Virgil, Georgics and Bucolics (The Palatine Virgil)
In Latin
Fifth or sixth century

This spectacular manuscript, written in Italy in a large rustic hand, may have been completed before the fall of the Roman empire, and thus is physically as well as intellectually part of the classical heritage preserved in the Vatican (to which it came as booty after Catholic armies sacked the Protestant stronghold at Heidelberg in 1623). It may have been preserved for some time at the Carolingian court, a vital center for classical studies in the early Middle Ages, and certainly it was studied and copied actively by Carolingian scholars. It came to rest at Lorsch by sometime in the ninth century.