Haimo of Halberstadt (778-853)
A leaf from his Homily for Septuagesima Sunday, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [Italy (Lazio or the south?), 11th century].
Very elegantly written, with a trace of Beneventan influence.

c. 295 × 210mm. An almost complete leaf, lacking only parts of the margins, elegantly written in 2 columns of 36 lines, the text concerning the Ages of Man and the periods of time in the Bible (‘seculi. in qua nos positi sumus […] resipiscat et ad dominum convertatur’; printed by F. Liverani, Spicilegium Liberianum, 1863, pp. 214–16) (recovered from use as a pastedown, with consequent wear, and darkened glue on one side, but still fully legible)

Provenance:
(1) Apparently produced within the sphere of influence of Beneventan script (see Script, below).
(2) Colker MS 281; acquired in 1978 from B.M. Rosenthal.

Script:
The main hand is an elegant and pleasing 11th-century Caroline minuscule: the thickened ascenders (especially of ‘l’ and ‘d’) and the slightly leftward-sloping descenders (especially of capital ‘I’ and ‘P’), in particular, impart a calligraphic quality. Near the bottom of the first column of the recto is a two-line correction over an erasure, interesting for two reasons: the new next does not match the printed edition, and the script uses a Beneventan form of ‘ri’ ligature that looks somewhat like an ‘N’. The latter suggests an origin, or connection of some sort, with the central and southern regions of Italy in which Beneventan script was written.

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