Ludovico Antonio Muratori

← Encyclopedia

Ludovico Antonio Muratori was an Italian Catholic priest, archivist, and historian who, more than any single figure, founded the modern critical study of medieval Italy — and who is remembered in the history of the Bible for one document he did not write but rescued from obscurity. Born at Vignola in 1672 and ordained in 1695, he spent the longer part of his life as librarian and keeper of the archives to the dukes of Este at Modena, working from manuscripts the way later scholars would work from printed editions: collating, dating, and publishing what he found.

His large monuments are works of erudition rather than devotion. The Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, a vast collection of the narrative sources for Italian history, and the Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi, a study of the period’s institutions and customs, set a standard for handling documentary evidence that gives him a fair claim to be called the father of Italian historiography. He was also a churchman of a moderate, reforming temper, writing on the regulation of popular devotion in terms that argued for restraint over excess.

The find that carries his name is small by comparison and outsized in consequence. In 1740, among the holdings of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, Muratori printed a damaged Latin text copied into a manuscript of perhaps the seventh or eighth century. The text itself is far older: most scholarship places its original composition in the later second century, which would make it the earliest surviving list of the writings the church received as scripture. It names most of what became the New Testament — the four Gospels, the letters of Paul, certain of the Catholic epistles — while including works later set aside and weighing each by where, when, and by whom it was thought to have been written. The opening lines are lost; the Latin is rough, very likely translated from a Greek original. This is the Muratorian Fragment, or Muratorian Canon.

What the fragment establishes is contested in detail and important in outline. That a community was already sorting accepted from disputed books, and giving reasons, before the canon was anywhere formally fixed is the point most readers have drawn from it; the standard second-century dating, long treated as settled, has been pressed by a minority who argue for a fourth-century, Eastern origin, and the debate is not closed. None of this was Muratori’s argument. He published the text and let it work — and a list a copyist had preserved by accident became one of the principal witnesses to how the Christian Bible took the shape it now has.

His name attached to the fragment is itself a small accident of scholarship: the document belongs to an anonymous ancient hand, and the modern title honours the archivist who brought it to light rather than its author. Muratori would probably have thought that the right order of credit.

→ Related: Hermann Samuel Reimarus · Alexander Of Hales · Samuel Clarke