Library MS Research Articles

Lydgate Rewrites Chaucer:

Lydgate Rewrites Chaucer:

John Lydgate’s “Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund” and the “Extra Miracles of St Edmund”: Edited from British Library MS Harley 2278 and Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 46

John Lydgate’s “Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund” and the “Extra Miracles of St Edmund”: Edited from British Library MS Harley 2278 and Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 46

NICOLAS K. KIESSLING (ed.), The Life of Anthony Wood in His Own Words.

STUDENTS of early modern England should be well aware of the debt they owe to Anthony Wood (1632–95). A biographer, antiquarian, and bibliophile, Wood assembled a library of nearly 7,000 items, including many unique ephemeral publications, kept a minute diary recording the rhythms of Oxford life during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and in 1691–92 published the monumental Athenae Oxonienses, a biographical dictionary of the writers and bishops associated with Oxford from 1500 to his own time. Modern scholarship has largely neglected him, however, and Nicolas K. Kiessling’s study of The Library of Anthony Wood (Oxford, 2002) was the first to recognize the immense potential for a better understanding of seventeenth-century intellectual and popular culture latent in Wood’s books and manuscripts. The Life is Kiessling’s second book dealing with Wood and is an edition of the latter’s autobiography, the so-called ‘Secretum Antonii’. It includes a full edition and collation of the two surviving manuscript drafts of the autobiography, now British Library MS Harley 5409 and Bodleian MS Tanner 102. Furthermore, Kiessling provides detailed notes and a new biography of Wood dealing with the period from 1672, where the manuscripts end, to his death in 1695. This is not, however, the first time these manuscripts have been published. Previous editions include those by Thomas Hearne (1730), Philip Bliss (1813), and Andrew Clark (1891–1900); indeed, Wood’s autobiography has enjoyed more frequent and better editions than most other scholarly manuscripts of the period.

A Birth Girdle Printed by Wynkyn de Worde

The authors identify STC 14547.5 as the only surviving example of an English printed birth girdle. A kind of amulet roll intended to protect women against the dangers of childbirth, this broadside is essentially a typographical version of a manuscript birth girdle, a textual interpretation of a holy relic such as the Virgin's Girdle once in Westminster Abbey. The authors analyze several key features of STC 14547.5, paying special attention to its textual relationship to five fifteenth-century English amulet rolls that may have been used as birth girdles and to an unstudied Latin charm preserved in British Library MS Sloane 783b, a medical codex of English provenance. The authors also comment on the connection between STC 14547.5 and STC 14077c.64, a broadside prayer attributed to the Southwark press of Peter Treveris. Their analysis suggests that STC 14547.5 was printed in 1533 in response to the pregnancy of Anne Boleyn, whereas STC 14077c.64 arguably reflected popular fears surrounding the 1528 outbreak of the sweating sickness. The commercialization of amulet rolls presupposed the broad acceptance in England of SS Quiricus and Julitta (the child and mother martyrs invoked as intercessors in both STC 14547.5 and STC 14077c.64) as effective conduits for the curative and protective powers of Christ.

The Passion in English: Meditations on the Life of Christ in Michigan State University Library MS 1

This article examines English pre-reformation literary representations of the life and Passion of Christ. Central to this genre of writing is the Pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition of meditative writing; a pan-European literary phenomenon, whose influence extended into preaching, decorative arts, dramatic performance, and other areas. My focus is on a text much overlooked by modern commentators, the Middle English meditation on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ preserved uniquely in Michigan State University Library MS 1. Dating probably to the mid-fifteenth century, this text translates and adapts selected chapters from the key pseudo-Bonaventuran text, the Meditationes vitae Christi. I examine processes of textual translation and adaptation in this vernacular life of Christ, providing extensive comparison between the English adaptation and its Latin source. The picture that emerges from such analysis is of an English adaptation that provides substantial addition to the Latin in its attempt to enflame and guide pious sensibilities. Particularly notable is a sequence of sustained alliterative compositions, which have no parallel elsewhere in the pseudo-Bonaventuran corpus, and which show the original approach of an English writer to the late-medieval religious imperative towards compassion and profound empathy with Christ and his mother. I conclude by examining the close textual links between the text in the Michigan SU manuscript and another Middle English Passion treatise better known to scholarship, the Privity of the Passion of c. 1400.

