Notker.—Among the various monks of St. Gall who bore this name, the following are the most important:

(1) Notker Balbulus (Stammerer), Blessed, monk and author, b. about 840, at Jonswil, canton of St. Gall (Switzerland); d. 912. Of a distinguished family, he received his education with Tuotilo, originator of tropes, at St. Gall’s, from Iso and the Irishman Moengall, teachers in the monastic school. He became a monk there and is mentioned as librarian (890), and as master of guests (892-94). He was chiefly active as teacher, and displayed refinement of taste as poet and author. He completed Erchanbert’s chronicle (816), arranged a martyrology, and composed a metrical biography of St. Gall. It is practically accepted that he is the “monk of St. Gall” (monachus Sangallensis), author of the legends and anecdotes “Gesta Caroli Magni”. The number of works ascribed to him is constantly increasing. He introduced the sequence, a new species of religious lyric, into Germany. It had been the custom to prolong the Alleluia in the Mass before the Gospel, modulating through a skillfully harmonized series of tones. Notker learned how to fit the separate syllables of a Latin text to the tones of this jubilation; this poem was called the sequence (q.v.), formerly called the “jubilation”. (The reason for this name is uncertain.) Between 881-887 Notker dedicated a collection of such verses to Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, but it is not known which or how many are his. Ekkehard IV, the historiographer of St. Gall, speaks of fifty sequences attributable to Notker. The hymn, “Media Vita”, was erroneously attributed to him late in the Middle Ages. Ekkehard IV lauds him as “delicate of body but not of mind, stuttering of tongue but not of intellect, pushing boldly forward in things Divine, a vessel of the Holy Spirit without equal in his time”. Notker was beatified in 1512.

(1) CHEVALIER Bio-bibl., s. v.; MEYER VON KNONAU in Realencyk fur prot. Theol., s. v.; WERNER, Notker’s Sequenzen (Aarau, 1901); BLUME, Analecta hymnica, LIII (Leipzig, 1911).

(2) Notker Labeo, monk in St. Gall and author, b. about 950; d. 1022. He was descended from a noble family and nephew of Ekkehard I, the poet of Waltharius. “Labeo” means “the thick lipped”, later he was named “the German” (Teutonicus) in recognition of his services to the language. He came to St. Gall when only a boy, and there acquired a vast and varied knowledge by omnivorous reading. His contemporaries admired him as a theologian, philologist, mathematician, astronomer, connoisseur of music, and poet. He tells of his studies and his literary work in a letter to Bishop Hugo of Sitten (998-1017), but was obliged to give up the study of the liberal arts in order to devote himself to teaching. For the benefit of his pupils he had undertaken something before unheard, namely translations from Latin into German. He mentions eleven of these translations, but unfortunately only five are preserved: (1) Boethius, “De consolatione philosophiae”; (2) Marcianus Capella, “De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii”; (3) Aristotle, “De categoriis”; (4) Aristotle, “De interpretatione”; (5) “The Psalter”. Among those lost are: “The Book of Job”, at which he worked for more than five years; “Disticha Catonis”; Vergil’s “Bucolica”; and the “Andria” of Terenz. Of his own writings he mentions in the above letter a “New Rhetoric” and a “New Computus” and a few other smaller works in Latin. We still possess the Rhetoric, the Computus (a manual for calculating the dates of ecclesiastical celebrations, especially of Easter), the essay “De partibus logicae”, and the German essay on Music.

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