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On the Meaning of the Term ‘Liber Commicus’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2016
Extract
The somewhat striking title of Liber Commicus was the usual designation in the Mozarabic Church for the liturgical book known elsewhere in western Christendom as the lectionarium, that is, the collection of passages from the Old Testament, Epistles, and Gospels specified for reading during the Mass throughout the ecclesiastical year. This book, so important for the history of the medieval Church in the Iberian peninsula, and cited in a great many documents, has survived in two complete manuscripts from the 11th century, two significant fragments from the 9th and the 11th centuries, and several smaller fragments. First made available by Morin in 1893, the work has most recently been edited by Pérez de Urbel and González y Ruiz-Zorilla. (Their spelling commicus is related to certain arguments relative to the term's origin; this form of the word will be used in this study up to the point at which I wish to argue otherwise.)
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References
1 Liber Comicus, ed. Morin, Germain (Anecdota Maredsolana 1; Maredsous 1893).Google Scholar
2 Liber Commicus, edd. Pérez, Justo de Urbel and Atilano González y Ruiz-Zorrilla (Madrid 1950).Google Scholar
3 Ibid. XV. Since Rivera called attention to the lines from Julian of Toledo, in which the saint observes only that it would be more accurate to call the book Liber Commatus, scholars have accepted this as the explanation of the title. Anscari Mundó, probably the world's leading authority on these collections, accedes without further discussion to the opinions expressed by Rivera, Ayuso Marazuela and Pérez de Urbel (‘El Commicus palimsest Paris 2269, amb notes sobre liturgia i manuscrits visigòtics a Septimània i Catalunya,’ Cardinali I. A. Schuster in memoriam (Scripta et documenta 7; Montserrat 1956) 154.Google Scholar
4 DACL 5.261.Google Scholar
5 So Phocas the grammarian, cited in Du Cange 450.Google Scholar
6 I have used the following collections of glossaries: Glossarium Latinum Bibliothecae Parisinae antiquissimum saec. ix., ed. Hildebrand, G. F. (Göttingen 1854); Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, edd. G. Götz and G. Löwe (Leipzig 1888–1923). Note that these word-lists never record a reading with double nasal (i.e., commicus).Google Scholar
7 We find in the glossaries one provocative documentation of comex for comes, as well as a single gloss equating comicum (from comex?) with comitium. While this would satisfy perfectly the requirements of phonology, we would still have to face the semantic problems previously mentioned in connection with comes. It would appear to stretch things a bit too far to argue that if comes has a variant comex, then a documented comis (= compositus) could have had an alternate form comix.Google Scholar
8 Corominas, Juan, Diccionario Crítico Etimológico de la Lengua Castellana (Madrid–Bern 1954–57).Google Scholar
9 Spitzer, Leo, ‘Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony,’ Traditio 2 (1944) 422 n. 10.Google Scholar