Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:56:17.346Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Self-contained units in composite manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

P. R. Robinson
P. R. Robinson
Affiliation:
The Queen's University of Belfast
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Many medieval manuscripts are composite volumes, made up of a number of self-contained units which elsewhere I have called ‘booklets’. Such a unit originated as a small but structurally independent production containing a single work or a number of short works. Two of the earliest surviving examples, dating from the late eighth century, were produced on the continent. Each is a single gathering now bound with other gatherings into a codex: Merseburg, Stiftsbibliothek 105, fols. 85–105, containing Alcuin's Vita S. Vedasti and some of his homilies, and St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 567, pp. 135–53, containing aVita S. Lucii. There is a fold in the centre of every page of both these quires, made after the text had been copied and not present in the other quires with which they are now bound. In both instances the completed quire was folded so that the verso of its last leaf became the outer pages or ‘cover’ of the resulting booklet. This ‘cover‘ is more soiled than the other pages in the quire, suggesting that the booklet once circulated independently of the other quires in the manuscript into which it is bound.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 7 , December 1978 , pp. 231 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 231 note 1 Robinson, P. R., ‘The “Booklet”: a Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts’, Codicologica ii, ed. Gruijs, A. and Gumbert, J. P., Litterae Textuales (Leiden, forthcoming).Google Scholar

page 231 note 2 Bischoff, Bernhard, ‘Über gefaltete Handschriften, vornehmlich hagiographischen Inhalts’, Mittelallerliche Studien 1 (Stuttgart, 1966), 93–100.Google Scholar

page 231 note 3 Ker, N. R., Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957)Google Scholar no. 332, art. 34: a quire of eight leaves; most of the last page (147V) is blank.

page 231 note 4 Ker, Catalogue, no. 297: a quire of eight leaves+one; the scribe misjudged the length of his text and needed to add a single leaf (fol. 18) to complete it. For a facsimile of this booklet see Saint Dunstan's Classbookfrom Canterbury, ed. Hunt, R. W., Umbrae Codicum Occidentalium 4 (Amsterdam, 1961).Google Scholar The central fold is visible throughout fols. 10–18.

page 232 note 1 Parkes, M. B., ‘The Palaeography of the Parker Manuscript of the Chronicle, Laws and Sedulius, and Historiography at Winchester in the Late Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, ASE 5 (1976), 149–71.Google Scholar

page 232 note 2 Robinson, ‘The “Booklet”’.

page 232 note 3 I omit catchwords – which may run only within a booklet, there being no catchword at the end of the last quire of one booklet to link it with the first quire of the next – because the system of catchwords was not generally adopted before the twelfth century; see Vezin, Jean, ‘Observations sur l'emploi des réclames dans les manuscrits latins’, Bibliothéque de l'École des Chartes 125 (1967), 5–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 233 note 1 The Leningrad Bede, ed. Arngart, O., EEMF 2 (Copenhagen, 1952), 18.Google Scholar

page 233 note 2 Bishop, T. A. M., English Caroline Minuscule (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, pl. 5, and the same author's ‘Notes on Cambridge Manuscripts, part IV: MSS connected with St Augustine's Canterbury’, Trans, of the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 2 (1954–1958), 327–9.Google Scholar

page 234 note 1 McGurk, Patrick, Latin Gospel Booksfrom A.D. 400 to A.D. 800, Les Publications de Scriptorium 5 (1961), 8–9.Google Scholar

page 234 note 2 Ker, , Catalogue, nos. 35, 245, 312 and 325Google Scholar. No. 20 is the exception.

page 234 note 3 See below, p. 236.

