Percy Folio

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Known among modern scholars by the name of its owner and subsequent editor, Thomas Percy, the seventeenth‐century miscellaneous manuscript London, British Library, Add. MS 27879 occupies an important, though not easy to define, place in the history of medieval literature scholarship. It contains numerous Arthurian and non‐Arthurian romances, popular ballads, and historical poems of late medieval/early modern origin, in most cases likely copied from early prints. Primarily due to the nature of its contents, the history of its ownership, and its difficult historical positioning, somewhere in between romance popularity in the age of print (in the early sixteenth century) and the turn toward the past that was going to characterize the Romantic movement in the eighteenth century, the Percy Folio remains both insufficiently explored and relatively poorly integrated in studies of late medieval English literature, with few exceptions. Its richness resides in the complex relationships between texts preserved elsewhere and in this manuscript, which deserve further exploration, both from the perspective of the manuscript's scribe/compiler and his first audiences, and their presentation in editions – from Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry to the twentieth century.