Saint-Maur · 1668-1701

Acta sanctorum ordinis sancti Benedicti

dom Luc d’Achery and dom Jean Mabillon · Paris, Billaine, Savreux, Robustel · nine folio volumes

The lives, miracles and translations of the saints of the Benedictine order, printed from the manuscripts of Saint-Germain-des-Prés over thirty-three years. They are ranged not by feast-day but by century, from about 500 to 1100. The texts are given with their sources named, which is what still makes them usable — and what makes them evidence to be weighed rather than believed.

Centuries, not months

Dom Luc d’Achery, who entered Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1637 and served as its librarian, gathered the materials. Dom Jean Mabillon, sent to join him there in 1664, edited the texts and wrote the prefaces, the observations, the notes and the indexes. The first volume came from the press of Louis Billaine in 1668, the second from Charles Savreux in 1669, the last two from Charles Robustel in 1701.

Mabillon set out the plan on the third page of his preface, a leaf that can still be turned at Gallica. He salutes Laurentius Surius, and the Jesuits Jean Bolland and Godefroid Henschen, whose own collection was then in progress; then he states the difference in seven words — Illi Mensium fastos, nos Saeculorum ordinem sequimur, they follow the calendar of the months, we follow the order of the centuries. Since he put Benedict’s birth in 480 and his death about 543, the first Benedictine century runs from 500 to 600. The rule for the texts stands on the same page: lives already printed were collated against manuscript copies, lives not yet printed were dug out of old parchments, and where several accounts of one saint competed, the better attested was admitted. The books are heavy objects. The second volume, printed by Savreux in 1669, runs to sixty-six roman-numbered pages of front matter, 1,104 pages of text and twenty leaves of index, in folio.

The petition of 1677

Mabillon refused to the order saints he judged had never belonged to it, and the volumes were attacked inside his own congregation. The sources disagree about which volume began the quarrel — one traces it to the very first publication of 1668, another to the second volume — but they agree on 1677, the year the volume of the fourth Benedictine century appeared: dom Philippe Bastide and dom Antoine-Joseph Mège carried to the general chapter a petition asking that the work be suppressed and that its author make amends. He answered with a short essay in French, Brèves réflexions sur quelques règles de l’histoire, which stayed in manuscript until P.O.L. printed it in November 1990. In April 1678 the priors of the congregation decided unanimously in his favour, and the volumes went on.

A plate that outlived its monument

One of the engraved plates has outlived what it shows. To illustrate the Conversio Otgerii, a Latin text written before 1084, an unsigned plate about thirty centimetres each way was engraved for the volume of 1677: the monument standing in the abbey church of Saint-Faron at Meaux, shown to visitors as the tomb of Ogier the Dane. The church was rebuilt and the monument taken down in 1751, and the print is now the chief record of it. It has to be used with care. The recumbent figures are dated on style to about 1140; the ensemble is thought to be a thirteenth-century assemblage of older pieces; the name of Ogier is a later attribution still; and the engraver restored heads that were already missing. The plate is keyed to page 664 of the 1677 volume, and bound near page 656 in some copies.

The Acta halts at the year 1100 and was never carried further; the title page of 1701 says so plainly, ab anno Christi M. ad MC. By then d’Achery had been dead sixteen years and dom Thierry Ruinart’s name stood beside Mabillon’s. Mabillon had in any case been at work since 1693 on the Annales ordinis sancti Benedicti, the commentary to the collection, whose first volume appeared in 1703; he lived to see four. Dom René Massuet brought out the fifth in 1713, dom Edmond Martène the sixth in 1739. Sebastiano Coleti and Giuseppe Bettinelli reprinted the Acta at Venice in the 1730s; the volume of the fifth Benedictine century in that reprint is dated 1738.

Why it is here

The nine volumes were made in a library by men who said where every text came from, and when they were attacked it was on that ground that they were defended. The research programme of the Conservatoire reads the papers of this abbey under the same rule: name the source, weigh its authority, leave the gap open when the evidence will not bear the weight. The plate from Meaux is also the reason the workshops treat an old drawing of a building as a document about the building — sometimes it is the only one left. The Congregation of Saint-Maur produced several such collections, listed among the works.

SourcesThe title page of the second volume and page 33 of the first come from copies digitised by Google for the Internet Archive — a Lyon copy and the copy of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli — both in the public domain. The portrait is at the Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.33122), published on Wikimedia Commons under CC0. The preface is quoted from the Gallica digitisation of the first volume; the collation of the second follows the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the Saint-Faron plate and the monument are described after the study published in the Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France and a further study issued by the Éditions du CTHS. The first volume may be read in full at the Internet Archive.