Library MS Research Articles

Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley

Reviewed by: Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley Frank Swannack Coley, David K., Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 236; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$99.95; ISBN 9780814213902. Death and the Pearl Maiden tackles a literary mystery that has puzzled late medieval scholars. The plague known as the Black Death, which caused millions of deaths in Europe and England, is hardly mentioned in late medieval English literature. David K. Coley offers a complex, multifaceted, and often brilliant explanation of why the unflinching descriptions of the Black Death’s devastation in European texts make England’s underwhelming literary response disturbingly conspicuous. Coley focuses on four Middle English works preserved in the British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, article 3 (Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) written at the height of the endemic between the 1370s and 1390s. Coley argues that the collected poems powerfully meditate on the plague and its cultural aftermath, eschewing a direct account. His argument uses trauma as a literary tool because traumatic events negotiate the fraught space ‘between acknowledgement and suppression’ (p. 6). The need to voice untold horrors becomes muted by their very nature. Coley’s analytical method is split between providing insightful readings, and self-critical comments. Early in the Introduction, he admits that the texts being examined contain no substantial evidence of engaging with the plague. He adds that his thesis is entirely speculative and based on allusive references. [End Page 195] His admission, however, becomes a critique of the New Historicist approach requiring that literature has a direct and clearly traceable engagement with historic events. Throughout the study, the pattern of anticipating the critical response to his readings enables Coley to add another layer to his speculative insights. Death and the Pearl Maiden examines first the second poem from the MS Cotton Nero A.x, Cleanness. The poem’s descriptions of dismemberment and death graphically adapted from the Book of Genesis resonate with the Black Death. By looking back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife acts as a ‘traumatic witness’ to catastrophic events (p. 34). She embodies Coley’s thesis as being a readable symbol for an unspeakable traumatic event and its silenced victims. The analysis of Pearl begins with an illustration of Christ’s crucifixion from the Holkham Bible (1327–40). As it precedes the Black Death, the image is startling both in its prescience and how it undermines Coley’s thesis. The illustration shows Christ’s body covered with blue-black spots and sores. Coley’s point is that the illustration provides a common context in which the sins of the world can be absorbed into any pestilence-influenced text. The illustration also shows that because Pearl contains many references to bodily sores and swellings, it does not necessarily signify the Black Death. Perhaps in recognition of such criticism, Coley augments his argument through the poem’s references to odours and summertime that resonate further with the medieval experience of the plague. Patience adapts the biblical story of Jonah, who, fleeing from God’s command to go to Nineveh, ends up in a whale’s body for three days. Before analysing the poem, Coley discusses intriguing research on the psychology of flight. Rather than escaping the terror, flight involves fleeing to familiar enclosures, even if it means more danger. By magnifying Jonah’s notion of flight without refuge in Patience, Coley provides a convincing historical context to the futility of trying to escape the Black Death. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Coley examines the female character Morgan le Fay. He argues that she represents the cultural changes the Black Death thrust upon England. The plague’s devastation of over half of England’s population created a labour shortage, giving aristocratic women greater autonomy in social and economic affairs. As the monstrous sorceress and crone, Morgan le Fay personifies the immoral female sexuality associated with the spreading of the Black Death. Furthermore, as the Lady of the Manor’s associate, her influential presence in...

The fragment of medieval Irish sanctuary law on British Library MS Egerton 88, f. 35<sup>r</sup>

This article provides a transcription and translation of the fragment of medieval Irish legal material found on the strip of vellum which comprises the entirety of British Library MS Egerton 88, f. 35r. Only the first section of the legal material on this strip of vellum appears in the Corpus iuris Hibernici (1531.25-28) and the Brehon Law transcripts (O'Curry 1851: 2429); the vellum is so badly degraded that little else is visible to the naked eye. However, with the assistance of an ultraviolet light, more of the text can be read. The passage concerns an aspect of the provision of legal protection by members of some of the lay, poetic, and ecclesiastical grades.

