Lambeth Palace Library Research Articles

The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 265

The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 265

‘A Blessing of God’: Marriage and Amelioration in Early Nineteenth-Century Montserrat

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship examining enslaved people’s marriages in the Anglophone Caribbean highlights the need to consider the Church of England’s influence over conflicts with the plantocracy. This article examines responses to a proposed marriage between a free man of colour, William Harris, and an enslaved woman, Betty Cudjoe, in Montserrat in 1828. Occurring during the period of ‘amelioration’, this article considers the changing perspectives of ecclesiastical authorities, missionary clergymen, the plantocracy, free people of colour, and enslaved people. It draws upon under under-consulted sources of ‘The Conversion Society’ held at Lambeth Palace Library alongside ecclesiastical correspondence to highlight the gendered property concerns of enslavers that were exacerbated in mixed-status marriages. This article contends that during the period of amelioration, Anglican marriages became an attractive option to free and enslaved people in comparison to nonconformist unions. While this came into conflict with the property rights of enslavers, ultimately a specific definition of marriage was acceptable and enforced by the Church of England, pursued in this case by Rev. Benjamin Luckock. This enforcement came from the authority of the newly established colonial bishoprics, who held substantial influence over sacramental affairs.

Lost Letters of Lewis at the Lambeth Palace Library

Three recently discovered letters from C. S. Lewis provide a window through which we can observe the Oxford don as he is first coming into national prominence during, and immediately after, World War II. They are a 1942 letter from C. S. Lewis to Archbishop William Temple and two 1946 letters from him to Canon Lewis John Collins. Lewis is seen in these letters struggling with the issue of calling or vocation, and this gives us a glimpse into his decision making at critical times both in his career and in the life of his country.

London, Royal College of Music Library, MS 2093 (1660s–1670s) ed. by Heather Windram and Terence Charlston, and: London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1040 (1650s–1660s) ed. by Andrew Woolley, Heather Windram and Terence Charlston

London, Royal College of Music Library, MS 2093 (1660s–1670s) ed. by Heather Windram and Terence Charlston, and: London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1040 (1650s–1660s) ed. by Andrew Woolley, Heather Windram and Terence Charlston

Cerību laiks: LELB kontakti ar Anglijas baznīcu arhibīskapa Gustava Tūra darbības laikā (1946–1968)

The purpose of this article is to analyse relationships of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (ELCL) with the Church of England during Gustavs Tūrs’ time as archbishop. Special attention is given to his visit to U.K. in 1955 as a member of the delegation of Soviet clergy. These contacts are placed in various contexts – theological, socio-political, personal relationships. “Voices” from various sources are placed face to face and confronted with each other. The author has explored materials previously unused in scientific circulation in Latvia – the archive files stored at the Lambeth Palace Library (London). Contacts between the two churches is a continuation of relationships maintained before the Second World War. Delegations of the Lutheran Churches in Estonia and in Latvia had meetings with representatives of the Church of England in 1936 and in 1938. These negotiations resulted in agreement on intercommunion that because of the war was never ratified but respected by the involved parties. The first years after Stalin’s death was a “thaw”, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union was relaxed. The renewed interest of Soviet leadership in using religious organizations for Soviet foreign politics was used by churches to further their own aims. They tried to reap additional benefits from the Soviet-inspired “parade ecumenism” – theological studies abroad, exchange visits, etc. However, it was not achieved without compromises. Here pops up a theme of collaborationism, which still is sensitive in post-Soviet countries. It may seem easy to evaluate this phenomenon from today’s perspective, whereas for people having no hope that situation would change in their lifetime, adjusting to the political realities was the only option they had. Of course, the question remains what kind of concessions they made to the Soviet system. Contacts between the churches in U.K. and Latvia helped to exchange information; they paved the way to membership in international organizations like the World Lutheran Federation. For Anglicans, the main emphasis during the visit of the delegation of Soviet clergy in 1955 was on Orthodox-Anglican relationships. It is related to the fact that the High-Church movement at that time was at its zenith of influence in the Church of England. The attitude of the Latvian Lutheran Church in diaspora was negative, because it did not recognize ELCL as legitimate, nevertheless, this attitude was not consistent, because the leadership of diaspora church simultaneously tried to maintain personal contacts with the colleagues in Latvia.

