The twelfth-century rubrication of Anglo-Saxon legal texts in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 383

Abstract

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 383 is an English collection of Anglo-Saxon legal texts produced in the late eleventh century or early years of the twelfth century, possibly at or for St. Paul's cathedral, London. This article focuses in particular on the scribal strategies and mise-en-page of the rubrics and emendations made to the manuscript by a scribal hand of the first half of the twelfth century. Developments in the concept and technology of the book were used by the scribes who emended and updated the manuscript to facilitate and direct (potential and actual) readers' interactions with the legal texts and allow intellectual interests in the continued role of Anglo-Saxon law into the twelfth century to be discerned.