The Secrets of Alexis in Glasgow University Library MS Ferguson 7

This article deals with a handwritten, hitherto unexplored copy of a printed text, The Secrets of Reverend Alexis of Piedmont, held in Glasgow University Library, MS Ferguson 7, which dates to 1565. The manuscript includes a collection of secrets by an anonymous compiler from the English translation of De’ Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio de Piemontese, a highly popular book of secrets published in Venice in 1555 and immediately rendered into other languages, including English. The handwritten compilation proves to be a dynamic artifact which is personalized to suit the compiler’s needs and ultimately becomes an independent new product. KEYWORDS: early modern manuscript studies; Books of Secrets; MS Ferguson 7; Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont; Girolamo Ruscelli; William Warde.

Liturgy and chant in a twelfth-century Exeter missal

AbstractExeter Cathedral Library and Archives MS 3515 (hereafter EXcl 3515), a notated missal located in Exeter Cathedral, has to date received very little scholarly attention. This neglect may be due to the absence of a liturgical kalendar and evidence of local saints in the Sanctorale. Its assignment to the thirteenth century with a generic English origin suggests that critical questions concerning provenance and dating have been overlooked. The source itself comprises four disparate sections assembled so as to create a complete liturgical cycle. Yet the parts are not as separate as hitherto believed. A comparative investigation reveals not only an Exeter provenance and a twelfth-century dating, but also a new witness to the St Denis/Corbie tradition. Research also reveals unexpected threads of liturgical continuity with the Anglo-Saxon past. As a complete pre-Sarum source of Mass prayers, chants and readings, EXcl 3515 offers a useful lens with which to view a transitional period in the development of a medieval secular liturgy in England. (By contrast, the three dominant cathedrals – Salisbury, York and Hereford – all lack notated chant sources from this period.) EXcl 3515 adds not only significant new data to the current information on secular liturgies, but also challenges accepted theories on the shaping of a distinctive English Use in southwest England.

Christ's Passion Shown in a Vision: A Newly Identified Acephalous Fragment from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Houghton Library MS Ger. 69, fol. 101r–106v

A fragment of one of the earliest German prose passion meditations, the anonymous Christi Leiden in einer Vision geschaut, has recently been discovered in a macaronic miscellany in Houghton Library. While the entire text has been edited in 1936 and 1952, the Houghton fragment contains significant variants that warrant further investigation. In addition to a study of the manuscript tradition of the Christi Leiden and this manuscript's place within it, we also present an edition of the Houghton version alongside a translation into modern English.

“Holsum to haue in memory”: An Added Tale in an English Book of Hours

Abstract San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 64538, an English book of hours (ca. 1425–50), contains a versified Middle English exemplum (laid out as prose) about the efficacy of praying for the dead in Purgatory. This unusual addition to a largely Latin manuscript originated in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend before circulating in Middle English in John Mirk's late-fourteenth-century Festial. A nearly identical version (laid out in verse) appears as part of a series of religious lyrics in London, British Library MS Harley 2251, a poetic anthology closely associated with Lydgate. As an addition to HM 64538, the story reshapes the book as commemorative, and its complex textual biography challenges us to reconsider books of hours as texts that enrich collective worship and as archives of vernacular literary practice and production.

Gofraidh Óg Mac an Bhaird Cecinit: 4. Do Toirneadh Ceannas Chlann gCuinn

This elegy on Seaán (son of Aodh Buidhe son of Conn) Ó Domhnaill is the fourth in a series of editions of the poems of Gofraidh Óg (son of Gofraidh son of Brian) Mac an Bhaird. The year of Seaán's death (perhaps 1655) is made uncertain by a textual difficulty, and neither the manner nor place of his demise is made clear. An apologue likens the loss felt by the Ó Domhnaill dynasty at Seaán's death to that felt by Oilill Ólom at the death of his son Eóghan. The poem is edited here from Stonyhurst College MS A II 20, with readings from Trinity College Dublin MS H 6. 7 (1411), British Library MS Egerton 112 and Royal Irish Academy MS 23 O 73 (1382), and with a full discussion of these and other extant MS witnesses.

Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith

Reviewed by: Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith Neil Cartlidge Walter Map and the Matter of Britain By Joshua Byron Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Few writers in the Middle Ages, or indeed in any period, have enjoyed a more complex, enduring, and incongruous literary afterlife than Walter Map (d. 1209/1210). Within decades of his death, Map was being credited with the composition of several parts of the monumental French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle--making him, in effect, a founding father of the Arthurian tradition. At the same time, medieval manuscripts so frequently associate him with various Latin satirical poems within what is now generally known as "Goliardism" that he effectively functions as a legendary father of this tradition too. (When Thomas Wright edited much of this material in 1841, he chose to entitle this volume Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes.) At the end of the eighteenth century Map's reputation still exerted such a hold on Welsh imaginations that the bardic antiquarian Iolo Morganwg (aka Edward Williams, 1747–1826) was moved to create spurious Welsh-language writing in his name. These days it is generally agreed that all of the literary work that can genuinely be attributed to Walter survives only in a single medieval manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851), where it is rubricated "de Nugis curialium" ("Courtiers' Trifles"). It was under this title that Walter's work was edited in a pioneering edition by Montague Rhodes James in 1914 (followed by a translation in 1923); and James's edition/translation was subsequently reissued (with revisions by R. A. B. Mynors and Christopher Brooke) in a Clarendon Texts volume first published in 1983. Ironically, there is one part of the De nugis curialium (and only one part) that did circulate widely in the Middle Ages, but in most cases without ascription to Map. This is the Dissuasio Valerii, an extravagant polemic against marriage, which survives in dozens of medieval copies (and which was the first work by an Englishman to be printed). The Dissuasio even makes an appearance in the Canterbury Tales (where it is cited as "Valerie")—which means that Walter Map is also one of the relatively few English writers whose work Geoffrey Chaucer can definitely be shown to have read. [End Page 145] Walter Map can thus be described as a figure who is central to several different literary histories of the Middle Ages. He was also a colorful and charismatic personality in his own right, as De nugis curialium amply demonstrates. Yet there have been remarkably few scholarly attempts at a rounded assessment of his work both in relation to his original cultural contexts and his subsequent literary reputation(s). From this point of view, Joshua Byron Smith's Walter Map and the Matter of Britain is something of a landmark. To my knowledge, it is the first published monograph in English exclusively devoted to a study of Walter Map. Fortunately, it is also a lively, wide-ranging and original book, distinguished by an impressively energetic reluctance to allow any received assumptions to pass unscrutinized. It makes a number of substantive suggestions in relation both to the interpretation of De nugis curialium in detail (including some interesting possible solutions to some of the specific textual difficulties posed by the one surviving manuscript) and to its placing in a wider socio-intellectual context—foregrounding in particular the networks centred on St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, and on the tradition of Welsh-Latin saints' lives represented by London, BL MS Cotton Vespasian A.xiv. It also makes some compelling arguments about Map's attitudes to (and knowledge of) Wales; about what Smith calls "Britonicization" (i.e., the setting of stories in an "ancient British past"); and about the nature of the authority that Map came to exert within the tradition of Arthurian romance. Overall, this is an important book, and engagement with it will be essential for all future work on Map. All that being said, there are some problems with the way its claims are presented. For example, Smith uses his introduction to suggest that "this book makes two larger arguments concerning the literary...

The Anglo-Norman Bible Stories in Ms Brit. Libr. Harley 2253

The Anglo-Norman Bible Stories, contained in Ms Brit. Libr. Harley 2253, an Old Testament narrative including Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, is of interest to the study of Old French bible adaptations, in that its contents present parallels (canonical and apocryphal) to some of these texts. This may aid us in narrowing down the sources used by their compilers. Since the first mention of the text in 1883, the Bible Stories have found an editor in 2015. Whereas the text is now available (Fein et al. 2015), there has not been made a thorough study of the contents (beside the one by Wilshere in Forum Mod Lang Stud 24:78–89, 1988; Thompson, in: Fein (ed) Studies in the harley manuscript. The scribes, contents, and social contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, Michigan, 2000), including not only the ‘Bibles intégrales’ like those compiled by Herman de Valenciennes, Jean Malkaraume and Macé de la Charité, but also a more recently published Old Testament poem, the Fragment de la Genèse en vers. It is the latter text that drew our attention to the Anglo-Norman Bible Stories, both texts presenting a number of similarities that deserve to be looked at in more detail.

