Evidence for an Early English Plenary Missal: The Flyleaves of MS Bodley 386

Abstract

Plenary missals developed in the tenth and eleventh centuries in response to increasing expectations that celebrant priests should perform along with the other liturgical ministers all of the parts of the mass. These missals were created in a number of ways, such as binding together different liturgical books or copying readings into the margins of existing sacramentaries, to create new manuscripts with the appropriate mass elements in their proper places. One example survives in the fifteenth-century binding of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 386, which has flyleaves created from two bifolia taken from a tenth/eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon plenary missal whose scribe was likely associated with Winchester and strongly influenced by his own experience as a priest and a liturgist. This manuscript fragment represents an informative witness to both manuscript creation and liturgical performance at the beginning of the eleventh century and serves as a reminder of what we can learn by paying careful attention to even fragmentary material that has survived through reuse in other manuscripts.