English Portions of the Marriage ordo in Manuscripts of German Provenance: An Edition of Two Middle English Texts in Hanover, Stadtbibliothek, Mag. 3, and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 705

Abstract

Abstract The two manuscripts under discussion are testimonies of two processes, both understudied: first, the codification of English portions in the marriage liturgy in late-medieval England, and secondly, the exchange of manuscripts between England and continental Europe in the later Middle Ages up to and including the sixteenth century. The English fragments in Hanover, Stadtbibliothek, Mag. 3, were reused in Germany in the late fifteenth century, while the Sarum missal in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 705, must have travelled to its current repository in the late sixteenth century. Through the English portions contained in them, they contribute in unique ways to a corpus of marriage-related English micro-texts that can be sourced mainly from liturgical manuscripts and early prints. In what follows, I shall offer a description of the two manuscripts and provide information about their provenance and the transmission to their current German repositories. The English portions and relevant extracts from the Latin are being edited here for the first time, and I will situate them within the corpus of extant English marriage ordines.