“Corpus Christi College MS 139”
A Twelfth-Century Historical Miscellany
Invitation Letter for 28 September 1990
The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
29 September 1990
In the Series of Seminars (and Workshops) on the Evidence of Manuscripts
The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Invitation Letter (with no RSVP form or slip) in pdf
The previous seminar in the series considered
Sixteenth-Century Interventions in Anglo-Saxon and Related Manuscripts
Parker Library, 22 April 1990
[First published on 3 October 2016, with an update to add the diagram of sewing patterns]
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The Subject
The Invitation asks for collective help in guiding the course of the research work on one of the manuscripts selected for the Research Project proposal. It invites the selected specialists
to join us for a workshop consultation concerning our MS 139, a twelfth-century composite manuscript which includes the unique medieval copy of the Historia Regum attributed to Symeon of Durham. It also has an erased ex-libris inscription of the Cistercian abbey of Sawley, although it may not have been made there.
At present it is undergoing conservation and research while disbound. This has provided a unique opportunity for examining and comparing the different sections of the manuscript, some of which originated separately. Before it will be rebound in the autumn, we wish to discuss the evidence thus revealed with a team of specialists in various disciplines. For example, we would like to consider how the evidence modifies the existing historiography of this important manuscript. The script and decoration may help to determine the date and place of origin of the manuscript and its components more satisfactorily. The character of the texts included in the manuscript might have further implications worth exploring.
We would very much value your presence in these discussions. We hope that your expert knowledge might help provide some fresh evaluations of the evidence. In this way we hope to ensure that the research on the manuscript will be of the maximum benefit for future scholarship.
Ruins of the Chapel of Salley / Sawley Abbey, Lancashire. Photograph by Chris Heaton via Wikipedia Commons.
The Logistics
The time-frame for “the consultation over the disbound manuscript” was planned to begin at 11 a.m. and “to work until about 4:40 p.m. As for logistics:
Although we are unable to reimburse fares, we will provide a buffet lunch. We might also, depending upon availability, be able to supply overnight accommodation in College free of charge on the 27th or 28th, if you require it.
Some participants chose to stay in College for one night or the other.
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Participants
Invitations were, in the first instance, sent to:
Bernard Meehan, Patrick McGurk, Christopher Brooke, Christopher Norton, Anne Lawrence, Derek Baker, Tessa Webber, Ian Doyle, Alan Piper, Martin Brett, David Rollason, Simon Keynes, Julia Crick
Most of them attended. The Research Group Archives contain correspondence relating to the preparations and the follow-up of the “consultation workshop”.
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Continuing our series of interviews and reports, we explore the processes by which Mildred Budny’s 2-volume Insular, Angl0-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue (“The Catalogue” or “The Illustrated Catalogue”) was designed, laid out, and typeset to camera-ready copy for its publication as a set of 2 volumes of “Text” and “Plates”.
A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues Reused for Euthymius
December 24, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition, Uncategorized
A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues
Reused for Binding
A Copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus’s On the Psalms
Budny Handlist 3
In our blog on Manuscript Studies (see its Contents List), Mildred Budny (see Her Page) continues to report the results of research for her Illustrated Handlist.
Here, we focus upon a leaf plucked from its 12th-century manuscript and pressed into service, with trimmed edges and mitered folds, as the vellum covering for a binding for a different text of small format. Both texts, primary and secondary in the life of the leaf, concern religious subjects, but they emanate from authors of different dates, locations, and languages in the Latin West and the Orthodox East respectively. The primary text represents a remnant of a text and an author familiar in some other blogposts, which consider the Dialogues, the Sermons or Homilies, and other texts by Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 to 694 CE).
Handlist 3, Recto
Handlist 3, Verso
Part of Gregory’s Dialogues, Book III, Chapter 7
(on Andreas, Bishop of Fondi/Fundi):
Sections 2 (Hic namque uenerabilis uir) –
8 (uel quae in conuentu)
Present measurements:
Circa 357 × 237 mm
< written area circa 266 × 133 mm >
Single column of 28 lines
in revived Caroline minuscule
without embellishments
Germany, circa 1175
Reused for some time as the vellum cover for the binding of a copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus‘s Commentary on the Psalms
in Greek or in Latin translation?
(now lost or preserved elsewhere in a location unknown)
For this secondary use, the remnants of a set of titles on the outside of the spine of the cover (the original verso of the reused leaf) remain in place, albeit abraded and fragmented, as both a pasted, inscribed paper label (orientated along the ‘horizontal’ across the spine) and an ink inscription on the reused leaf itself in Capitals (‘vertical’, with the tops of those letters turned toward the ‘front cover’). Another, smaller and fragmentary pasted label with a broad rectangular border stands near the bottom of the broad spine of the cover and partly overlies the ‘vertical’ spine inscription.
Acquired, probably by purchase (according to the Owner’s recollections), in France in the past 15 years or so, but before 2007 when I first saw and began to photograph the leaf. This item and others in the Illustrated Handlist acquired in France at various times and by various means (purchase, gift, or exchange), came from a single source in the Département of Saône-et-Loire, from about 1999 onward. Because the leaf does not carry indications of its original place and time of production, apart from its materials, layout, design, script, orthography, and punctuation, those unknowns must depend upon evaluations of the style of the script, lacking any forms of embellishment, such as decorated initials, which might have provided possibly more closely datable symptoms than the letters “alone”.
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Tags: 'Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts', Binding History, Bishop Andrew of Fundi, Budny's Illustrated Catalogue, Ege Manuscript 41, Euthymius Zigabenos, Fondi, Gregory the Great, Gregory's Dialogues, manuscript fragments, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Manuscript studies, Psalter Commentary, Saki, Temple of Apollo
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