Queerly productive: Women and collaboration in Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.6

Cambridge, University Library MS Ff. 1.6 (the Findern manuscript) offers a test case for a speculative exploration of the role of female queer desire in medieval theorizations of textual collaboration, and collaborative manuscript production. I argue that, whereas masculine queer desire is represented as resulting in textual as well as sexual sterility, female queer desire is potentially hyper-productive, with each female body simultaneously an inscribable surface and a prosthetic pen/penis that can inscribe. In the Findern manuscript, the narrative of the mutilated Philomena provides the nexus for multiple interrelating and mutually modifying representations of female vocality, female desire, and female-female relations that range from the supportive to the erotic. The manuscript’s examples of collaboratively produced texts model ways to break away from the hierarchal model of inscriber and inscribed, masculine and feminine, and produce spaces in which desiring female speakers can recuperate from the wounds of the masculine paradigm of textual inscription, and develop their own female-centric modes of erotic expression.

Gower out of time and place

Surviving in more than 50 manuscript witnesses, John Gower’s Confessio amantis poses significant challenges for modern editors. Multiple languages and registers, several versions, and an intricately structured confessional dialogue are just some of the elements of the textual corpus of Gower’s poem that make it particularly striking that the most recent major new edition of the poem was completed at the end of the nineteenth century by G.C. Macaulay, with the early 2000’s edition by Russell Peck arguably being closer to a revision than a completely new effort. This article explores the ways in which the poem itself constructs queer temporalities, both within its frame narrative and in the confessional dialogue between Genius and Amans. These queer temporalities are further complicated by variations across manuscript witnesses, and this article examines a specific case in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 35 that cuts across and flattens the queer temporalities that are found in the majority of manuscript witnesses. The proposition is that the poem’s intricate structure and layout across manuscript witnesses can be opened up for detailed and advanced study once the text and its witnesses are, quite literally, taken out of time and place by a queer approach to editing. Such an approach would embrace the queer temporalities of the poem itself by liberating Gower’s text from the temporal and physical confines of printed editions and physical manuscripts.

The Fragment of Earl Rivers’ Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers in London, British Library, Add. 60577

This article investigates the fragment of Earl Rivers’s Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers extant in London, British Library MS Add. 60577, a miscellany of religious and moral texts produced in Winchester in the second half of the fifteenth century. Although it contains only the chapter on Hermes, it is important as it is the result of a careful re-elaboration of the source made by the copyist. Moreover, contrary to what is believed, the text does not derive from Caxton's 1477 edition, but it contains variants that can be ascribed to only one other witness, contained in London, British Library, MS Add. 22718. The relationship between these two texts suggests the existence of a branch of the tradition of the Dicts unnoticed by scholars.

A Revelation of Purgatory

A Revelation of Purgatory

Reading Family in the Rate Manuscript's Saint Eustace and Sir Isumbras

Abstract A close resemblance between Sir Isumbras and Saint Eustace has long been recognized. Indeed, they appear together in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, a miscellaneous manuscript copied sometime around 1500 by a single scribe who signs the name Rate. Rate places the two narratives first and fifth in the Ashmole manuscript, with intervening poems that provide instruction for the community and household. Bringing together four different genres from three different centuries, Rate's initial scribal activity domesticates these aristocratic narratives for a bourgeois audience by highlighting the affective family already visible in both Saint Eustace and Sir Isumbras. This article argues that the first five poems in Ashmole 61 constitute the nuclear family with a strong patriarch as the foundation of Christian society.

