Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Qupperneq 173
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Thus, nearly all these prayers come from the classic Gregorian and
Gelasian sources; five of them, six, if we also include the prayer after
ps. 150,3 of the divergent MS q, from Alcuin’s votive masses. Some of
them occur frequently among the prayers following the litany in the
medieval psalters. The only neo-classic texts are the prayers after ps.
100,3 and ps. 120.
This description does not really, however, fit the first of these two,
‘Sancte dei genitricis et uirginis marie et omnium sanctorum’, adapted
from a prayer to All Saints, which again reads as an abbreviated
version of Alcuin’s votive mass, no. 14. The prayer after ps. 120,
‘Corda nostra’, is represented in St. Denis, the great Norman abbeys,
and pre- and post-Conquest England, in forms related to that of our
Psalter. Outside this area, it appears in a more or less expanded form,
sometimes with a different beginning and ending.
Traces of a ‘redaction’ of these prayers appear here and there, as for
instance in the addition of ‘et negligencias nostras’ in the prayer
following after ps. 10, and in the substitution of the singular for the
plural in the prayer after ps. 20, and of the plural for the singular in the
prayer after ps. 90, ‘Deus qui iustificas impios’. It is interesting that
this latter prayer occurs in the plural only in an Irish libellus precum,
Bibi. Vat. MS Chigi C VI 173, of the mid-eleventh century. Among
the events of Christ’s life mentioned in the prayer after ps. 120,
‘circumcisionis’ appears only in Vitellius and Westminster, ‘apparicio-
nis’ only in St. Denis. Our redactor is alone in somewhat clumsily
changing the prayer by, after ‘incamationis’, omitting ‘tue’, and, after
‘ascensionis’, adding ‘domini nostri ihesu christi’.
From the Canticles to the Explicit
The canticles have survived in MSS B, Na, and Nb, though not
beyond the first New Testament canticle; they were, however, extant
in MSS C, q, and s, when excerpted by Åmi Magnusson. For the
remainder of the psalter we have to rely upon the fragmentary evidence
of A. It remains an open question whether the texts of the other
manuscripts went beyond the canticles.
MS A, f. (24)rv = pp. 59-60, contain the Athanasian symbol
‘Quicumque vult salvus esse’ from ‘est diuinitas. equalis gloria’ to the
end, and the beginning of the litany. Unhappily, it ends on ‘Sancte
Jacobe’.