Calabrese, Michael, Hoyt N. Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. 2008. <i>The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive Vol. 6: San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm2)</i>. and Adams, Robert, ed. 2011. <i>The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive Vol. 7: London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 398 & Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (R)</i>. Cambridge: Published for The Medieval Academy of America

Volumes six and seven of <em>The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA)</em> mark a significant achievement for the work of the editors and contributors to the project. The omnibus project aims to provide not only colour digital images of the entire corpus of William Langland’s texts of <em>Piers Plowman</em>, from the medieval period through the sixteenth-century, but also electronic transcriptions of each manuscript (as explained by <a href="http://digitalmedievalist.org/journal/7/olsen/#duggan2005">Duggan 2005</a>). Volume six includes images and transcriptions from San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm2); volume seven includes images and transcriptions from London, British Library MS Lansdowne 398 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (R). <em>Piers Plowman</em> has traditionally received much scholarly attention, not only due to its status as a canonical poem surviving from the Middle English period, but also because Langland wrote three distinct versions of the poem (A, B, and C), and thus the poem offers much for the study of Middle English textual history, editorial theory, and reception theory.

Henry VII’s Book of Astrology and the Tudor Renaissance*

AbstractThis essay considers the place of astrology at the early Tudor court through an analysis of British Library MS Arundel 66, a manuscript compiled for the use of Henry VII (r. 1485–1509) in the 1490s. It argues that an illustration on fol. 201 depicts King Henry being presented with prognostications by his astrologer, William Parron, with the support of Louis, Duke of Orleans, later King Louis XII of France (r. 1498–1515). It considers the activities of three Tudor astrologer courtiers, William Parron, Lewis of Caerleon, and Richard Fitzjames, who may have commissioned the manuscript, as well as the Fitzjames Zodiac Arch at Merton College, Oxford (1497) and the London Pageants of 1501. It concludes that Arundel 66 reflects the strategic cultural investment in astrology and English prophecy made by the Tudor regime at the time of the marriage negotiations and wedding of Arthur, Prince of Wales and Katherine of Aragon, descendant of Alfonso X, the most illustrious medieval patron of the science of the stars.

Literary Activism: James Montgomery, Joanna Baillie, and the Plight of Britain’s Chimney Sweeps

