Codices Keionenses: Essays on Western Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Keio University Library edited by Takami Matsuda (review)

Abstract

TAKAMI MATSUDA, ed., Codices Keionenses: Essays on Western Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Keio University Library. Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2005. Pp. 214. ISBN: 4-7664-1154-4. ¥ 5,990 For those interested in manuscripts and rare books the buzz of activity in Japan is most exciting. Keio University in Tokyo is home to the formidable HUMI (Humanities Media Interface) Project; in 2001 the exhibition and accompanying catalogue Mostly British: Manuscripts and Early Printed Materials from Classical Rome to Renaissance England in the Collection of Keio University Library (Tokyo: Keio University, 2001) celebrated Keio University's collection of Western manuscripts and rare books. The latest work to honor the rare books collection at Keio University, Codices Keionenses, is a compilation of five essays that developed from a lecture series in 2002-2003. Several of the objects that are discussed in these essays are being published for the first time. Claudia Rapp offers her self-titled 'preliminary description' of the Antiochos manuscript, a twelfth-century Greek manuscript including the Pandects of Antiochos, a few works by Gregory of Nazianzus, and several unpublished poems. Rapp does an admirable job of establishing the setting from which the manuscript originates, but the fascinating aspect of her article is found in the description of the object itself. Rapp presents details on the content of the manuscript, listing each text, its foliation, author, and when the text is known, a citation to a published version. For the texts that are unknown, Rapp transcribes the tide and incipit of each work, offering these intriguing new texts to scholars far-removed from Tokyo. Yukie Baba and Neil McLynn focus their attention on the two remaining leaves of the Speculum Novitii that was added to a manuscript of Augustine's Sermones de verbis domini et apostoli. Baba and McLynn provide a transcription of the two leaves, and plates of all four folios accompany the article. The authors discuss the textual differences between the four previously known copies of the Speculum and the version at Keio, arguing that the Keio copy presents the most original version of the text. The article includes an apparatus detailing the textual differences between the versions and an appendix with an English translation of the Keio text. In the next article A.S.G. Edwards offers the most comprehensive codicological study in the book, examining the fifteenth-century Hopton Hall manuscript of Middle English devotional texts, compiled by the scribe William Halls. …