Introduction: The Manuscript Copy and the Printed Original in the Digital Present

Introduction: The Manuscript Copy and the Printed Original in the Digital Present1 Sonja Drimmer On April 1, 2007, Google altered the login page of Gmail to announce a new analogue service (fig. 1).2 The service, Gmail Paper, promised users print-on-demand copies of their emails, stacked in archive boxes and shipped directly to their homes or work-places. Three photos of cheerful laborers and a satisfied customer lined the top of the webpage, with captions hailing the ease of service relations in a digital economy: “You click. We stack. You get.” Testimonials from beta users included advocacy from crafty types such as Anna-Christina D., life coach (“Gmail [Paper is a scrapbooker’s dream. I paper archive all of my son’s emails, cut them out in creative shapes, and paste them in my binders”), and endorsements from Luddites such as Kevin S., CEO of AdventaStar, Inc. (“I’ve always felt uneasy about the whole internet thing. With the help of Gmail Paper, now I’m taking matters into my own hands, literally”).3 Readers attentive to the release date of this service will have guessed that this was an April Fool’s hoax. And if we assume that Twitter—even in its nascent days—was a reliable barometer of immediate response, it is clear that few were fooled and many amused.4 But why was this so amusing? Why should it be funny or ridiculous that someone might want copies, in paper, of something they have typed into or read from a digital format? To inquire into the nature of the prank requires that we estrange the assumptions on which its success as a prank depends. A different set of assumptions governs a manuscript of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers produced in 1477. A collection of aphorisms culled from ancient wise men, originally composed in Arabic by Abū al-Wafā’ Al-Mubaššir ibn Fātik in the middle of the eleventh century, the Dictes and Sayings was subsequently translated into Spanish, Latin, and French. From the last of those versions Anthony Woodville, the second Earl Rivers (d.1483), produced this English translation. The [End Page 93] manuscript is a handsome volume, with a prologue introduced by a vine-stem initial, a Janus-faced ornament plucked from the modish Italian books that revived them under the (mistaken) belief that they were ancient Roman forms (fig. 2). Across the page, a presentation miniature depicts Woodville kneeling before Edward IV to present a luscious book in an emerald-green binding and shimmering gold foredges, the hub around which the main actors of the scene congregate. The text beneath the miniature iterates in words the personalization of the social interaction in image, referring ambiguously to the book in the picture and to the very book in which the words appear: Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Screenshot of the Gmail Paper Announcement Archived online at: <<arquivo.pt/wayback/20080315144610/http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html>>, accessed March 20, 2020. This boke late translate here in sightBy Anthony Erle [Woodville] that vertueux knyghtPlease it to accepte to youre noble graceAnd at youre convienient leysoure and spaceIt to see reede and understondA precious jewell for alle youre lond (Lambeth Palace Library MS 265, fol. vi verso) Everything about the appearance of this manuscript and the intimate address it contains suggests that it emerges wholly from the world of the scriptorium and the small trade in bespoke books. Yet as the scribe who signs himself Hayward alerts us in its colophon (fig. 3), “Here endeth the book namede the dictes or sayinges of philosophres emprinted by me William Caxton at Westmynster the yere of our lorde MCCCC [End Page 94] lxxvij” (Lambeth Palace Library MS 265, fol. 102r). What this colophon makes evident is that this is a handwritten copy of a printed book. And while the text of this manuscript closely follows its printed source, its appearance, including elaborate decorated initials and, not least, the presentation miniature, rejects the printed book’s aesthetic. Just as the Gmail Paper prank depends on its electronic origins only to reject...

