9 - London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D. XV: A Priest’s Book from before the Benedictine Reform?

Summary

It has not escaped the attention of scholars that England, from the reign of King Edgar, was heavily influenced by proponents of a reformed Benedictine monasticism. Changes occurred not only in the political landscape but also in liturgy, law, episcopal appointments, and pastoral texts, all of which are indicators of considerable changes which have been documented by generations of medievalists. However, the collected volume in which this chapter appears is intended in some sense as a corrective to the large concentration of scholarship that has focused on the monastic reform movement in tenth-century England to the exclusion of the preceding decades. Appropriately, the manuscript under consideration here may in fact predate Edgar's reign and the Benedictine reform. London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D. XV, written by three scribes of the mid-tenth century, appears to be a penitential book for an English priest.1 This is one of the few practical manuscripts of penance from early medieval England and apart from its significant value as a witness to everyday penitential practice, the book is an indicator of ecclesiastical changes in the tenth century. Specifically, I argue here that the book preserves some features of priests’ books prior to widespread Benedictine influence, such as the almost exclusive use of Latin in pastoral texts, the transitional, liminal nature of the writing styles employed, and its stronger resemblance to priests’ books from broadly contemporary continental Europe than English books of the hundred years following its production.

That said, a recent reassessment is salient to questions of monastic reform. Scholars such as Julia Barrow and Steven Vanderputten have considered the issue of reform in its medieval context, pointing out that ‘reformers’ rarely use a contemporary equivalent of the word reform, instead choosing terms with a more theological or overtly monastic character, such as forms of the Latin regula. While it is important to note the potential anachronism of the term ‘reform’ for the regularization of monastic practice, the terminology is retained here principally because the Benedictine reform serves in this chapter as an approximate terminus ante quem for the production of certain sections of this manuscript rather than as a way of conceptualizing the changes implemented by Bishop Æthelwold and others.