Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Side 191

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On the strength of the invocation of St. Quirinus, Dom Leclercq
proposes the Benedictine nunnery of Neuss in the diocese of Cologne
as the home of our manuscript. The Church of Neuss possessed relics
of St. Quirinus, probably since the late ninth century, and in 1050 it
received a new gift of relics from Pope Leo IX.
The prayers to the Apostles are each preceded by one of the gradual
psalms, ps. 119 - ps. 130 for the twelve apostles, with ps. 131 - ps.
133 inserted among the concluding prayers and chants; by ‘Laudate’,
probably ps. 116, and by a strophe of the proper hymn of each apostle,
except for St. Simon and St. Jude. A proper antiphon follows after the
hymns to St. John and St. Thomas.
For the elaborate introductory and concluding prayers and chants,
and for references to biblical and liturgical texts, see Dom Leclercq’s
edition. We shall limit ourselves to exploring the relationship of the
prayers to the apostles to those of our Icelandic manuscript. See Plates
130-131, with reproductions of ff. 112v-113r, and ff. 115v-116r.
Alpirsbach = Paris MS lat. 2986, ff. 215r-217v (see Ph. Lauer,
Catalogue général des manuscrits latins. Bibi. Nat., 3 [1952], pp. 369-
71), of miscellaneous contents, was written in 1510 for the Benedictine
abbey of Alpirsbach in the diocese of Constance. The prayers to the
Apostles, most of them closely related to those of Zurich, are, with the
exception of the prayers to Peter, Paul, and Andrew, followed by a
versicle and the mass-collect of the apostle in question. After the
concluding prayer to all the apostles, Alpirsbach alone adds two more
prayers:
De uno Apostolo. O Apostole dei virtutum specialiter sanctifica-
tus... perduc gaudia. Alia. O preclare Apostole O insigne decus
ecclesie .NN. . . corporis periculo et anime. Amen.
Bremen = Copenhagen Det kongelige Bibliotek MS NKS 39 8°, ff.
402r-41 lr, preceded by a Bremen calendar, is a book of Hours with a
very rich collection of prayers, written 1515-16. (See Ellen Jør-
gensen, Catalogus codicum medii ævi Bibi. Regiæ Hafniensis [Hafniæ
1923], p. 218, where it is wrongly described as a breviary.) Except for
the reversal of the prayers to the two St. James’s, and the inclusion of
a second prayer to St. Andrew, St. John, and all the Apostles, it
follows Alpirsbach so closely as to render a collation superfluous.
Marturi, Zurich, and Bremen are interrelated manuscripts. For com-
parison, a French and an English series have been examined: