A Fragment of a Thirteenth-Century Manuscript of Ovid’s Heroides with an Orléanais Commentary (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 9295/1)

Among the newly cataloged fragments of manuscripts of the Latin classics held in the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona, there is a fragment of a thirteenth-century French manuscript of Ovid’s Heroides. It contains the text of part of epistles 1, 3, and 4, with an accessus, a marginal commentary, and interlinear glosses. The accessus is a new witness to the text catalogued as 183 in the Incipitarium Ovidianum, whereas the introductions to Heroides 1 and 4 and the marginal glosses transmit the anonymous commentary preserved in catena form in Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Fabricius 29 2º. This note provides a description of the manuscript, identifies its contents within the medieval commentary tradition, and offers as an appendix an edition of the accessus, the introductions, and a sample of marginal glosses. Annotations by seventeenth-century hands suggest that by this time these leaves were bound in a book possessed by a prominent member of the Majorcan Despuig family who was acquainted with the poetry of Ausiàs March (1400–59).