for her son Charles the Bald, and sets out to help underpin the newly reforged Europe by presenting a vision of a society which had evolved from isolated pagan tribes to a single federation held together by the might of the Franks and the primacy of Rome. The section here, with parts of 2.4:XIII-XV, discusses the reign of Emperor Valentinian the Great (321-75), and includes a substantial quote from the Historium Adversus Paganos by the scholar and historian Orosius (d.420), perhaps the most influential surviving survey of the pagan peoples of Europe from the earliest times up until the fourth century.

This is one of only three ninth-century witnesses to the text. Only 13 manuscripts and 2 fragments are recorded in total, of which only Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS.622 and a fragment now Beuron, Bibliothek der Bendiktiner-Erzabtei, fr.17 are of the same antiquity as the present leaf. To the best of our knowledge no copy has appeared for sale since records began, and only one example is recorded in private hands (a fragment of the fourteenth century in a private Italian collection).