St. Gall Abbey is mentioned as the monastery where Poggio discovered manuscripts of Quintilian’s Institutes and Cicero’s Orations in 1416. The book invokes that discovery as a comparison for the later recovery of a long-sought manuscript of Babrias’s fables at the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos; the two sites are distinct, and the Babrias manuscript was found at St. Laura, not at St. Gall Abbey.

The 1416 Manuscript Discoveries

The account places Poggio’s discoveries at the monastery of St. Gall in 1416, naming two works recovered there: Quintilian’s Institutes and Cicero’s Orations. It gives no further description of the monastery or of the circumstances of the finds. Its significance in this passage is documentary: the discoveries supply a precedent for the unexpected recovery of ancient literary texts in monastic collections.

Comparison with the Babrias Manuscript

The book compares the St. Gall discoveries with the search that led M. Menoides, acting on a commission to find ancient manuscripts, to the convent of St. Laura on Mount Athos in 1844. There he found a manuscript containing a choliambic version of Babrias, divided into two books of 125 and 95 fables. The parallel is one of recovery after obscurity, not location: the Babrias manuscript belonged to the Mount Athos discovery, while St. Gall is mentioned only through the earlier finds associated with Poggio.

Role in the Account of Textual Transmission

By placing the two recoveries side by side, the preface presents manuscript discovery as a way of testing scholarly conjecture against surviving texts. The Babrias manuscript confirmed a line of critical speculation and, in the book’s account, brought forward literary evidence supporting the reputation, antiquity, and authenticity of much Aesopian fable. St. Gall therefore serves as a brief historical analogy within a wider account of how texts attributed to Aesop were collected, transmitted, and reassessed; the passage does not claim that the monastery itself held an Aesopian or Babrias manuscript.