Category Archives: Early Medieval Manuscripts

MS Ee.4.32 and the Case of the Disappearing ‘Pope’

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MS Ee.4.32 is datable to s. s.xv2 and contains two texts: The Three Kings of Cologne and the English Prose Brut Chronicle. Renown Brut scholar Lister Matheson asserts that: ‘The Middle English prose Brut survives in more manuscripts than any other Middle English work except the two Wycliffite translations of the Bible’[1]. Matheson’s compiled catalogue of the Brut lists nineteen extant versions of the Latin Brut[2], forty-nine versions of the Anglo-Norman Brut[3], and over one-hundred-seventy versions of the Middle English Brut[4]. For a complete list and location of these manuscripts, please see Matheson’s monograph The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle. 

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Arthur Marotti’s The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England

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Arthur F. Marotti’s The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2021) is a study that examines the transmission and compilation of poetic texts through manuscripts from the late-Elizabethan era through the mid-seventeenth century, paying attention to the distinctive material, social, and literary features of these documents.The study has two main focuses: the first, the particular social environments in which texts were compiled and, second, the presence within this system of a large body of (usually anonymous) rare or unique poems. Manuscripts from aristocratic, academic, and urban professional environments are examined in separate chapters that highlight particular collections. Two chapters consider the social networking within the university and London that facilitated the transmission within these environments and between them. Although the topic is addressed throughout the study, the place of rare or unique poems in manuscript collections is at the center of the final three chapters.The book as a whole argues that scholars need to pay more attention to the social life of texts in the period and to little-known or unknown rare or unique poems that represent a field of writing broader than that defined in a literary history based mainly on the products of print culture.

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An Introduction to Biocodicology and the Beasts 2 Craft Project

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The life of a book holds many stories, all leaving an invisible signature trapped in the pages, waiting to be read by those with the keenest eye. However, what if an eye is not enough? Invisible traces have seemed impossible to recover, but this is all changing with recent technological advances available to us. The emerging field of Biocodicology1 offers the tantalising prospect to read these long forgotten biographies, revealing complex stories of use, handling, storage and production.

But why is this relevant? What can we really learn that cannot already be ascertained from reading the text? The value of the materiality of manuscript production cannot be overstated. Understanding the craftsmanship involved in the production of materials, so intrinsically linked to the users themselves, are as much a part of the codex as the words inscribed on the page. Understanding book production in terms of the livestock economies that sustained them, the choice of animals (age, sex, breed), the idocincracies of each skin requiring specialist knowledge of treatment and production. But then there are additional stories imprinted on the completed text, how was it being used? Were these objects of reverence with barely a scratch as proof of their sacred status, or are they everyday books to be used and thumbed and splashed and cleaned? Much the same way as our favourite recipe books contain evidence of the ingredients we use, manuscripts may present similar signatures from their users, a drop of wine here, a stain of milk there, a veritable feast of biomolecules preserved for posterity, lying dormant waiting to be revealed.

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Lyell Lectures 2016

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‘Public Reading and its Books: Monastic Ideals and Practice in England c. 1000-c. 1300’, to be given by Dr Teresa Webber (Trinity College, Cambridge), in the Weston Library Lecture Theatre (the former ‘New Bodlean’ Library), Broad Street, Oxford, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5pm, from 3 May to 19 May, as follows:

3 May ‘Public Reading in Monastic Observance: the framework of norms

5 May ‘Reading the Gospel

10 May ‘Reading the Bible’

12 May ‘Celebrating the Saints’

17 May ‘Reading in Chapter’

19 May ‘Reading at Collation: Monastic Ideals and the Practice of Public Reading’

http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/whats-on/upcoming-events/2016/may/lyell-lectures-1

Workshop “Collecting Knowledge, Creating Knowledge”

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COLLECTING KNOWLEDGE, CREATING KNOWLEDGE MEDIEVAL MISCELLANIES BETWEEN AUTHORIAL STRATEGIES AND SELECTIVE RECEPTION

Cambridge, 27 February 2016

Seminar Room 11, Faculty of History (3rd floor)

West Road CB3 9EF

10:00 – 10:30 Welcome Coffee and Registration in the Senior Combination Room

10:30 – 11:00 Introductory remarks by Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge)

11:00 – 13:00 Reading the Classics

Chair : Mary Garrison (York)

Joanna Story (Leicester) The Reception of Classics in Munich Clm 14641

Justin Stover (Oxford) Victorinus, Isidore and a Bamberg Miscellany

Paulina Taraskin (London) Reading Horace: British Library Harley 2724

Renan Baker (Oxford) Sedulius Scottus and the exempla of Roman imperial biographies

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch in the Senior Combination Room

14:00 – 16:00 Collecting Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages

Chair : Teresa Webber (Cambridge)

Giorgia Vocino (Cambridge) Miscellanies For and From the Classroom: some Italian Examples (9th-11th centuries)

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz (Leeds) The Art of History-Making in Eighth-Century Francia: the Case of Historia Daretis Frigii de origine Francorum

Claire Burridge (Cambridge) Early Medieval Medical Miscellanies: an Exploration of Three Manuscripts

Anna Dorofeeva (Frankfurt) Strategies for Knowledge Organisation in Early Medieval Latin Glossary Miscellanies: the Example of Munich, Bayerische

Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14388

16:00 – 16:30 Coffee & Tea in the Senior Combination Room

16:30 – 17:30 Round table

Attendance at the workshop is free of charge, but registration is required. Depending on the number of attendants we may need to ask for a small contribution to the cost of refreshments.

For further details and to register, please contact Giorgia Vocino (gv275@cam.ac.uk)

CollectingKnowledge_Workshop_27.02.2016