Just to clarify,
Desiderius, abbot of MC from 1058-85, Gregory VII d. 1085 and was
succeeded in that year by Desiderius as Victor III. Victor III dies in 1087
and is succeeded in turn by Urban II
Desiderius' work on building the great Romanesque basilica w/ cloister was
a project of 1066-1075-80s.
HEJ Cowdrey, The Age of Abbot Desiderius, Montecassino, the Papacy, and the
Normans in the Elventh and Early Twelfth Centuries,Clarendon Press, c1983
KJ Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800-1200. Yale Univ.
Press, 4th ed. 1979, rpt. 1983.
The facsimile of the Mss. mentioned has Paul Meyvaert as one of the
editors; it is touched up (actually laden) with gold gilt, and I believe is
fabulously expensive--so only a few libraries own it, and probably in
consortium agreement w/ others in the area!
Leah Rutchick
At 01:32 PM 9/16/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Victor III (Desiderius II, abbot of Monte Cassino 1157-85) whose papacy was
>brief, was probably the most powerful and celebrated of all abbots of MC
>after Benedict himself. He rebuilt the basilica there and several other
>buildings, made strategic alliances with the Norman rulers of Sicily and
>somehow managed to be a moderate in the increasingly polarized papacy of
>Gregory VII, a friend. Desiderius also decorated the church with important
>bronze doors. His workshop produced MSS that are among the finest products
>of the Byzantine-Italian school, most notably a lectionary containing
>illustrated lives of Benedict and Maurus. This has been sumptuously
>reproduced by Belser Verlag as the Codex Benedictus, and is available in
>several university libraries in the US and Europe. His fine historian
>claimed that "only under Desiderius did the splendor of Monte Cassino that
>had been promised by God to Blessed Benedict, come to pass.".
>jw
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