Uncovering the Oppenheimer Siddur: using scientific analysis to reveal the production process of a medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscript

The aim of this research was to use non-invasive scientific analysis to uncover evidence of the planning process and relationship between pigments used in text copying and artwork production in the Oppenheimer Siddur (Oxford Bodleian Library MS Opp. 776), an illuminated 15th-century Hebrew prayer book. In many medieval Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, the authorship of the artwork is unknown. This manuscript’s colophon states that it was copied by its scribe-owner for personal family use but does not confirm who was responsible for the artwork. Prior deductive analysis suggested that the scribe-owner may also have been the manuscript’s artist, based on common motifs and an apparent shared colour palette appearing in both texts and artwork. Visual examination using high resolution digital images also identified points of contact between pigments used in the manuscript’s texts and artwork, raising questions about the pigment application sequence, and concurrent versus sequential text copying and artwork production. An in-house developed remote spectral imaging system (PRISMS) with 10 filters spanning the spectral range from 400 to 880 nm was modified for close-range application to image two of the folios to examine the sequence of production, identify the pigments and compare the materials used for the illumination and the text. Optical microscopy and Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy in the attenuated total reflection mode (FTIR-ATR) were used directly on the folios to complement the spectral imaging data in binding media and pigment identification. The results revealed close matches in reflectance spectra for the colorants and inks used in both text copying and illuminations, suggesting that the same mixture of colorants and inks have been used. The spectral imaging in the near infrared bands revealed a hidden underdrawing, indicating a design change during production of the manuscript, and the outlining of letters prior to coloured pigment being applied. The pigment use, the variation in the binder for different pigments and some elements of its production were found to be consistent with those described in historical sources. The evidence from this study supports the hypothesis that the scribe applied pigments for the manuscript’s artwork at the same time he did some of the scribal work which has implications for understandings of Jewish medieval visual cultures.

Notes on the Text of John Skelton, ‘Vpon the dolorus dethe … of the … Erle of Northumberlande’

JOHN SKELTON’S ‘Vpon the dolorus dethe and muche lamentable chaunce of the mooste honorable Erle of Northumberlande’ is generally held to be his earliest surviving English poem. It seems likely that it was composed as an immediate response to the murder of Henry Percy, fourth Earl of Northumberland on 28 April 1489. The earliest witness, British Library MS Royal 18 D. II, fols 165–66v, is considerably later: it probably dates from the late 1520s. The poem also appears in Marsh’s 1568 edition, Pithy pleasaunt and profitable works of master Skelton (STC 22608), sigs Yvi–Ziiv, a version that does not differ very significantly from the Royal manuscript. Several of the readings in both versions that have been retained in modern editions may be the result of scribal error introduced in the course of transmission.1 54: ‘Alas, I kan not fayne.’: This is the reading of the Royal manuscript and Marsh. But the sentence follows a series of rhetorical questions (‘why wer ye so stark mad? | What frantkyk frenzy fyll in your brayne? | Where was your wit and reson … | What willfull foly made you …’, lines 50–54), so fayne should probably be sayne. The likely confusion of -f- and long -s- is obvious. 96: ‘Take up whose wolde, for ther they let hym ly.’: Royal and Marsh read whos(e). But sense requires that the passage read ‘Take up whos[o] wolde.’ The error could have been easily created by misreading -o- as closed -e-. 118: ‘… O fowle mysuryd grounde,’: OED gives this as the only usage of mysuryd as an adjectival form meaning ‘unlucky’; it appears in both witnesses. The form may not be a genuine one, but formed by a scribal misreading of mysusyd (‘ill-treated’, misused’), through confusion of long -s- and long -r- here. 125–26: ‘… with thy sworde enharpid of mortall drede | Thow kit asonder his perfight vitall threde.’: The form enharpid is recorded only here in OED; it appears in both witnesses. It is possible it may be a scribal misreading for scharpid (‘sharpened’), a form that gives an alliterative phrase, sworde scharpid, particularly characteristic of Skelton’s usage here. 195: ‘With thi blode precious our fenaunce thou dyd pay’: This is the reading of both witnesses, with minor orthographic variation. Although fenaunce is glossed in Scattergood’s edition as ‘ransom, redemption’. I can find no warrant for its usage in this figurative sense in OED.2 Nor does the word appear elsewhere in Skelton’s lexicon. Emending fenaunce to penaunce seems to make better sense and to preserve the alliteration of the line.3

