keyword: manuscripts
manuscripts
- Using Decorative Elements to Refine the Relationship Between Two Ælfrician Manuscripts
Issue: Leeds Medieval Studies, 1 (2021)
Items from Ælfric’s First Series of Catholic Homilies survive in thirty-four manuscripts and manuscript fragments. Because of their complex histories, and our incomplete modern knowledge of their production and dissemination, we still have only a limited understanding of the exact relationship between all copies of the First Series texts. In the past, scholarship has determined manuscript relationships based primarily on textual collation, rather than by considering physical aspects of the manuscripts themselves. This article demonstrates that attention to extra-linguistic aspects of these manuscripts in relation to decoration and mise-en-page can help to qualify our understanding of these relationships. I here look at two manuscripts containing primarily Ælfrician texts — Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 340 and 342, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 162 — and argue that these two manuscripts are not only related, but perhaps very closely so, even sharing a direct exemplar-descendent relationship. I base my argument both on the texts shared between the manuscripts and aspects of the decoration that are uniquely similar between the two.