ABSTRACT John Dygon participated in the copying of at least six manuscripts (and left his annotations in more than a dozen others). But Oxford, Magdalen College MS lat. 93 represents a particularly complicated example of his work. The volume includes contributions by a dozen other scribes and appears to have been compiled over something like two decades. It is thus a particularly challenging example of medieval miscellaneous book production. John Dygon was an Oxford-trained lawyer, secular priest, and from 1435, fifth recluse of Sheen. From a modern perspective he is the most visible donor of books to Magdalen College, Oxford--a total of nineteen surviving volumes. This is far more than survive from larger medieval benefactions, such as the founder William Waynflete's donation on one day of eight hundred books. (1) Not simply donation, the survival of a substantial library largely intact, renders the books interesting. For, unlike many donors, Dygon was actively involved with his books in a variety of functions, including a considerable amount of scribal work. His most protracted effort as a copyist occurs in Magdalen College MS lat. 93, in which he wrote more than two hundred folios. This is a complicated miscellaneous volume, and much of my essay will necessarily include a scaled-down narrativized description. But, given the state of the book, I fear that even this may obfuscate as much as it clarifies. The failure to achieve clarity in discussing this manuscript is not an admission of total failure. MS lat. 93 resists definitive description because it embodies problematic features potentially inherent in a range of miscellaneous books, and the descriptive exercise may be useful because the manuscript documents, in some measure, one root cause of these features, a multiplicity of forms of production and use. The study may potentially stand as a model for other investigations. My preliminary description in the forthcoming catalogue of the medieval books of Magdalen College presents MS lat. 93 as containing thirty-five texts. The volume begins with two large sermon sequences. The first, perhaps of German provenance and derived from ps. -Haymo of Halberstadt's commentary on the Pauline epistles, arranges an exegetical text into a temporale cycle for the epistles read from Advent to Palm Sunday. It is succeeded by the second book of Gregory the Great's homilies on Ezechiel. (2) Following these materials comes a sequence of eight fairly extensive items (items 3-10) that resemble the materials in other Dygon books: Pore caitif tracts 1-2; the ps. -Augustinian 'De fide'; (3) Anselm's Proslogion; (4) the poem 'O homo velox'; (5) shorter texts ascribed to Chrysostom (items 7-8); (6) and two bits specifically associated with Syon and Sheen, 'Meditationes Augustini' (items 9-10). (7) Following a rather scrappy mid-portion, longer texts recur late in the volume: Arnauld of Bonneval's two tracts, on the words from the cross fused with his praise of the Virgin (item 23, which might be taken as two texts); (8) Quodvultdeus of Carthage's lengthy sermon against heresy, another work assigned here to Augustine (item 25); (9) two large devotional works, both imports from the Low Countries, Gerard Zerholt of Zutphen's Ascensiones and Thomas a' Kempis's Imitatio Cristi (the first, so far as I can tell, unique in England; the second, the earliest dated copy produced in England); (10) finally, Alcher of Clairvaux's 'Manuale' and ps. -Origen's popular sermon on Mary Magdalen (items 32-33). (11) Between them, these texts at the head and end of the manuscript--sermons, theological discussions, meditative/devotional tracts--occupy 214 folios, about two-thirds of the book. The middle of the volume (fols 133-212) is decidedly scrappier. Strangely, this is the only portion of MS lat. 93 to have attracted commentary. Siegfried Wenzel, who has provided the most extensive discussions, argues that what Dygon produced should be described as a 'sermon notebook', largely on the basis of his analysis of ten macaronic sermons in this portion. …
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May 16, 2023
David C Bosanquet + 1
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