A Palatine codex missing since 1798, now open leaf by leaf

The first written leaf opens in two columns of dense Latin. A large red initial S fills the upper left, and the rubric above it names the subject: Incipit legenda de s[an]c[t]o Cyriaco — here begins the legend of Saint Cyriacus. That page belongs to Vatican manuscript Pal.lat.851, an early-sixteenth-century German paper codex that left the Vatican inventory in the late eighteenth century and returned only in January 2026. This week the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana put the complete scan on DigiVatLib. The independent Recent Vatican Manuscripts feed records the item on 25 August 2026 as part of the Week 34 batch. 12

Pal.lat.851 is a paper manuscript of 115 leaves plus two flyleaves. Several copyists produced it in Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century, most likely at Worms — a setting that helps explain the choice of saints. The binding is dated 1556; its two covers still carry the portrait of Elector Palatine Ottheinrich. 3

Inside, the volume holds five saints' lives — Cyriacus, Gallus, Maurus the abbot, Goar, and Burchard, bishop of Worms — followed by Paul the Deacon's Historia Langobardorum, the medieval chronicle of the Lombards. The Vatican's January announcement stresses the rarity of the hagiographic texts preserved here. 3

The shelfmark is the story. Pal.lat.851 arrived in Rome in 1623 with the Latin books of Heidelberg's Bibliotheca Palatina, the gift of Maximilian I of Bavaria to Pope Gregory XV after papal support in the Thirty Years' War. Leone Allacci, then Scriptor Graecus of the Vatican Library, coordinated the transfer. By the library's 1798 revision the volume was already missing. 3

Flyleaf signatures and ex libris chart the private path that followed: Frederick North, fifth Earl of Guilford; Sir Thomas Phillips; Maurice Burrus. In early 2026 the codex resurfaced at Hugo Wetscherek's Inlibris bookshop in Vienna. Jochen Apel, director of the Heidelberg University Library, alerted the Vatican prefect Don Mauro Mantovani, and the Apostolic Library bought it back into the Palatine series to which the inventories still assigned it. 3

Eight months later, the same library opened every leaf online. The catalog and viewer now sit under the restored shelfmark. 4

Folio 1r is the cleanest place to start. The red initial and the Cyriacus rubric fix the opening of the first legend; the two-column script fills the rest of the leaf without decoration beyond the rubrics. The page reads as a working German humanist book rather than a luxury commission — which matches a codex meant for reading saints' lives and a national chronicle together.

Later leaves carry the remaining four lives and Paul the Deacon's Lombard history. The IIIF set runs to 244 images, from the Ottheinrich binding through the millimetric scale at the end. 5

The complete digitized codex is free to browse in DigiVatLib: open Pal.lat.851. Begin with the front board if you want the 1556 Ottheinrich covers, then turn to folio 1r for the Cyriacus legend, and keep going for Gallus, Maurus, Goar, Burchard, and the Historia Langobardorum. The catalog record and edition browser supply the shelfmark path for the same object. 4