Ian Wood

Colomban quitta le monastère de Bangor, en Irlande du Nord, aux environs de 590 et mourut à Bobbio en 615. Entre ces deux dates, il voyagea beaucoup dans le royaume des Francs. Ses plus importants déplacements sont rapportés en détail dans la Vita Columbani écrite par Jean de Bobbio, qui donne de précieuses informations sur les modes de transport, notamment à travers le voyage que Colomban entreprit de Luxeuil à Nantes et de Nantes en Austrasie jusqu'à Bregenz aux environs de 610. Jean livre également d'importants témoignages de son propre voyage de Bobbio à Suse et de Bobbio à Rome. Son récit nous éclaire sur les routes et les rivières en lien avec les voyages durant la fin du vi e et le début du vii e siècle. Ces informations peuvent notamment être confrontées aux témoignages archéologiques concernant la navigation sur la Loire et le Rhin à l'époque romaine tardive. [Trad. de la Rédaction]

Chains of chronicles: The example of London, British library ms. add. 16974 The study of chronicle production in the Carolingian period has become increasingly sophisticated. 1 It is now clear that far from being simple records of events, chronicles were carefully structured to put across particular interpretations of history. Moreover, compilers of manuscripts who put together more than one historical or chronicle text have been shown to have interfered deliberately with their material, editing it in such a way as to put a particular spin on events. 2 The implications of this approach are beginning to have a major impact on interpretations of the historiography of the eighth and ninth centuries. As yet, however, there has been little recognition of the importance of such studies for our understanding of the chronicles of previous centuries , despite the fact that the earliest manuscripts of most chronicles of the fifth and sixth centuries come from the Carolingian period or later. Certainly, important work has been done on the extent to which late antique chroniclers were interpreters and not simply recorders of events. 3 But, given what we now know of historical practices in the ninth century, we need to be acutely aware that Carolingian scribes may have edited the information contained in earlier chronicles. Although it is not usually possible to get behind our earliest manuscript to recreate an Ur-text, we ought to think hard about the nature of the texts that have survived , and whether we only have access to an edited recension. In some cases it may well be that we may end up with some optimism that a relatively unaltered version of a text has been transcribed; in other cases we may end up with a greater awareness of what compilers hoped to do with the past. My intention in what follows is to pursue some of these issues through an investigation of a single manuscript: London, British Library ms. add. 16974. It is a manuscript of considerable importance for scholars of the fifth and sixth centuries because it is one of three copies of the Chronicle of 452 (leaving aside around forty manuscripts of Sigebert of Gembloux, which include a version of the chronicle). 4 Yet more significant, the manuscript contains the only surviving text of the Chronicle of Marius of Avenches. 5 The Chronicle of 452 has long been a text of importance to historians of Late Roman Britain, because it contains unique annals relating to Romano-British history in the fifth century. As a result its contents has been subject to considerable discussion, some of which has expressly recognised the need to pay attention to its Carolingian transmission , but largely in so far as it relates to the factual reliability of the Chronicle as preserved in the London manuscript. 6 The most recent edition of the Chronicle of Marius, however, failed to make anything of the 1 This paper is a version of a number of presentations given in Vienna and in Leeds. I should like to thank all those who have commented on the various recensions of the argument. In particular I should like to thank Helmut Reimitz, Richard Corradini and Michael Allen for their observations.