Source: Textual EditionGregory I.LibResp

Notes

*@Meyvaert 1971, pp. 15-33, at p. 23, identifies three textual traditions:
1. the Letter version;
2. the Capitula version;
3. the Question-and-Answer version (Q/A) (which was of two types: an insular and a continental version: see p. 25).
*Bede acquired a text that derived from the third tradition, although it omitted the 'Obsecro' passage containing Augustine 1's request for the relics of St Sixtus and Gregory 1's response. This same clause was unnumbered in the 1st tradition.
*According to @Meyvaert 1971, p. 25, the Letter version circulated mainly in northern Italy; the earliest MS dates from the beginning of the eighth century but already contains 'various small slips and mistakes' (p. 25). He notes that '[t]he Q/A version had the monopoly of circulation in Gaul, England and Germany' (p. 25). The early insular Q/A version that accompanies the penitential collection of Theodore of Canterbury 'and may represent a revision done at Canterbury itself' (p. 26). Two collections of texts containing the Libellus are particularly important. Bede's text circulated with the so-called Canones Gregorii, which in turn derived from a collection known as the Discipulus Umbrensium, Meyvaert considers (p. 26) that 'the Q/A version, as such, is a defective and secondary one'. He also argues strongly that it did not come to Bede through the agency of Nothelm.
*The source of Bede's comments about Peter and Lawrence have been variously ascribed: for the various points of view see @Meyvaert 1971, p. 30, who in 1971 felt that Bede used both Gregory 1's letter to Bertha and the Libellus preface (see p. 31).