Opening the Medieval Folding Almanac

Folding almanacs provided their medieval users with densely-packed information about scientific practices, medical treatments, astrological movements, and religious feast days. Their contents are mirrored by an equally compact materiality, one based on folded panels rather than side-bound pages. This article pays special attention to one such manuscript—London, British Library MS Harley 937—in its argument that the genre is far more complex and provocative than has previously been imagined. Harley 937, written in the vernacular and including an adaptation of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, represents an object deeply concerned with the connection between form and access. It mediates this connection through an emphasis on material and conceptual expansion, one enabled by the form of the fold and the myriad didactic potentialities afforded by the act of unfolding meaning. Taking as its foundation Gilles Deleuze’s formulation of the fold as “endlessly furling and unfurling in every direction,” this article contends that, far from being a straightforward referential tool, the medieval folding almanac instead facilitates a restless, embodied negotiation of the space between readers, writers, and their objects.

The Provocations of Orthodoxy: Lydgate and Late-Medieval Books of Hours in Literary Culture

Theologically conventional, books of hours nonetheless participate in cultures of formal and aesthetic experimentation that we would, under other circumstances, call literary. This article explores those provocations by examining the intersections of devotional and literary reading cultures visible in John Lydgate’s “Fifteen Joys of Our Lady,” a small poem that appears in a variety of manuscript contexts. One of these is a book of hours, British Library MS Egerton 3088. But the poem’s other manuscript contexts, ranging from a psalter (Oxford, Bodleian MS Lat. Liturgy. e 47) to an anthology of vernacular poetry (Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.21) reveal how malleable it is. Finally, another poem of Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Our Lady,” provides a vision not only of how devotional reading works, but also of devotional literary production itself.

William Tyndale and Erasmus on How to Read the Bible: A Newly Discovered Manuscript of the English Enchiridion

British Library MS Additional 89149, newly discovered in 2015 at Alnwick Castle, is a previously unknown translation of Erasmus’ Enchiridion militis Christiani into English. Dated 1523, it now represents the earliest surviving English translation of any work by Erasmus. This article presents detailed verbal evidence that associates the vocabulary of imitatio in the translation with William Tyndale’s hermeneutic work on scripture, including his New Testament of 1525–1526. It thus offers the strongest evidence to date of Tyndale's hand in the English Enchiridion, long the subject of scholarly enquiry. It also provides a fresh interpretation of Tyndale’s engagement with Erasmian humanism, and his position on disputes over literal and figurative senses in early Protestantism. At the heart of this is the distinctive English word ‘counterfeit’, the meanings of which are traced through a range of medieval and Renaissance sources, from Chaucer onwards.

Puzzle, Pun, and Visual Morph in Divine Comedy Manuscripts: Beinecke Library MS 428, British Library Lansdowne MS 839, and Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana MS It. IX, 276 (=6902)

Written commentary, images, and layout were the most common instructional forms embodied within manuscripts of the Divine Comedy. This paper focuses upon a less-frequently encountered pedagogical technique: "figured text." In certain manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, interpolated text not originating with Dante unexpectedly appears within Dante's verse and is laid out to create a unique design. This design (figured text) takes the form of verse-relevant puzzles and puns whose decoding demands mental effort, a visceral experience that aids memory retention of veiled teachings and influences a reader's reception and experience of the text. In Beinecke Library MS 428 the morphing of an image with such figured text annotates the poem's insistence upon contrapasso as a reflection of Divine Justice, provides a palliative to Dante's glaring departures from Christian dogma, and fosters a blueprint for meditative reading. In British Library Lansdowne MS 839 and Marciana MS It. IX, 276 (=6902) multifaceted textual puns and analogies illustrate the opening verse to Paradiso, embrace the reader within the structure of the poem and, through layout provide an emotional and intellectual pedagogical experience.