The Physiologus is an early Christian collection of naturalist allegorical descriptions, from which medieval bestiaries developed. Although Cod. 233 – as opposed to the famous Cod. 318 – contains just the Physiologus without illustrations, it is nevertheless the earliest representative of the important Latin textual recension B. Further parts of the former compound codex are in the Bibliothèque municipale of Orléans and in the Burgerbibliothek Bern. The volume came to Bern in 1632 from the possessions of Jacques Bongars. (mit)

A composite manuscript produced in three phases from the end of the eighth century to after the middle of the ninth century. It was likely made in St. Avold near Metz for a chapel of the cathedral chapter. In the first part are gathered texts that were important for the pre- and early-Carolingian period in Metz, including the original version of Chrodegang's Regula Canonicorum, various homilies, and a version of Theodolf of Orléans' Capitularia. The second, better known part (from f. 52) contains one of the oldest witnesses to the text of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum. In 1632, the volume entered the collection of Bern from the property of Jacques Bongars. (mit)

This manuscript contains the complete hagiographic works of Gregory of Tours, consisting of eight books of hagiographies. The manuscript is very close to Gregory's autograph (class 1a); it originated in the circles of the Reims scriptorium in the 9th century. Two pages of a Gospel of John in Merovingian script as well as a Vita of Paul of Thebes were bound into the volume. (mit)

This medieval Hebrew lexicographical and scientific miscellany dates back to 1290 and encloses three highly important texts, used as the base for published editions and studies. These are: the Maḥberet Menahem by Menahem ben Jacob Ibn Saruq (died c. 970); an anonymous Hebrew prose translation of the very popular Old French version of the lapidary by Marbode of Rennes (12th c.) and lastly, an anonymous abridged version of the talmudic and midrashic lexicon entitled Sefer ha-Arukh by Natan ben Yehiel Anav of Rome (1035-1110), called the Berner Kleiner Arukh. The particularity of this copy is the presence of Old West Yiddish and Old French glosses. Furthermore, among the numerous later notes, there are more significant additions which abound in the blank pages and margins of the manuscript, the most unusual of which is a charm in Middle High German in Hebrew characters, relative to Hulda, a German goddess comparable to Venus, taken from the Tannhäuserlied. Moreover, this manuscript belonged to several famous Jewish and Christians owners, whose scriptural witness testifies to the manuscript's remarkable stature as a treasured source of knowledge from the time it was compiled at the end of the 13th century, to its possession by Christian Hebraists in Switzerland during the 16th and 17th centuries. (iss)

Cod. 207, presumably created in Fleury (St. Benoît-sur-Loire), is one of the few and by far the richest representative of a style that evolved in Fleury towards the end of the 8th century; with its extremely rich and high-quality artistic decoration, consisting of three ornamental pages and almost 140 initials, it is an outstanding example of the creative evolution that the insular language of forms underwent in the important cultural centers of the continent. The manuscript, consisting of 197 leaves in Bern as well as 24 leaves in Paris (BNF, lat. 7520), is the oldest grammar manuscript from Fleury; it contains an early medieval corpus of Roman grammarians from antiquity and from the early medieval period: Bede, Donatus, Maximus Victorinus, Julianus Toletanus, Servius Honoratus, Asper minor, Sergius, Petrus Pisanus, Isidore, as well as numerous other anonymous treatises and excerpts. (mit)

This codex consists of two parts that were united in the 9th century already. The first part, written in Mainz (ff. 1-110), contains the second book of Cassiodorus' Institutiones, which is devoted to secular knowledge; since the 9th century, it has been preserved in several manuscripts in an interpolated version that contains Cassiodorus' remarks on grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, supplemented with excerpts from Quintilian, Boethius, Augustine and others. The second part, written in Mainz or in Saint-Amand (ff. 111–126), contains the picture poems of Optatianus Porphyrius as well as some from the beginning of the reign of Charlemagne. A note in Jacques Bongars' own hand indicates that the manuscript - like many others - came into his possession from the chapter library of Strasbourg Cathedral. (mit)

Guillaume de Marchaut was one of the most important poets and composers of the middle ages in France. His work is represented in the collection of the Burgerbibliothek Bern by a manuscript of the highest quality: the 13 column-width miniatures and many of the initials are polychromatic and accented with gold leaf. Notation provided with some of the songs makes this manuscript, easily datable by its scribal colophon, important to the study of music history. (mit)

The manuscript contains the second part of the Chronicle of Eusebius in the Latin translation and continuation of Jerome. The tables, generally laid out as double pages, are in the majority of cases condensed onto a single page. The book decoration is a superb example of pre-Carolingian manuscript illustration from the Frankish Empire and Northern Italy. From the detailed information on the title page, one can deduce that the text was written in 699; the Bernese Chronicle of Eusebius therefore is Switzerland's oldest dated manuscript. (mit)

Extraordinary compilation of various texts by Isidore on secular (Etymologiae, De natura rerum) and ecclesiastic topics (Prooemia biblica, De ortu et obitu patrum; Allegoriae), as well as pieces on the Latin language (Differentia, Synonyma, Glossaria). This composite manuscript contains three full-page family trees as well as astronomical and geometric figures. Originally written in the scriptorium of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans, probably in Saint-Mesmin-de-Micy, this volume was soon held in Strasbourg, as attested by various Formulae iuris as well as a glossary of herbs and an incantation. From the holdings of Jacques Bongars, the volume came to Bern in 1632; here the original early 8th century flyleaves (Bern Burgerbibliothek, Cod. A 91.8) were removed around 1870. (mit)