JUDITH BAILEY SLAGLE Literary Activism: James Montgomery, Joanna Baillie, and the Plight ofBritain’s Chimney Sweeps N 6 FEBRUARY 1824, JOANNA BAILLIE NOTIFIED HER FRIEND WALTER vy Scott that Scottish poet James Montgomery, then living in Sheffield, England, had written to ask her for a poem on the plight of chimney sweeps, also known as climbing boys. A committee there was at work on a collection ofpoems to “engage the Public” to “sympathize with their mis­ eries” entitled The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing-Boy’s Album (1824 and 1825). But Baillie, deciding the subject was too grim and too im­ portant for a simple poem, had already responded to Montgomery on 14 January 1824: . . . you must pardon me for being so presumptuous as to say that po­ etry, even from your pen or that of any of our most distinguished Poets, would not be so useful to them as a plain statement of their miserable lot in prose, accompanied with a simple, reasonable plan for sweeping chimneys without them. . . . There is a jealousy in peoples [sic] minds regarding every thing that is told them in verse, & or every thing which in that garb attempts to work upon the feelings.1 A practical thinker well acquainted with the London scientific community, Baillie understood that the public often mistrusted the sagacity ofpoets. So instead of a poem, she sent the editor something else, as she explained in her subsequent letter to Scott: I. Wellcome Library MS 5608 ££43—44, partially printed in Memoirs ofthe Life and Writings ofJames Montgomery, ed. J. Holland and J. Everett (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853), 4:60-61. SiR, 51 (Spring 2012) 59 60 JUDITH BAILEY SLAGLE I received some time since an application which amused me a good deal, from Montgomery the Poet in behalfofa committee at Sheffield for suppressing the use of Climbing Boys for sweeping chimneys, that I might send them a Poem on that subject to be added to a collection ofsimilar poems. . . . Instead ofpoetry I have sent to the committee in plain simple prose an account of the old Scotch way of cleaning chim­ neys with a rope & a lead & a parcel ofbrooms & brushes tied to it, as a far better thing. For all the verses on earth will never make them give up the old mode of sweeping till they get one in its place nearly as easy to themselves and as cheap. Is this old way still in use with you or do climbing chimney sweepers universally prevail?2 Baillie’s letter also underscored the conflict in using verse for reform, a conflict with which Scott agreed. This essay, then, aims to combine a fac­ tual history of chimney sweep legislation with the activist literature in­ volved in hastening its execution. Poet and social activist James Montgomery (1771—1854) was born at Irvine in Ayrshire to an original Scottish family who had settled in Ulster. His father adopted the tenets of the Moravians, becoming a minister in the 1760s, and sent his son James to school at the Moravian settlement near Leeds in 1777; in 1783 his parents went to Barbados as missionaries. James Montgomery proved a liberal thinker early on and found his tenure with the Moravians stifling, so he ran away in 1787. He eventually returned to his teachers but soon left for London with manuscripts in hand. In 1792 Montgomery became a clerk for the Sheffield Register, and his career as an activist writer was launched.3 As a poet and a reform writer, Montgomery authored the popular Christmas carol “Angels from the Realms of Glory” and “had the distinction of going to prison twice for printing material that was unpopular with the authorities”; as later editor of the Sheffield Iris, he was determined to “do what was right.”4 Montgomery had written several book-length poems, including one on the Moravian mission to Greenland and another against slavery, but he is probably best remembered today for his hymns and for his fight against the deplorable condition of child chim­ ney sweeps. 2. The Collected Letters ofJoanna Baillic, 2 vols., ed. Judith Bailey Slagle (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 424. Further references to Baillie...

John Mirk's Festial: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A. II, Vol. II ed. by Susan Powell (review)

Review(s) of: John Mirk's festial: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A. II, Vol. ii, by Powell, Susan, ed., (Early English Text Society, Original Series, 335), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, hardback, pp. 600, 1 b/w illustration, R.R.P. 70.00 pounds, ISBN 9780199590377.

John Mirk’s “Festial”: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II (review)

John Mirk’s “Festial”: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II (review)

A TEXT ON ALMSGIVING IN RIA MS 3 B 23 AND THE "LEABHAR BREAC"

This paper presents a Latin-Irish text on almsgiving in RIA MS 23 P 16 (1230; the Leabhar Breac) and a previously unpublished Middle-Irish version which is found in RIA MS 3 B 23 (1227). Editions and translations of both texts are provided and the language of the latter text is discussed. Many of the Latin sources in the text are identified, and some general observations are made concerning the compilation and transmission of Latin-Irish texts. In addition, a transcription of the text as found in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud 610 is given as an appendix.

Recovery of effaced mediaeval recipes for painters and illuminators from Brussels Royal Library MS 10152 [circa 1200

Deux articles dans le Bulletin ont présenté (1842), et en partie édité (1954) des recettes techniques pour peintres et enlumineurs, à partir de c. 1200, qui sont conservées à la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique MS 10147-58. L'édition de 1954 a omis f. 26 v° en raison de sa quasi illisibilité. Ce document identifie une série de recettes parallèles de Montpellier MS H 277, c. 1350-1400. Les similarités permettent de reconstituer le contenu de f. 26 v°. Le MS de Bruxelles se révèle un témoin important d'une tradition textuelle alternative du traité de Théophile sur l'art roman, son importance a été confirmée comme étant probablement le premier document technique relatif à l'art des Pays-Bas.

