Rabanus Maurus

English

And he divided the light and the darkness. For he divided them not only by a difference of quality, but of places: namely by spreading the light over the upper part of the world, in which the human way of life was to be, and by allowing the lower parts of it to remain in their ancient darkness.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Latin

PL 107, col. 448C · pd

Notes

Bede's two clauses reproduced without a word changed and without a name — the commonest event on the Carolingian bench and worth one card, because it is what makes the difference of quality and of place the standing Latin answer rather than one Northumbrian's opinion. Rabanus is compiling a commentary for the schools out of the fathers, and Bede is by now among the fathers.

Threads

• → transmits · Bede
  Verbatim and unnamed, from 'Divisit namque eas non solum qualitatis, sed et locorum distantia' to the end of the sentence. The transmission is what makes 'by quality and by place' the standing literal answer of the Latin bench.
• ← cites · Paul of Burgos
  Burgos's defence is a citation, and it is of the witness this daf already carries. Rabanus is the doctor whose answer Lyra called truphatica, a piece of trifling; Burgos quotes him at length on the second day and calls the dismissal irreverence. What makes this worth an edge is what it shows about the Latin bench's own memory: by the fifteenth century a Latin has to argue that Rabanus said something first, and the argument has to be made against another Latin who has been reading Hebrew.