Ludovico Antonio Muratori

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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.

Ludovico Antonio Muratori, librarian and archivist to the dukes of Este at Modena — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He came to the archives by way of the library shelf. Trained under the Benedictine scholar Benedetto Bacchini, who taught him to read a charter the way a jeweler reads a stone — by its cut, its hand, its small tells of date and forgery — he was placed as a young doctor of laws and theology among the holdings of the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where he learned the trade of the manuscript among the largest collection then within reach. In 1700 Duke Rinaldo I d’Este recalled him to Modena to take charge of the ducal library and the family archive, a post he held until his death; he added to it, from 1716, the modest cure of the parish of Santa Maria della Pomposa. The arrangement suited him. A working librarian rather than a university professor, he answered to a prince and a parish and otherwise to the documents, and he treated the documents as the only witnesses that could not be browbeaten.

The architect of the medieval Italian record

His large monuments are works of erudition rather than devotion. The Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, a vast collection of the narrative sources for Italian history from the year 500 to 1500, gathered chronicles and annals that had lain unprinted in scattered archives and set them, edited and annotated, between covers — twenty-eight folio volumes appearing from 1723 onward. The Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi turned from the chroniclers to the institutions: a study, organized by topic across its dissertations, of how medieval Italians governed, worshipped, traded, married, and recorded themselves, built from the diplomatic evidence of the charters rather than from the later storytellers. Late in life he compressed the whole into the Annali d’Italia (1744–1749), a year-by-year narrative for the general reader. The labor was prodigious and corporate: he wrote to scholars across Italy and beyond for transcripts, corresponded for decades, and pressed a network of copyists and librarians into service, so that the Scriptores became less the work of one man than the first systematic dragnet of a peninsula’s archives. Together these set a standard for handling documentary evidence — for asking of a text who wrote it, when, from what, and with what interest — that gives him a fair claim to be called the father of Italian historiography.

Line engraving of Muratori, the scholar whose editions of the Italian narrative and documentary sources set a standard for handling evidence — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY 4.0)

The standard was, at bottom, a habit of suspicion turned into a discipline. The age before him had read its sources credulously, taking a chronicle’s claims and a charter’s date at face value; the diplomatic scholarship Muratori practiced — the science of the document, of authentic deeds told from forged by their formulae, scripts, and seals — asked instead what could be proved. He weighed a grant of land by its Latin and its dating clause, exposed donations that no genuine chancery could have issued, and reconstructed institutions from the dry sediment of the records rather than from the flattering narratives of later hands. The method that later generations would carry into the criticism of scripture, he had already brought to bear on a forged donation or a doctored chronicle: not what a document says it is, but what its hand, its Latin, and its silences say it is. It is a method indifferent to whether its object is a ducal diploma or a list of holy books — and that indifference is what makes the find of 1740 of a piece with the rest of his life’s work rather than a stray episode in it.

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. Under the pen-name Lamindo Pritanio he published Della regolata divozione de’ cristiani (1747), a plea for an interior, well-ordered piety — the title’s regolata means regulated, governed, kept within measure — pruned of the proliferating feast-days, the bargaining cult of relics, and the more credulous forms of the cult of the saints — work, he argued, served God better than superstition. The book belongs to the current later called the Catholic Enlightenment: reform from within, loyal to the church and impatient with its abuses. It cost him friction. Pope Benedict XIV, who admired his learning and in the 1740s stayed an attempt by the Spanish Inquisition to condemn some of his writings, nonetheless disapproved of his strictures on papal politics and excessive holy days and let the Regolata divozione wait for its approval. The same temperament that distrusted a too-easy miracle made him exacting with a too-easy manuscript.

The find that carries his name

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 — a codex that had come down from the great Irish- founded monastery of Bobbio, in northern Italy, bound up with other matter, its list of received books one item among many. The page itself is rough work: about eighty-five lines in the uncultured Latin of an early-medieval copyist, the hand careless, the opening lost, so that the surviving text begins in mid-sentence on the second Gospel and must be read forward from a torn edge.

A page of the Muratorian Fragment (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Cod. J 101 sup.), the rough early-medieval copy Muratori printed in 1740 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The text itself is far older than its parchment. 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 — older than the canon-lists of the fourth-century councils, older than the festal letter of Athanasius that in 367 named the twenty-seven books now standard. It names most of what became the New Testament. The lost opening evidently covered the first two Gospels, for the surviving text takes up with the third and fourth, identifying them as Luke and John; it goes on to the Acts of the Apostles, the thirteen letters of Paul, the letter of Jude, two letters of John, and — among the writings of the older covenant kept for Christian reading — the Wisdom of Solomon. It receives two apocalypses, John’s and that ascribed to Peter, noting of the latter that some among the writer’s own community will not have it read in church. And it does not merely list. It weighs each book by where, when, and by whom it was thought to have been written, and it draws lines: the Shepherd of Hermas may be read in private but not proclaimed in public worship, having been composed, the writer says, only recently, in his own day, at Rome, while Hermas’s brother Pius held the city’s episcopal chair; and forgeries circulated under Paul’s name — a letter to the Laodiceans, one to the Alexandrians, fabricated to suit Marcion’s doctrine — are turned away outright, for, in the writer’s image, gall is not to be mixed with honey. The heretic Marcion is named and refused; the sorting is polemical as well as descriptive, a boundary drawn against an enemy as much as a shelf put in order.

