• Loire Valley (?)
• Angers (?)

Collection of Philibert de la Mare (1615–1687)

• Computus
• Cosmology
• Exegesis
• Grammar
• Lexicography
• Rhetoric
• Poetry

• Medieval list of the manuscript's contents (1v)
• Justus of Urgell, Explicatio in Cantica Canticorum (3r-23r)
• Synonyma Ciceronis (23r-26v)
• Alcuin, De rhetorica et uirtutibus (27-44r)
• Poem Qui rogo ciuiles cupiat (44r)
• Alcuin, Letters to Charlemagne (44r-49r)
• De ordine creaturarum (49v-64r)
• Alcuin, De uirtutibus et uitiis (64r-66v)
• Commentary on a sermon by Jerome concerning the Passion according to Saint Matthew (66v-113r)
• Compilation of computistical texts (113r-122r)
• Blank folio (122v)
• Treatises on orthography (123r-133v)
• Glossaries Adonai and Abactor (133v-197v).

• Certainly not written in Brittany
• Some contents possibly derive from a Breton exemplar / archetype

This is the MS bearing the siglum U in Diaz y Diaz's 1972 edition of the seventh-century Hiberno-Latin cosmological tract De ordine creaturarum. This MS was not written in Brittany; Diaz y Diaz (1972: 51) rather pointed to a possible connection with Angers (although he also added that 'una conexión con una región más al Este no es de excluir'; perhaps Vendôme could be suggested as an alternative to Angers, judging from the script). However, the same scholar considered this MS to be particularly close to Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 178 (siglum K), a ninth-century manuscript from the Loire Valley which presents insular features and even contains a fragment of a chronicle of Britain; indeed, Diaz y Diaz concluded that both witnesses to this Hiberno-Latin tract may derive 'de un manuscrito insular o fuertemente influenciado por ambientes insulares' (ibid.). Interestingly, the highly peculiar orthography malionae for malina ('spring-tide') occurs in this copy of De ordine creaturarum (cf. Diaz y Diaz 1972: 148, apparatus criticus): a very similar orthography (mallione) can also be found in an excerpt from the same text in Rome (Città del Vaticano), BAV, Reg.lat.123 (fol. 83r), a large scientific encyclopaedia from eleventh-century Ripoll that presents many points of contact with computistical texts from Brittany and Fleury. Finally, it should be pointed out that the computistica at fols 113r–122r contain numerous passages reflecting Irish or Irish-influenced thought in this field of Medieval learning. These elements may be tentatively taken as indications that the copy of De ordine creaturarum in Lat. 2183 (and perhaps also the one in Bern 178?) derived from a Breton exemplar (cf. Bisagni 2017: 32). Needless to say, further research will be needed to test this working hypothesis.

Bisagni 2017: 32; BnF Archives et Manuscrits;BNCG II, 357; Diaz y Diaz 1972: 51–2; Smyth 2011: 214–15.

• https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53157000f