The Travels of a Quire from the Twelfth Century to the Twenty-First: The Case of Rawlinson B 484, fols. 1–6

Summary

Neil Ker wrote that the dissolution of the monasteries in England was the great crisis in the history of manuscript libraries. It was also so in the history of manuscripts. We have a few names of the great collectors who obtained their manuscripts directly from the monasteries in that period, but, as Ker pointed out, smaller collections are often forgotten. It is not only the smaller collections that are often overlooked, but also the smaller survivors: the history of manuscript fragments and miscellaneous compilations, despite a recent increase in attention, is still a path less trodden than the study of the great books surviving from the Middle Ages. The present study is dedicated to a single manuscript fragment, preserved in an antiquary’s notebook. As the following discussion will show, the surviving evidence links this fragment to many lives across the centuries, and touches on the histories of more than one manuscript collection.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B 484 is described in the Bodleian Library catalogue as the ‘Collectanea of Sir James Ware, comprising fragments, extracts and notes mostly on Ireland but including (fol. 85) cutting without text from a Psalter, EN, Winchester, 10th century, second quarter’. The manuscript belonged to Sir James Ware (26 November 1594 – 1 December 1666), and bears his coat of arms on the front cover. The quire which interests us is the first item in this collection, occupying fols. 1–6. It contains a fragment of the twelfth-century Latin encyclopaedia Imago Mundi by Honorius Augustodunensis. For reasons that will be set out below, there are few discussions of this quire, which is nevertheless an important witness of the text. The present study presents new findings regarding the importance and history of this quire.

Importance

The Imago Mundi quire, consisting of a single gathering of six folios, is the first item in Rawlinson B 484. (Fig. 1 shows the first page.) The fragment of Imago Mundi it contains begins with the last two sentences or so of chapter 3 [3], and ends halfway through chapter 35 [36]. It is important since it appears to be one of only two early witnesses to the first version of Imago Mundi, composed in 1110. The other witness, which preserves a complete text, is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 66 (s. xii, Sawley).