This is the document long called the Muratorian Fragment, or Muratorian Canon — the title naming its modern editor, not its ancient author. The opening lines are lost; the Latin is rough, very likely translated from a Greek original, and a few of its sentences turn up again in certain manuscripts of the Pauline epistles at Monte Cassino, confirming that the list once circulated more widely than the lone Ambrosian copy. Of the four Gospels the church eventually fixed, the fragment as it survives speaks directly only to two; what it shows is not a finished canon handed down whole, but a community already deep in the work of deciding.

What the fragment shows, and the quarrel over its age

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 same instinct toward an authoritative list of received writings runs through the second-century church — through Irenaeus, who argued for exactly four Gospels and no more; through Tertullian, who wrote against Marcion’s pruned scripture; through Origen, who cataloged the disputed and the agreed; and, later, through the textual labors of Jerome, whose Latin Bible would set the Western shape — and the fragment, on the usual dating, stands at the early end of that line, a snapshot of the sorting in mid-motion. Beside it the long history of apocrypha, the writings weighed and set aside, takes on the look of a decision rather than an accident: books were not simply lost but judged.

The age of the snapshot is the live quarrel. The standard second-century dating, long treated as settled, rests above all on the writer’s note that the Shepherd of Hermas was written very recently, in his own time, while Pius — bishop of Rome to about 157 — sat in the city’s chair; read straightforwardly, that places the author within living memory of the 150s, at Rome or nearby, around 170 to 200. That reading was pressed hard in 1973 by Albert C. Sundberg, in the Harvard Theological Review, who argued instead for a fourth-century, Eastern origin — the list’s profile, he held, fits the canon-lists of the fourth-century Greek East better than anything from second-century Rome — and the case was extended at book length by Geoffrey Mark Hahneman in 1992, who proposed a date near 375. The redating has persuaded a minority and been resisted by most: Joseph Verheyden judged in 2003 that none of the arguments for a fourth-century Eastern origin convince, and the handbook surveys of Bruce Metzger and the state-of-research essays of Eckhard Schnabel keep the early date as the working position, while granting that it is a strong majority view rather than a closed one. The most recent full-scale treatment, Clare Rothschild’s critical edition of 2022, reopens the questions of date, provenance, and source with the whole two-and-a-half centuries of debate in view. 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.

The fragment’s afterlife runs forward into the very criticism that later unsettled scripture from within. The eighteenth century that printed it would, within two generations, turn the archivist’s tools on the sacred text itself: Jean Astruc dividing Genesis by its names for God, and Hermann Samuel Reimarus prising apart the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. Where they pulled a received book into its sources, the ancient list pulled in the other direction — assembling, from a field of competing writings, the bounded collection a tradition would call its own. The question the fragment opens, of how an unchanging deposit can visibly acquire its edges over time, is the one John Henry Newman would later make a doctrine of: that a living tradition develops without breaking. A canon-list caught early in its forming is that development with the lid off.

The text and its scholarship

The fragment’s modern study begins with the volume Muratori himself printed: the Latin text appeared in volume three of his Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi (Milan, 1740), and that editio princeps fixed the document’s name and its place in the literature. The single Ambrosian manuscript — Bobbio’s copy, now Cod. J 101 sup. in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana — remains the only witness to the full list, eked out by the few sentences that recur in Monte Cassino codices of the Pauline letters; every edition since has worked from that slim base. The standard modern English translation and a careful handbook treatment of the list’s place among the canon-witnesses are given by Bruce Metzger in The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), long the standard handbook treatment and still a common starting point.

The dating quarrel has its own small library, and it is best read from its poles inward. The minority case opens with Albert C. Sundberg Jr., Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List (Harvard Theological Review 66, 1973, 1–41), and is argued at length in Geoffrey Mark Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), which presses an Eastern, late-fourth-century origin near 375. The rebuttal is gathered in Joseph Verheyden, “The Canon Muratori: A Matter of Dispute” (in The Biblical Canons, ed. J.-M. Auwers and H. J. de Jonge, Leuven: Peeters, 2003), and surveyed in full by Eckhard J. Schnabel, The Muratorian Fragment: The State of Research (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 57/2, 2014, 231–264), which lays out the arguments on both sides and keeps the early date as the working position. The most recent full-dress edition — text, fresh translation, and a commentary that takes the whole eighteenth-to-twenty-first-century debate into account — is Clare K. Rothschild, The Muratorian Fragment: Text, Translation, Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022; Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity 132). For the document’s reception as a churchly witness, the older Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Muratorian Canon remains a serviceable summary of the traditional reading. Taken together the literature traces a single arc: a list a copyist preserved by chance has become the most argued-over scrap of evidence in the entire history of how the Christian scriptures acquired their boundary.

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 honors 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 · Bible · New Testament · Jean Astruc · John Henry Newman · Irenaeus · Athanasius · Jerome · Origen · Tertullian · Apocrypha