Notker the stammerer‘s notatio de illustribus viris. Study programmes and readings in the Abbey school of St. Gallen

Abstract

The Abbey of St. Gallen was the seat of one of the most important schools of the Carolingian universe. Of this school and of the literary and artistic activities connected to it, there remains an extraordinary quantity of sources, which allow us, at least in principle, to reconstruct the complexity of the internal dynamics, the contrasts between the different teachers, the different curricula, the variety of study texts adopted, the different learning methodologies practiced. They are also sources of very difficult interpretation, full of allusions and messages built on complex word games, which refer to characters, facts and circumstances that we often do not know or that we cannot identify exactly. This paper examines one of these sources, the Notatio de illustribus viris by Notker Balbulus, of which we provide a partial interpretation, aimed at capturing some aspects of the complexity that the study of the Bible had achieved at the school of St. Gallen.