Texts from the Margin: Lydgate, Recipes, and Glosses in Buhler MS 17

Abstract

���� � Buhler MS 17 of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1 contains in the main (fols. 5r‐133r) a copy of the Liber ruralium commodorum (Book of Rural Profits) by Petrus Crescentius (Pietro de Crescenzi), probably composed between 1304 and 1309. This treatise on medieval gardening and other country matters has attracted some attention, 2 both for its text and for the miniatures that accompany it in some manuscripts, among them the French translation in Morgan MS M.232. 3 On the spare leaves preceding and following the Liber, Buhler MS 17 preserves, in addition, a number of short Latin and Middle English texts. The present article will offer a discussion of the English texts in the volume, together with a transcription of the unedited Middle English prose texts. The English verse texts in Buhler MS 17 provide some clues about its dating. Previous cataloguers have dated both the main part of the manuscript and the flyleaf texts to the early fifteenth century. 4 Folio 4v preserves a verse stanza excerpted from Walton’s Middle English translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae ; 5 since manuscript colophons date Walton’s Boethius to 1410, 6 this excerpted stanza can be no earlier than that date. Folio 2r‐v preserves a copy of the first redaction of John Lydgate’s “Verses on the Kings of England,” 7 to which the MED assigns a date of ante 1449, that is, before Lydgate’s death. But the poem in its various incarnations can probably be more narrowly dated. The last stanza in the Buhler MS version concerns Henry VI: