My PhD research concerns the copyist Ralph Crane, a poet and scribe who is best known for his transcription of several plays for Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio. Although typically described as a ‘playhouse scrivener’ or ‘copyist to the King’s Men’, Crane is known to have also copied for the Privy Council and Privy Seal Offices, and the Inns of Court. His manuscripts contain the work of the poets Randolph, Davison, and Austin, the naval officer Sir Henry Mainwaring, the playwrights Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Middleton and Webster, and the Lord Chancellor Sir Francis Bacon. At other points in his life, Crane was working alone, in the production of presentation manuscripts and verse miscellanies which contain poetry circulated only by him.
Monthly Archives: December 2015
Sandars Lectures in Bibliography 2016
The Sandars lectures take place in Cambridge every year. This year’s series of lectures is given by Professor Anthony Grafton of Princeton University. All are welcome to attend one or all of them.
Cambridge, University Library, Hh. 1.13: fols 71v-72v
Cambridge University Library, MS Hh. 1. 13 (Hh.1.13) is one of over 50 extant copies of the Speculum Christiani, a popular pastoral compilation dating most likely from the first few decades of the fifteenth century. The Speculum almost always consists of eight sections or tabulae, each of which expounds on certain aspects of the Christian faith, in keeping with Pecham’s basic syllabus of religious instruction. The Speculum, however, is often combined with other religious texts of diverse provenance.
Fols 1r-71v of Hh.1.13 contain a unique version of the Speculum (G. Holmstedt (ed.), Speculum Christiani, EETS: OS, 182 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933, p. cxlii).