Two Fragments of an Old English Manuscript in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Abstract

In 1962 appeared one of the classic articles in Anglo-Saxon manuscript studies, the publication of two eleventh-century fragments of leaves of Old English found in the binding of a seventeenth-century printed book in the library of the University of Kansas, Lawrence.' The fragment that more nearly concerns the present article now carries the shelf mark Pryce MS C2:1 in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library (formerly Y 103). It is a large part of a single leaf from The Legend of the Holy Cross before Christ, an edifying work known in full only in a twelfth-century copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, fols. 14v-20v (Ker no. 310, item 12; Cameron B 3.3.5).2 Working from a photograph the great paleographer and codicologist N. R. Ker attributed the hand of the Kansas fragment to the scribe who also wrote the texts of two bits of the same work found in the library of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury (1559-75), at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, now MS 557 (Ker no. 73). He concluded, no doubt rightly, that all three are part of one manuscript.3