11 - London, British Library, MS Egerton 913

Summary

Confessio Amantis (Prologue and part of Book I only), single column, paper London, s.xv, first quarter (the watermarks belong to long runs and are not helpful in dating), with missing text supplied by a slightly later hand.

Contents

(fols 1r–47v) Confessio Amantis Prol. 1–I.1709

Torpor hebes sensus scola parua labor minimusque, &c. (6 lines).

Incipit prologus. Of hem that written vs tofore < > Him þenkeþ wel nyȝ his

hert brekeþ (last complete line)

Prologue (fol. 1r); Book I (fol. 20r) (lines I.1668–87 and 1701–09 are progressively defective because of the loss of a large lower outer segment of the last leaf).

At fol. 26v, 184 lines are omitted (I.387–570) as the text leaps in mid-column from I.386 to 571, due (as Macaulay points out [ed.], Works, II.cxlii) to loss of a leaf in an exemplar which had the 46-line double-column layout frequently found in copies of the Confessio (see A. S. G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts’, in Griffiths and Pearsall [eds], Book Production and Publishing, 257–78, esp. 260, with list of ten such MSS, page 274). After fol. 26, four leaves are inserted (fols 27–30), with the missing text supplied by a slightly later hand: I.375–86 are repeated at the beginning of the inserted portion of text (so that the first lines of the new folio are the same as the first lines of fol. 26v, perhaps to make the continuity clear, or for safety’s sake if being done away from the defective volume); at the end, where there was not enough text to fill the pages now available, fol. 30r continues with thirteen lines to I.574, with the remaining half of the page left blank (at the bottom, ‘Verte folium ~’), and then fol. 30v has the Latin Celsior verses (to follow I.574), the Latin prose gloss for I.575 (written, exceptionally, right across the page) and finally, after a large space, I.575–80 at the bottom of the page.

Text: collated by Macaulay (sigil E2): Ia.