A Canterbury classbook of the mid-eleventh century (the ‘Cambridge Songs’ manuscript)

Abstract

Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 5.35 is known to scholars principally for the contents of fols. 432–41, the lyric anthology known (somewhat mis-leadingly) as the ‘Cambridge Songs’. Important though this group of poems is for the history of the Latin lyric, it has diverted attention from the contents of the manuscript as a whole, which presents a remarkable range of texts, mainly poetic, from the Early Christian, Carolingian and Anglo-Latin periods. Physical description, moreover, has generally been confined to the section containing the ‘Cambridge Songs’ and consequently the method of compilation of the whole codex has been neglected. The Cambridge University Library catalogue, for instance, gives the impression of forty-four works entered sequentially in the manuscript, and leaves unexplained such curiosities as no. 41 ‘Prose treatise on medicine’ and no. 44 ‘Certain medical prescriptions’, which appear to sandwich between them the ‘Cambridge Songs’ and another group of ‘hymns’. This article describes the compilation as a whole, its physical appearance, its genesis, and its contents in detail.