Cuatro leccionarios fragmentarios de cistercienses (siglos XII-XIII)

Abstract

The certain history of the four lectionaries for the night office examined in this study, which can be roughly dated to a period from the mid-12th to the mid-13th century, actually only goes back to a period long after their creation when, after reducing them to parchment fragments, they were used to protect documents dating to the 16th-18th centuries. The Cistercian origins of the materials since modern times is a matter of certainty because the membra disjecta were re-cycled in the archives of three abbeys belonging to that order – Santa María de Montederramo (Ourense), Santa María de Oia (Pontevedra) and Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas (León). Furthermore, with only one exception, no other traces of these manuscripts have come to light outside the above-mentioned collections. That being said, and with all the necessary caveats, since we are dealing here with a tiny part of the original medieval texts, the study of these fragments enables us toaffirm that the liturgical manuscripts which they come from were in fact Cistercian books from the very time they were made.