The Middle English Apocalypse Gloss in British Library MS Additional 18633

Abstract

AMONG the ten manuscripts of the late thirteenth-century biblical paraphrase Revelacion, shown in Table 1 below, only British Library MS Additional 18633 (A) presents Apocalypse materials in three languages. In addition to its planned Apocalypse components – the picture cycle, Vulgate Apocalypse, Revelacion, and commentary in French prose – A contains extensive portions of a commentary in Middle English prose. In her description of A, Justice alludes to ‘English translations of text … in the margins, written in a 16th-century cursive hand’.1 The purpose of the present note is to establish that the ‘translation’ in question is a paraphrase into Middle English of the same non-Berengaudus French prose gloss that characterizes the γ group of manuscripts (ACT). The inscriptions occupy principally the broad outer margins of fos 10v–39r, but also occasionally the top or bottom margins – in some instances all three areas (e.g. 34v, 36r) – or, exceptionally, sideways in the inner margin along the trough (11v, 23v). The glosses occur on nearly all leaves in this section, which corresponds to Episodes 18–94 of Revelacion.