Naturally for a place founded by an Irish monk, St. Gall held early Irish manuscripts. Numbering fifteen volumes in all, they dated from the seventh to the ninth century, the foundation years of the monastery. Priceless artifacts from the era in which Irish and Scottish missionaries helped preserve and renew European Christianity, all fifteen were of worldwide importance for the history of religion, culture, language, and paleography. One of them, for example—the Grammatica Prisciana, c. 845—is today the main source for the philology of Old Irish. How, then, did the monks of St. Gall treat the
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