Tradition and Innovation in Later Medieval English Manuscripts (review)

Tradition and Innovation in Later Medieval English Manuscripts. By Kathleen L. Scott. (London: The British Library. 2007. Pp. xiv, 194. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-712-34936-0.) This volume examines five little-studied English manuscripts of the later medieval period that contain rare or enigmatic decoration and iconography. Scott uses these examples to argue that although fifteenth-century manuscript illumination has often been derided as derivative and dull, these specific manuscripts not only contain strikingly inventive pictorial elements but also raise intriguing questions about the broader contours of English book production and the function of illustrations in late-medieval manuscripts. The first chapter concerns Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 156, an English modelbook for a work known as the Postilla litteralis super totam Bibliam, a widely used literal exegesis of the Bible composed by Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349). Although this manuscript does not include the full text of the commentary, which typically ran from three to five volumes, it contains illustrations intended to accompany the text, including images that depict practical information about the Bible such as diagrams, plans, and illustrations of the Temple of Solomon, the Table of Shewbread, the Brazen Sea, the Altar of the Holocaust, and so on. She posits that the Bodleian manuscript was a kind of archetypal exemplar or modelbook that provided copyists with a repertoire of imagery for use in the numerous other copies of the work produced during the period.The second chapter considers All Souls Library, Oxford, MS 10, the only surviving copy of an illustrated French Bible written in England. The origins of this manuscript are especially mysterious, as the text was written in French at a time when Wycliffite Bibles were readily available, but produced in an English illuminating shop by a prolific and well-known artist who seems to have moved in the highest circles of noble book-commissioning patrons. Although the manuscript contains many of the standard features of English book art, some of its iconography was clearly influenced by French models; moreover, it prominently features miniatures of readers and books. Scott unravels some of the potential implications of this evidence for ownership and, intriguingly, proposes that the book may have been commissioned by a French patron in forced residence in England such as Charles d'Orleans. Scott then focuses on British Library, Stowe MS 39, the only surviving English manuscript of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, a Middle English treatise of spiritual guidance that employs architectural motifs to depict aspects of interiority. …

Shakespeare and The Book of Sir Thomas More

British Library MS Harley 7368 or The Book of Sir Thomas More presents a play by five hands in various states of revision. Scholars have identified Anthony Munday as the principal playwright and William Shakespeare as the author of three pages that portray Thomas More quelling a Mayday London riot against foreigners. Its manifold uncertainties notwithstanding, the playscript teaches us some things about Shakespeare and about Thomas More. It enables us to see the Bard in the act of creating and revising, participating fully in the processes of collaboration typical in his time. Moreover, it presents More as a heroic wise man whom Protestants and Catholics can admire for his resolution, mirth and compassion, qualities that transcend confessional dispute.

‘Ye that pasen by pe Weiye’: time, topology and the medieval use of Lamentations 1.12

Lamed. O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite, et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus! quoniam vindemiavit me, ut locutus est Dominus, in die irae furoris sui. Lamed. O all ye that pass by t...

The Name Elizabeth Darcy in British Library Ms Harley 1766 and British Library Ms Additional 10304

The Name Elizabeth Darcy in British Library Ms Harley 1766 and British Library Ms Additional 10304

Editing Middle English Medical Manuscripts : The Case of Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 509

It has been pointed out that the editing of a scientific treatise should be “an extended and challenging exercise in judgment, requiring an earnest commitment to scholarship” (Keiser 1998: 110). In the present article, the challenges and steps involved in the process of editing a specific Middle English medical text, G.U.L. MS Hunter 509, are dealt with. After a brief introduction to the manuscript, the stages previous to editing are discussed. These include transcription, of which the main difficulties are addressed and possible ways to overcome them put forward, lemmatisation and morphological tagging. Then, the two types of edition that have been carried out, printed and electronic, are presented. A comment on the glossary and list of lemmas closes the article.

