The Saints Venerated in Medieval Peterborough as Reflected in the Antiphoner Cambridge, Magdalene College, f.4.10

Summary

‘ISTE LIBER EST S. petri de Burgo. Quem qui ei abstulerit uel titulum deleuerit anathema sit. Amen.’ So reads the colophon on fol. 8v of the late thirteenth-century antiphoner preserved in the Old Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, manuscript f.4.10. The kalendar later in the manuscript, and the Sanctorale, leave no doubt as to the provenance of the book: the Benedictine abbey of SS. Peter, Paul and Andrew at Peterborough. The apparent owner of the book whose name appears on fol. 1r ‘Antiph. Gilberti de Stanford’ written in red ink, and again on fol. 8r ‘Antiph. Gilberti’ and ‘Staynford’ , cannot yet be identified. These entries, like the colophon, date from the fourteenth century.

The Peterborough antiphoner has occasionally been consulted, but not described in detail. There is a brief entry for it in W. H. Frere's Biblioteca Musico-Liturgica, but Frere states that the sparse information he gives is borrowed from the description in M. R. James's catalogue of the Magdalene manuscripts. Manuscript f.4.10 has been quite overshadowed by the slightly earlier antiphoner from Worcester, manuscript f.160 of Worcester Cathedral Chapter Library, reproduced in Paleographie Musicale with a valuable introduction by the Abbess of Stanbrook, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, published in 1922. Few studies have referred to the Peterborough book, as will become clear from the following remarks.

From James's description it is nevertheless clear that the Peterborough antiphoner is a source of unusual interest, the more so since so few English medieval antiphoners have survived. The book is preserved practically complete. (There is one large lacuna in the Advent season: two leaves were extracted from the office for Thomas of Canterbury, and a leaf is lost which would have had the end of the Dedication office and the start of the Office of the Dead.)

Apart from the Temporale, Sanctorale and Commune Sanctorum, the manuscript includes an extensive hymnary. There is a complete kalendar (between Temporale and Sanctorale), the first folios give a set of Venites, and there is a supplement of chants for newer feasts, written by later hands. One of the most outstanding features of the antiphoner is the large number of chant cycles for the feast days of less well known saints, in particular those associated with Peterborough.