page 234 note 4 London, British Library, Cotton Nero A. i, fols. 70–177; see A Wulfstan Manuscript containing Institutes, Laws and Homilies, ed. Loyn, Henry R., EEMF 17 (Copenhagen, 1971)Google Scholar. Wulfstan's ownership of this collection has recently been challenged by Hohler, C. E., ‘Some Service-Books of the Later Saxon Church’,Tenth-Century Studies. Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and ‘Regularis Concordia’, ed. David, Parsons (London and Chichester, 1975), p. 225, n. 59.Google Scholar

page 234 note 5 Fols. 3–41 and 42–57.

page 234 note 6 A Wulfstan Manuscript, p. 32.

page 234 note 7 Saint Dunstan's Classbook, ed. Hunt, p. xv.

page 234 note 8 Ker,Catalogue, no. 231.

page 235 note 1 Cotton Nero A. i, fols. 70–96, 97–108, 109–21 and 122–77.

page 235 note 2 Rigg, A. G. and Wieland, G. R., ‘A Canterbury Classbook of the Mid-Eleventh Century (the “Cambridge Songs” Manuscript)’,ASE 4 (1975), 129.Google Scholar

page 235 note 3 Fols. 1–50, 51–89, 90–110 and 115–28 respectively. See Hunt, R. W.et al., The Survival of Ancient Literature (Bodleian Library Exhibition Catalogue, 1975)Google Scholar, no. 120 and pi. xx(a).

page 235 note 4 Ker,Catalogue, no. 338, arts. 31–5.

page 235 note 5 Ibid. no. 283, arts. 1–3 and 4–8.

page 235 note 6 The existence of such booklets was postulated by Éamonn Ó Carragáin, , ‘The Vercelli Book as an Ascetic Florilegium’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, The Queen's University of Belfast, 1975), p. 199.Google Scholar

page 235 note 7 Ker,Catalogue, no. 332.

page 235 note 8 Above, p. 231.

page 236 note 1 Several later medieval manuscripts survive in wrappers; see Robinson, ‘The “Booklet”’.

page 236 note 2 Ker,Catalogue, no. 48.

page 236 note 3 Ibid. no. 69.

page 236 note 4 See Sisam, Kenneth.‘MSS Bodley 340 and 342: Ælfric's Catholic Homilies’, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1953), pp. 153–6.Google Scholar

page 236 note 5 See above, p. 234. The unity and independence of this series is confirmed by the original list of1 contents on fol. iii which lists only arts. 1–32.

page 236 note 6 According to the list of contents brought up to date by the ‘tremulous hand’; the third of these booklets is now separated from the other two by fols. 367–77.

page 237 note 1 Scribe 4 had left art. 43 incomplete at the end of quire xxxvi (287V); scribe 8 later concluded the unfinished homily in quire xxxvii and extended the booklet by adding Ker's arts. 58–63 in quires xxxviii–xli.

page 237 note 2 Another homily originally began on 394V but has since been erased.

page 237 note 3 Scragg, D. G., ‘The Compilation of the Vercelli Book’, ASE 2 (1973), 189–207Google Scholar; see further The Vercelli Book, ed. Sisam, Celia, EEMF 19 (Copenhagen, 1976)Google Scholar, and Ó Carragáin, ‘The Vercelli Book’.

page 238 note 1 Ker, Catalogue, no. 336: the outside limits of the collection represented by Junius 85 and 86 are 160 x 115 mm. The leaves of Junius 85, fols. 18–24 are of slightly wider dimensions than those of the other booklets.

page 238 note 2 Ker,Catalogue, no. 144.

page 238 note 3 Both manuscripts were at Worcester by the early thirteenth century when the ‘ tremulous hand’ glossed them; see Ker, N. R., ‘The Date of the “Tremulous” Worcester Hand’, Leeds Stud. in Eng. 6 (1937), 28–9.Google Scholar

page 238 note 4 I am grateful to Professor P. A. M. Clemoes, Dr M. R. Godden, Dr A. J. Minnis, Professor É. Ó Carrigáin and Mr M. B. Parkes, all of whom read drafts of this article and made helpful comments and criticisms. I am solely responsible for the errors and omissions and for the views expressed.