Richard of Saint Victor and the Anonymous of Bridlington

Abstract

Only since 1932 has the existence been known of the Bridlington Dialogue — or, more properly, Colloquium magistri et discipuli in regulam beati Au- gustini de uita clericorum — a conversation between master and student on the Augustinian Rule. In that year the Bodleian Library of Oxford acquired from the bookdealer E. P. Goldschmidt what is now Bodleian MS. Lat. th. d. 17, a codex which was executed about 1200 and contains the Dialogue on folios 1 to 97v. Nearly twenty years later J. C. Dickinson published some excerpts from the work and discussed it in his The Origins of the Austin Canons and their Introduction into England. Later, Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V., under-took to edit the complete Dialogue. Her edition was well advanced when, in 1955, she learned from Winfrid Hümpfner, Ο.S.A., of another medieval manuscript of the text: Durham College Library MS. Β III 8, folios 222v to 253v, written about 1300. In 1960, she published an edition based upon a study of both manuscripts.