Fuentes romances de las crónicas generales: el testimonio de la Historia menos atajante

The Historia menos atajante is an account of the struggle between the houses of Castro and Lara during the minority of king Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158–69) included in two of the chronicles that stemmed from Alfonso X's Estoria de España: the Crónica manuelina (the chronicle summarized by Don Juan Manuel in his Crónica abreviada), and the Crónica ocampiana (the text published by Florián de Ocampo in 1541). The fact that two other chronicles (Versión crítica and Crónica de Castilla) offer slightly different versions of the same story suggests the existence of a common source for the entire tradition. This article contains the preliminary conclusions of a study on the Historia menos atajante, as a stage previous to its critical edition. After reviewing the testimonies, including a manuscript absent from the previous critical literature about the work (British Library MS Egerton 289), a comparative study allows us to draw up a model for the transmission of the text, and to present a hypothesis on its sources. These are tentatively located in a corpus of legendary materials dealing with the deeds of the Castilian nobility, which might well pre-date the activities of the Alfonsine historiographical workshops (1270–84).

The sea monsters in the Madrid manuscript of Ptolemy's Geography (Biblioteca Nacional, MS Res. 255)

The sea monsters in the Madrid manuscript of Ptolemy's Geography (Biblioteca Nacional, MS Res. 255)

John Mirk’s Festial edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II (review)

Reviewed by: John Mirk’s Festial edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II John Scahill Powell, Susan, ed., John Mirk’s Festial edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II, Volume I (Early English Text Society O. S. 334), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009; hardback; pp. cxlv, 188; 6 b/w plates; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9780199578498. Written in the 1380s, John Mirk’s sermon-cycle had most of its impact much later: it underwent considerable excerpting and two re-workings, and was printed twenty-three times, making it for a while the most widely circulated Middle English text. It then suffered a near-total eclipse from the Reformation until Erbe’s edition of 1905, of which only Volume i (text and glossarial index) appeared, owing to his death in World War I. [End Page 262] Susan Powell has made Claudius A.II her base manuscript, for reasons she sets out in her detailed analysis of it. The choice is almost inevitable, as this is by far the earliest copy, and uniquely preserves much in the way of original-looking forms and lexis; but it is also a difficult choice, as Claudius gives the text in five heterogeneous sections (four hands, one including an unmistakable change of exemplar), some nearer the original than others, and all but two of them having significant affinities with the post-Mirk ‘Group B’ recension. Erbe’s edition, based on what Powell’s investigations have shown to be the second-best surviving copy, provides a more homogeneous text, and offers readings likely to be closer to what Mirk wrote, although in the sections in Powell’s hand D (about three-fifths of the whole) the two editions seldom diverge markedly. This is a critical best-text edition, sparingly emended through comparison with the other manuscripts, and preserving a wide assortment of scribal oddities, though with modern punctuation and capitalization and silently expanded abbreviations. While Section 3 of the Introduction gives a lucid overview of the Festial’s complex transmission, there are no descriptions or datings of any of the manuscripts, other than Claudius. It might have been made clear that the ‘Instructions for Parish Priests’ (ed. Young) listed in the Bibliography is not the separate work by Mirk discussed under that title in the Introduction, but a component (28. in this volume) of the Festial itself.When Volume II appears, containing the remainder of the text, notes, glossary, and the sample collations on which Powell’s views on manuscript relationships are based, a lively medieval work whose influence continued into early modern times will be available in a scholarly form. John Scahill Insearch University of Technology Sydney Copyright © 2011 John Scahill