A Tenth-Century Fragment of the Metrical Calendar of Gambera from the Lake Constance Region

Abstract

The Gambera Missal is an illustrated missal written around 1500, now in the Archivio Capitolare at Casale Monferrato. The manuscript includes the text of a Latin metrical calendar (the “Metrical Calendar of Gambera” or MCG) which, based on the feasts included, was suggested to have been composed some 450 years earlier and had a connection to the Abbey of St. Gall. This article discusses a second witness to the MCG, a single leaf that was used as a binding for a seventeenth-century book. The fragment has metrical text and computistical data virtually identical to that in the Gambera manuscript, and a large Ottonian painted KL (for “Kalends”). Based on the handwriting and style of the initials, the fragment dates to the second-half of the tenth century, likely from the Lake Constance area.