Chapter Five. Miscellaneous Masculinities And A Possible Fifteenth-Century Owner Of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108

Abstract

The chapter first demonstrates that the tHenrico Perveyst of the attestation can be confidently identified with Henry Perveys, London draper, as Smithers surmised. Second, It argues that the additions to the final folio reorient the manuscript's fifteenth-century identity and meaning for Perveys and for us to that of a mercantile collection, one especially concerned with the processes of maintaining a mercantile masculine identity. Third, the chapter shows that one of the flyleaf poems, Be þou nauȝt to bolde to blame, places Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108 (L) in a textual network of similar manuscript collections created or added to in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of which were owned by mercantile men and concerned with instruction in mercantile masculine identity. Keywords: Bodleian library; Henrico Perveys; mercantile masculine identity; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc