If the publisher who had reprinted this from a download they found somewhere on the Internet, stuck it between covers and put it for sale on Amazon, had had any idea what it was, they might have added "vol 3" to the cover, or "tomus tertius," as it says between the covers, which is Latin for "vol 3," and they might even have added "Monumenta Moguntina," which is the actual title of this particular volume. Not to mention choosing a cover which had some relation to the contents of the volume.
When I got this volume I didn't know what "Moguntina" meant either. "Monumenta" in the title of a volume like this, I knew that meant historical records. So "Moguntina" must be the genitive of whatever these written records were about. Back then I bought a few volumes from Amazon without knowing what they were, just hoping that their contents would be Latin like their titles. It turns out that Mogontiacum is the original name of the German city now known as Mainz, and that Moguntina is the genitive of Mogontiacum. The Romans founded Mogontiacum as an army base in 13 or 12 BC. Many German and Austrian cities along the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers were originally Roman military bases. Those rivers were the frontier of the Roman Republic and Empire, or very close to the frontier, for a very long time. Centuries. Gradually the bases grew into towns. After the Roman Empire had ceased to exist in the region, the towns remained, and often grew into big cities like Mainz.
So, I learned after obtaining this volume, a certain Philipp Jaffe had put together a series of volumes of Medieval German writings and called it Bibliotheca Rerum Germanica, and the third of these volumes had to do with Medieval Mainz, and in particular with two 8th-century Archbishops of Mainz, St Boniface and St Lullus. Almost half of the volume, nearly 300 pages, consists of letters from and to the two sainted Archbishops. The rest of the volume, if you were to judge solely on the basis of the number of pages, would seem to consist of afterthoughts, of whatever other Medieval documents relating to the history of Medieval Mainz Philipp Jaffe could find: many letters by and from other Medieval residents of Mainz; several biographies -- hagiographies -- of St Boniface, various lives of other local saints.
Boniface was born in England around Ad 675, was a leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Franks -- that is to say, he had a lot to do with the dangerous business of trying to convert 8th-century pagan Germanic tribes to Christianity, beyond the borders of the Franks, who were already Christians -- and he was martyred in 754.
Boniface is well-known today, and takes up so much room in this volume lying before me, in part, quite simply because the volume of his surviving writing, and contemporary or near-contemporary writing about him, is unusually large, compared to the records left by other 8th-century Western Europeans, or by other residents of Mainz during the entire Medieval era. He's also of interest as a part of the rise of the Frankish Kingdom, which, a few centuries after Boniface's death, during the reign of Charlemagne, became the Medieval Western Empire. The unusual volume of writing by and about him make his life an unusually well-illuminated episode in the Dark Ages.
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