The extant corpus of Anglo-Saxon texts contains hundreds of Old English charms. Except for about a dozen “metrical charms” included in Dobbie’s sixth volume of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, most scholars know little about the charms. With a few notable exceptions, the charms have been studied very little, though they have frequently found inclusion in Old English readers. For the Anglo-Saxons, however, these charms could represent the difference between sickness and health, between life and death. They were important to the Anglo-Saxons and, when we examine the manuscript evidence, we also find that they were probably of great importance to King Alfred the Great. One of the most important of the extant charm texts, Bald’s Leechbook, was compiled during the Alfredian Renaissance, and very possibly at the request of Alfred himself.
The Old English charms are scattered around about two dozen manuscripts, but most of these manuscripts are texts dedicated to some other subject, and the charms are found in the margins or the flyleaves. Fewer than half-a-dozen texts dedicated solely to charms still exist today, and these texts are found in only two manuscripts. The most important charm text is found in British Library, Royal 12 D.xvii, and is commonly referred to as “Bald’s Leechbook.” Royal 12 D.xvii contains three separate texts, of which Bald’s Leechbook usually refers to the first two texts, Leechbook I and Leechbook II. Leechbook III, while similar in structure and format to the first two books, is actually of a different origin than Bald’s Leechbook (Wright 14).
Video: Drawing as an Art Form in Medieval Manuscripts
Lecture by Jonathan Alexander, New York University
Given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
June 7, 2009
Jonathan Alexander, the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, presents a talk about the techniques, aesthetics, and role of graphic images—drawings, maps, diagrams, and masterful manuscript decorations—in the creative and intellectual life of the Middle Ages.
BL MS Harley 7333: The “Publication” of Chaucer in the Rural Areas
Shonk, Timothy A.
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 15 (1998)
Abstract
In the long history of the study of manuscripts containing works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Harley 7333 has been treated as something of a poor cousin. In spite of the increasing attention to manuscript studies in the past two decades and the resultant flood of publications, Harley has received very little attention. Since the initial study of the Chaucer manuscripts by Manly and Rickert in 1940, Harley 7333 has not been investigated at length in any published study of which I am aware. And there is some reason for this. While Harley 7333 is unique in the corpus of Chaucer manuscripts in some ways–the largest in size of the Chaucer manuscripts (approximately 450 mm./17″ tall and some 330 mm./13″ wide), the largest in terms of its collected holdings, and the only manuscript in which The Canterbury Tales makes up less than half the book1–the text is so corrupt that it carries no authority for literary scholars. The Parson’s Tale, moreover, breaks off incomplete, as do other Chaucer pieces, such as The Parliament of Fowls, which lacks its final stanza, and Anelida and Arcite, which lacks its final 120+ lines.
The manuscript, furthermore, neither presents itself as a sumptuous manuscript, like the famous Ellesmere, nor holds a place of importance in the date of its composition, like the equally famous Hengwrt manuscript. Harley 7333 dates from about 1460. But in my view the Harley manuscript holds great interest for those who study medieval bookmaking. It represents one of a relative few larger collections of secular literature produced in the rural regions–Harley in Leicester, some 100 miles from London. The manuscript also holds promise for Chaucer scholars, offering valuable clues about the manner in which Chaucer manuscripts were being produced, “published,” if you will, outside of London.
The Virgin Above the Writing in the First Vita of Douce 114
Clouse, Rebecca
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 11 (1994)
Abstract
Elizabeth of Spalbeek (d. 1316) has not attracted much critical attention among Anglo-American scholars. Her religious observances are neither as repulsive to modern sensibilities as Angela of Foligno’s, nor as fantastic as those of Christina Mirabilis, Elizabeth’s textual neighbor in the Middle English manuscript Oxford Bodley Douce 114. Caroline Walker Bynum and Valerie Lagorio have both referred to Elizabeth in passing, but for both scholars, Elizabeth is one of a group (albeit very different groups), noteworthy in so far as she provides additional exemplary evidence of medieval women who participated in identifiable trends of mystical practice. Bynum also gives some small attention to Philip of Clairvaux as Elizabeth of Spalbeek’s Latin biographer. For the most part, Bynum quotes or paraphrases Philip’s text (probably written in 1267), referring, as I will, to the only published version, “Vita Elizabeth sanctimonialis in Erkenrode, Ordinis Cisterciensis, Leodiensis dioecesis,” from the Bollandists (1886). In her footnotes, however, Bynum implies something about Philip’s attitude toward his subject: “Philip of Clairvaux calls Elizabeth of Spalbeek’s ecstasies imbecillitas.” The context of this comment and of its twin in an earlier footnote makes it clear that, on the basis of this word imbecillitas, Bynum thinks Philip considered Elizabeth “insane.” That other biographers shared this opinion about their subjects provides the basis for Bynum’s remark that “in the frenzy of trance or ecstasy, pious women sometimes mutilated themselves with knives, as Mary of Oignies did, or, like Beatrice of Nazareth and Elizabeth of Spalbeek, drove themselves to what they and their companions saw as ‘insanity’.
Unlike Psalters, Tropers were not commonly furnished with images of King David. This was because the Tropers’ idiosyncratic texts drew from widely varied sources and could claim no such illustrious author. One manuscript, however, Paris B.N. fonds latin MS.9448, from the monastery of Prüm in western Germany, was illustrated with a striking double-image of King David during the Ottonian period, ca. 990-1001 (p. 48). As part of the miniature originally accompanying the third mass of Christmas, folio 4 represents King David as rex in the upper register and as author of the psalms, i.e., within his liturgical venue as sacerdos, in the lower register. Comparable to the Werden Psalter frontispiece, which has a similar two-tier composition, the Prüm scene is justified in a Troper by specific references to King David in the Introit tropes.
