A New Text of the Middle English Short Charter of Christ

Abstract

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poet. 26 is a large seventeenth-century English and Latin verse miscellany on paper.1 The compilation brings together many formerly separate leaves and booklets by many hands. Rawlinson poet. 26 contains poems by, inter alia, Walter Raleigh, James I of England, John Donne, and Ben Jonson and tends toward the satirical, political, and academic. On folio 104r there appears a previously unnoticed text of the New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) 4184, the so-called Short Charter of Christ.2 Rendering Christ’s redemption of humankind as a lyric/charter, this tetrameter couplet poem survives in some two dozen copies. Like two other copies,3 the Rawlinson text is formatted as prose. As in most other copies, Latin legal tags, here in calligraphic script, punctuate the English verse. In this note, I offer the text as an addition to NIMEV and as a remarkable conjunction of late medieval literary production and early modern manuscript reproduction. In the following transcription, I omit all scribal punctuation and lineate the poem as verse in order to facilitate comparison with other manuscript copies. Capitalization is editorial and follows modern usage, including capitals at the beginning of each line of verse. Word division is regularized. I represent i/j according to modern usage. I represent the scribe’s calligraphic script as italics. I interpret the Latin headings as indicating the beginnings of stanzas, and so I exclude the headings from the lineation.