This late 13th or early 14th century fragment of a French Trouvère manuscript probably was once part of the same codex as Paris, BN français 765. It contains 20 chansons, among them 14 by Thibaut de Champagne; all chansons are attested in a parallel version. 14 songs include square notation. (mit/hop)

This 9th century manuscript is dedicated to the Artes; it consists of two parts, the first of which was written in Fulda around the second quarter of the 9th century. It contains the second book of Cassiodorus' Institutiones, which is devoted to secular knowledge; since the 9th century, it has been preserved in several manuscripts in an interpolated version that contains Cassiodorus' remarks on grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, supplemented with excerpts from Quintilian, Boethius, Augustine and others. The second part was created a little earlier or simultaneously during the first third of the 9th century in Western France; it contains Alcuin's Dialectica and excerpts from Audax Grammaticus. The two parts were already combined in the 9th century and were held in France. (stb)

The manuscript consists of two parts. The first, Carolingian (fol. 1–12) with its original texts (fol. 1v–11v), reflects a meeting between Einhard and Lupus of Ferrières that occurred in June of 836 in Seligenstadt. Lupus received the arithmetic book (Calculus) by Victorius of Aquitaine along with a now widely known model alphabet for Ancient Capitals. Around 1000, texts by Abbo of Fleury on the ‘computus' (reckoning the date for Easter) were then added at the abbot's home monastery on the Loire (fol. 12–28), along with an abacus table (fol. 1r). The resulting collection of documents contains key items for and from Abbo's technical scholarship and offers a slightly divergent counterpart to the contemporaneous Floriacensis, Berlin, Staatsbibl., Phill. 1833. (all)

The Arba'ah Turim is a work of legal nature and is divided into four books, the first of which is found in MS Cod. 253 is the Tur Oraḥ Ḥayim or ‘Path of Life' and encloses laws on daily Jewish practices of blessings (i.e. washing hands in the morning, tefilin, tsitsit), prayer and laws on the Sabbath, festivals and Torah readings. This section also includes aspects of the Hebrew calendar relative to the annual liturgy. (iss)

This manuscript, which was probably produced in Fleury, consists of two independent parts. The first part (f. 1-47) comprises three commentaries on the Old and the New Testament; the second part (f. 48-192) consists of a total of 14 glossaries containing a total of about 25,000 lemmas. A particularity of this manuscript is that it shows different stages in the development of glossaries side by side. The first part represents an earlier stage with definitions of words in the order of the source text, also containing glosses in Old English and Old High German. In the second part the glossaries are already more developed with entries on individual authors or certain topics, ordered alphabetically by keywords. (mit)

This compilation of various legal texts, also known as Breviarium Alarici, probably is from the Upper Rhine area; it is preceded by two excerpts from Isidore's Etymologiae, which also pertain to laws, and by two full-page family trees. At the end there is a Latin-Hebrew-Greek glossary. This is an exceptionally colorful manuscript that gives the impression of being antique; it has a splendid title page, and it served as model for Johannes Sichard's edition of the Breviarium Alarici (which he considered to be the Codex Theodosianus), published by Heinrich Petri in Basel in 1528. The volume came to Bern in 1632 from the holdings of Jacques Bongars. (mit)

The richly illustrated Prudentius manuscript, created around 900 in the region of Lake Constance, is counted among the outstanding examples of Carolingian book art. It contains all seven poems published by Prudentius in the year 405 as well as a later added eighth work. The codex was given to the episcopal church of Strasbourg by Bishop Erchenbald of Strasbourg (965-991) and later came into the possession of Jacques Bongars. (mit)

The manuscript consists of a single quaternio formerly bound with the present Cod. 250 of the Burgerbibliothek Bern. The quire continues the computistic content of the latter, here with Easter tables whose margins hold the Annales Floriacenses. The last page received a copy of Abbo's second letter to Giraldus and Vitalis. (all)

A very interesting, completely edited and corrected manuscript of the three books of the Sententiae by Isidore of Seville. Compared to the main tradition, the form of the text is substantially different and contains numerous transpositions and additions. The manuscript was written at the Abbey of Saint-Mesmin, Micy, as evidenced by ownership labels (ex libris) written along the text area of each quire. In the middle there is a subsequently inserted binion (11th century), which contains, among others, parts of the Sermones by Fulbert of Chartres. (mit)

The Physiologus is an early Christian collection of naturalistic and allegorical descriptions from which the medieval beastiaries are derived. Bern Cod. 318, which originated in the School of Rheims, contains, in addition to the Physiologus (fol. 7r-22v), the life of St. Simeon (fol. 1r-5r), the so-called “Chronicle of Fredegar” (fol. 23r-125r) as well as a pericope from the Gospel of Matthew with Latin translation by Ephraem of Syria (fol. 125v-130r). Owners of the manuscript included the humanists Pierre Daniel and Jacques Bongars, among whose library holdings this manuscript came to Bern in 1632. (mit)

This manuscript is part of a substantial Carolingian composite manuscript, the surviving parts of which today are held in the Burgerbibliothek Bern (Cod. 330, 347, 357), the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (Ms. Lat. 7665), and in the Universitätsbibliothek Leiden (Voss. Lat. Q 30). Cod. 330 contains the last part of the volume with works on orthography by Cassiodorus, Alcuin-Bede, Caper, Terentius Scaurus, Agroetius, as well as several other texts. (mit)