The Florence manuscript was produced in Paris during the mid-thirteenth century by a lay workshop now known as the Johannes Grusch atelier, a named coined by Robert Branner. This manuscript contains the largest extant collection of music in the “Notre Dame” style. Apart from Branner’s work, the Parisian origin of this manuscript has been determined in several ways: (1) It includes a copy of what a 13th-century theorist, commonly known as Anonymous IV, described as the magnus liber organi used at the cathedral of Paris; (2) The chants upon which the polyphonic compositions of the magnus liber organi are built are Parisian variants; (3) Though several manuscripts containing this music are extant, this is the only one in which the polyphony conforms without exception to the edicts of the Bishops of Paris governing polyphonic performance; (4) Furthermore, the correspondence between details of its liturgical cycles of organa and the known activities of the singers of the cathedral is often so strong that there can be little doubt that this manuscript represents a copy of the cathedral’s magnus liber organi and not another church’s within the Parisian diocese.
The Commemoration of Jeanne d’Evreux’s Coronation in the Ordo ad Consecrandum at the University of Illinois
Hedeman, Anne D.
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 7 (1990)
Abstract
In the Middle Ages the French royal coronation was an important ritual which transformed the royal person in significant ways. The drama and importance of this public ceremony were clearly expressed in treatises about the coronation, and the ceremony itself was commemorated in numerous copies of the ordines, most frequently in pontificals. Despite the importance of visual symbols to the French ceremony, detailed pictorial representations of the coronation are rare, perhaps because independent coronation books were made after the ceremony for a small, private audience. Only three or four illustrated French coronation books survive from before 1400. One of the earliest of these is a French manuscript from the early fourteenth century in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The interaction of pictures and text in this ordo restructures history in order to shape a particular memory for the manuscript’s patron.
Ascension Sundays in Tropers: The Innovative Scenes in the Prüm and Canterbury Tropers
and Their Relationship to the Accompanying Texts
Marquardt-Cherry, Janet
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 6 (1989)
Abstract
Tropes are additional lines of text and music interpolated within liturgical prayers. Tropers are manuscripts containing tropes and other variable material such as Sequence hymns. The two tropers I will discuss here also have painted illustrations for major feast days. They belong to a group of only four extant illustrated tropers and represent two completely different traditions of troper production. The earlier, German manuscript is dated ca. 1000 and located by a contemporary colophon at Prüm monastery at the western border of Germany. It is cataloged as MS. 9448 at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It was an “in-house” product designed to record the Prüm monks’ celebration of the Mass throughout the Church calendar year. The Ascension scene from the temporale in the Prüm Troper is just one example of that community’s adaptation of recent pictorial traditions to fit a singular copying of the Sequence hymn from, like most of the material in the manuscript, St. Gall. The abbot, or whoever was in charge of the design of this manuscript, combined literary references with concepts of Christ’s Ascension in order to obtain a rare emphatic “leaping” version of the independent or Western iconographic type.
The Palaeography of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 19
By Francisco Jose Alvarez Lopez
The Proceedings of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies Postgraduate Conference (2005)
Introduction: From the time of King Alfred to the death of Bishop Oswald in 992, England lived through one of the most important stages in the history of religion. The revival of the Benedictine tradition brought with it a renewed interest in arts, and even economic stability to the realm. The principal figures of this period were the three monks who ruled the three most important sees of the time: Canterbury, Winchester and Worcester. Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald, with the valuable support of King Edgar, changed the situation from ‘a complete collapse of monasticism’ into a process of foundation and reformation of ‘substantial numbers of monasteries’ throughout the country.
The synod at Winchester in c. 973 approved the Regularis Concordia as the code which would establish a uniform observance for all monks and nuns throughout the country. However, although this text was important, its purpose was to be an English complement to the key Benedictine text, the Regula Sancti Benedicti.
The Rule was translated into Old English, possibly by Æthelwold, and several copies distributed throughout the Benedictine houses of England. Today only nine of copies containing the vernacular text survive. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 197 is the oldest of them and it has the same disposition as all the others, with the exception of Durham Cathedral Library, B.IV, 24, where the whole vernacular text follows the Latin instead of doing so chapter by chapter.
John Trevisa and the English and Continental Traditions of De proprietatibus rerum
Lidaka, Juris G.
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 5 (1988)
Abstract
The first two Volumes of Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ encyclopedia used 2 Latin texts as controls for editing the Middle English text–MS Bodley 749 and the Vatican copy of a text printed in 1485 by Georg Husner of Strasbourg. The textual commentary uses some 18 Latin MSS to consider what Latin Trevisa may have actually had before him.1 Just how much, though, has been studied? The Latin text was not edited, but several studies of different portions were made: M. C. Seymour, the general editor, collated the first 5 folios of each book; Ralph Hanna studied Book V; Susan Clinton’s work on Book X is separately available as her doctoral thesis, and Traugott Lawler did Book XI. The average folio of the English MSS provides for just under six pages in the printed text, so five folios means just under thirty pages. There are 1,396 pages; taking away Books V, X, and XI and the first thirty pages of each other Book leaves 715 pages not included in the survey of Latin MSS for the textual commentary. That accounts for just under half the text, then, but favors the first Volume: the three Books studied are all there, it contains thirteen Books to the second’s six, and the unsurveyed material in the second Volume is nearly three quarters of all unsurveyed material.