Elizabeth I’s Translation of Tacitus: Lambeth Palace Library, MS 683

Abstract Preserved at Lambeth Palace Library is a manuscript translation of Tacitus’s Annales, completed in the late sixteenth century. The translation was undertaken, this essay argues, by Elizabeth I. The article makes the case for the queen’s authorship with an appeal to paper stock, provenance, style of translation, and, above all, to the handwriting preserved in the manuscript. The queen’s late hand was strikingly idiosyncratic and the same features which characterize her autograph works are also to be found in the Lambeth translation of Tacitus. The manuscript’s transmission is traced from the Elizabethan court to Lambeth via the collection of Archbishop Thomas Tenison (1636–1715), whose acquisition of Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) manuscripts helped to make Lambeth Palace Library one of the largest collections of State Papers from the Elizabethan era. The article then compares the authorial corrections made to the Lambeth Tacitus with those which Elizabeth made to her other translations with a special focus on the idiosyncrasies of the queen’s late hand. Finally, Elizabeth’s translation is compared with Richard Greenway’s translation of the Annales (1598), highlighting the methods of translation adopted by either translator. While Greenway expands for the sake of clarity, reworking Tacitus’s remarkably terse prose, Elizabeth preserves something of the historian’s celebrated brevity, closely reproducing the syntax of the original. By examining both the material aspects of the manuscript and the stylistic qualities of the translation itself, this article offers the first study of Elizabeth I’s translation of Tacitus.

Recent Books

Patient Reading / Reading Patience: Oxford Essays on Medieval English Literature. By Ralph Hanna. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2017. xii + 370 pp. £100. isbn 978 1 78694 055 1. This is a collection of selected essays by Ralph Hanna. Ten chapters are reprinted from elsewhere with some updated references, three others are new productions, and the final fifth of the book is a new extended study, a monograph in miniature, with its own bibliography. The first section of the book gathers writings on the poly-lingual state of medieval English books and texts, recording and studying the inter-penetration of what modern scholarship might see as separate languages. Its chapters are: ‘Literacy, Schooling, Universities’, ‘Vernacular Exegesis in Fourteenth-Century England?’ (first published here), ‘Lambeth Palace Library, MS 260 and the Problem of English Vernacularity’, ‘Editing “Middle English Lyrics”: The Case of Candet nudatum pectus’, and ‘Performing Exegesis: Lyric and Sermon in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.26’ (first published here). The essays of the second section all revolve around manuscripts which contain disjunctions and messy evi dence of production and use. Its chapters are: ‘Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenth-Century Textual Transmission’, ‘Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93’, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Miscellany Revisited’, and ‘Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c.66’. The third section contains pieces which bring local history to bear on specific book-historical case studies. Its chapters are: ‘Yorkshire Writers’, ‘Some North Yorkshire Scribes and their Context’, ‘Dr Peter Partridge and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 98’, and ‘John of Wales and “Classicising Friars”’ (first published here). The fourth section, the miniature monograph, is a literary-critical study of the figure of Patience in Piers Plowman, and a sustained argument for the value of direct and precise reading in approaching Langland's poetry. The book as a whole models, inculcates, and implicitly argues for a type of scholarship which attends to the very immediate details of specific situations in books and texts from the past.

Singers without borders: a performer’s rotulus and the transmission of jeux partis

ABSTRACTThe jeu parti – a debate in song weighing questions of love, sex, wealth, ethical behaviour – enjoyed popular acclaim across social classes in thirteenth-century France. Despite the appeal of these texts as historical sources, suggestive of the mentalité of a medieval community through frank discussion of taboo subjects, jeux partis have received sporadic scholarly attention. A rare scroll, copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1681) supplies new evidence of the genre’s transmission outside the pages of a codex and outside northern France. The only known document of its kind to contain jeux partis, it has been overlooked by scholars for a century, yet it suggests that the transmission of music and culture could be achieved textually, borne along the performance circuits of medieval Europe. This study investigates how jeux partis were composed, transmitted and refashioned for new audiences with the aid of text and improvisation.

Religious Change and Print: 1450–1700(Chicago, The Newberry Library, 14 September – 27 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://www.newberry.org/religious-change-and-printRemembering the Reformation(London, Lambeth Palace Library, 28 September – 23 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/.

Religious Change and Print: 1450–1700(Chicago, The Newberry Library, 14 September – 27 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://www.newberry.org/religious-change-and-printRemembering the Reformation(London, Lambeth Palace Library, 28 September – 23 December 2017). Online exhibition: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/.

Two Unexamined Witnesses to Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon anglicanum in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 371

This article draws attention to two unexplored witnesses to Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon anglicanum in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 371, which are important evidence for the reception of the Chronicon in medieval England and its role in shaping monastic interpretations of Richard I's reign, particularly his crusading career.

