page_title: Commonitorium (Orientius)
section_title: Textual history
hierarchical_section_title: Commonitorium (Orientius) / Textual history
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Cartulaire de Pecquencourt représentant l'Abbaye d'Anchin
context_page_description: The Commonitorium is the name of a c. AD 430 poem by the Latin poet and Christian bishop Orientius. Written in elegiac couplets, the Commonitorium is made up of 1036 verses and has traditionally been divided into two books. The poem is hortatory and didactic in nature, describing the way for the reader to attain salvation, with warnings about the evils of sin.
  The Commonitorium was rediscovered near the turn of the seventeenth century at Anchin Abbey, and the editio princeps of the poem was published in 1600 by Martin Delrio. This version, however, lacked the second book, which was only discovered in 1791; the first complete edition of the poem was then published in 1700 by Edmond Martène. The poem has received qualified praise, with Mildred Dolores Tobin—who wrote a commentary on the poem in 1945—arguing that while it was not of the same quality as the poems of the Golden Age writers, it is a better work than other contemporary poems.
context_section_description: The Commonitorium was lost sometime in the Middle Ages only to be rediscovered near the turn of the seventeenth century at Anchin Abbey in a manuscript known as the Codex Aquicinctensis. The finder of the poem, a Jesuit named Heribert Rosweyd, turned it over to his colleague, the theologian and Latinist Martin Delrio, who dubbed the work the Commonitorium and published the editio princeps of it in 1600; this edition was marred by the fact that Codex Aquicinctensis—and thus Delrio's version—preserved only the first book of the Commonitorium. Almost a century later in 1791, a second manuscript (the Codex Ashburnhamensis, also known as the Codex Turonensis) was discovered at Marmoutier Abbey, Tours that contained the Commonitorium's second book, thereby enabling the French Benedictine historian and liturgist Edmond Martène to publish the first complete edition of the poem in 1700. In 1774, the Italian Oratorian and patristic scholar Andrea Gallandi published a second complete edition of the poem. In 1888, the classicist Robinson Ellis published an edition of the work, which in 1911 Adrian Fortescue referred to as "the best modern edition".
  In 1841, Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja stole the Codex Ashburnhamensis and sold it to Bertram Ashburnham, 4th Earl of Ashburnham (hence its common name), and today, the Commonitorium is preserved in only this manuscript, as the Codex Aquicinctensis was long ago lost. The Codex Aquicinctensis also contained two prayers and four short poems, all of which have been attributed to Orientius.
caption: The Commonitorium was rediscovered at Anchin Abbey c. 1600.
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