ABSTRACT

Vogel and Elze tended to defer to Andrieu's wisdom on most matters of interpretation, giving an outward impression of absolute consensus when inwardly they may have felt unqualified to disagree. And as Andrieu's remarkable hypotheses have been replicated reverently from article to article, and have assumed concrete form through the publication of successive editions, theory has coalesced slowly into fact. One could find out about the Pontifical romano-germanique as a watershed moment in the evolution of pontificals. And readers could discover how monks from a German cathedral city had managed to assemble this compendium, which, following a stellar rise in popularity across eleventh-and twelfth-century Europe, as well as its successful implantation in Rome, set a standard for episcopal books in the Christian West that is said to persist even to this day. To that end, among the most pressing tasks is to topple the existing edition's artificial and outdated hierarchy of manuscript sources, by which the history and philology were inextricably intertwined.