Translating Machiavelli's Prince in Early Modern England: New Manuscript Evidence

'All Estates and signiories wich haue had and doe beare rule ouer men, haue either byn and are Comon weales or Monarchies': thus begins Sion MS L40.2/E24, preserved in Lambeth Palace Library, London. Written in clear anglicana, it offers a translation of Machiavelli's Prince. It is a welcome addition to the already known English manuscript translations preceding Dacres's printed version. The codex shows how the scribe paid attention to historical allusions in the text. It offers a faithful and elegant translation; the layout may offer interesting suggestions as to the modalities of reading in early modern England. This article presents hypotheses on the manuscript's provenance, compares this translation with four contemporary versions, and discusses its possible use.

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Greek Manuscript Collection of Lambeth Palace Library by Christopher Wright et al.

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Greek Manuscript Collection of Lambeth Palace Library by Christopher Wright et al.

Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many institutions, colleagues, and friends have helped bring this volume together. The seeds began at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009; they grew significantly during a stay at Durham University from 2012 to 2014; they bear fruit finally at the University of Nottingham now in 2015. I am grateful to all three universities for the opportunity to work on this project, grateful to the library staffs and interlibrary loan departments who consistently accepted and processed hundreds of my requests. I have been lucky to fall on my feet here in Nottingham, where new friends and colleagues have managed to make me feel at home in a matter of months, this despite consistently pointing out my unconscious Americanisms. The archives in which these documents are found deserve thanks not only for permission to publish but also for the courteous service I received while in situ. The British Library is justifiably a magnet for many early modernists, but Lambeth Palace Library has a wonderful charm all its own, the Huntington offers an idyllic setting in an otherwise busy environment, and the National Library of Scotland felt a home away from home for a time. For fellowship support during the research and writing, I am grateful to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of History, the European Union's COFUND/Marie Curie Actions, and the Huntington Library.

Lexical Cruces in Orrmulum: The importance of context

Between 1659 (when he purchased the Orrmulum manuscript) and 1666 (when he died), Jan van Vliet, Dutch local administrator and antiquarian, worked on a glossary for Orrmulum. A draft of this glossary, together with transcripts of parts of the text of Orrmulum, is preserved in his notebook, now London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783. In his 1961 study, Robert Burchfield presented an analysis of those words in van Vliet’s material that derived from folios since lost from the Orrmulum manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1). A problem with Burchfield’s analysis is that he discusses problematic words out of context, which in some cases leads to infelicitous interpretations. Since the folios where the words occurred have been lost, this may seem to be the only approach possible. But some context which may support (or disprove) an interpretation is provided by van Vliet’s transcripts of text passages; his notebook as a whole also provides a context which may aid interpretation. It is also possible to construct a more general context for a word by considering the content of the text before and after the lacunae in order to determine what Orrm in all likelihood wrote on the missing folios.This article will present a re-interpretation of a few problematic words in this material, based on the context in which they appear.

Deciphering the Brut : Lambeth Palace MS 6 and the Perils of Transmission

Art is some Brut manuscripts helped shape readers’ understanding of history. Whereas the Dartmouth Brut ’s single painted border fulfills an “authorizing” function common in Middle English Prose Brut manuscripts, the seventy miniatures painted by the Master of Edward IV in Lambeth Palace Library MS 6 actually interpret history. This article transcribes instructions to the artist that survive on nine folios of Lambeth 6 and addresses how the manuscript planner and the artist negotiated differences of both medium (text, image) and language (English, French). The planner instructed that pictures match text; the artist’s interpretations and iconography yielded sometimes unexpected historical nuances.

“Booke, go thy wayes”

“Booke, go thy wayes”

Melanie Barber M.B.E., B.A., M.A., F.S.A. (1943–2012)

Melanie Barber M.B.E., B.A., M.A., F.S.A. (1943–2012)Melanie Barber spent her entire career at Lambeth Palace Library. She confessed at her retirement that the longer she stayed, the more she had a...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors acknowledge with gratitude the guidance of Cressida Williams at Canterbury Cathedral Library and staff at Lambeth Palace Library in London. The work has been much encouraged by Margaret Pawley and by Virginia Johnstone, who typed most of the reports in Rome. It has also been greatly assisted by many conversations with other scholars and thinkers, particularly those who came to discuss Vatican II in its ecumenical context at a colloquium in George Bell House, Chichester Cathedral, in June 2013. The editors take full responsibility for any errors or omissions.