Richard H. Rouse

Authentic witnesses : approaches to medieval texts and manuscripts

A collection of 13 articles concerned with the study of medieval Latin manuscripts, whose findings are based on philology, palaeography and codicology, rather than on any theoretical grounds.

Bostonus Buriensis and the Author of the Catalogus Scriptorum Ecclesiae

SINCE the middle of the sixteenth century Bostonus Buriensis or John Boston of Bury has been known to scholars as the compiler of the Catalogus scriptorum ecclesiae. He is said to have been a monk of Bury St Edmunds who flourished around 1410 and traveled about England compiling a great union catalogue of books. The catalogue survives in a late seventeenth-century transcript made by Thomas Tanner which is now Cambridge University Library MS Additional 3470.2 It is a large and complex piece of work, beginning with a preface concerning the genuine and apocryphal books of the Bible and the patristic writers accepted by the Church, followed by a numbered list of 195 mediaeval English libraries. The major portion of the work is an alphabetical list of 674 authors in which each author, with some exceptions, is followed by a short biographical note and a list of his writings, and each work is, with many exceptions and variations, followed by its incipit and explicit and by the numbers of up to nine libraries in which the work could be found. It concludes with a list of commentators on

A Fifteenth-Century List of the Books of Edmund Norton

MS 114 of the Mullen Library in the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., contains on fol. ii a hitherto unnoticed list of books which belonged in the fifteenth century to a Master Edmund Norton.1 In the light of the date and the contents of the list, this Edmund Norton can probably be identified with the person of that name who was a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1467. Possibly he was a Yorkshireman, since his ordination to major orders, including the priesthood, in 1467, is found registered in a York episcopal register, together with the notice of his Balliol fellowship.2 Although the register makes no mention of a cure of souls at the time of Nortons ordination, it would appear from the books in the list that he may have held a cura animarum at some later date. Nothing more is known about him.

Gerald of Wales and the Florilegium Angelicum

THE career of Gerald of Wales as student, teacher, royal chaplain, prelate, historian, polemicist and inveterate storyteller spanned some fifty-five years from 1168 to 1223.1 During that time he wrote at least ten major works, among them four books on the geography and history of Wales and Ireland, a manual for princes, a substantial collection of letters, two polemical treatises, and an autobiography. Together these have earned him a significant place in medieval literary history, and it is not without reason that one encounters him in most discussions of twelfth-century thought. In spite of this, little attention has been paid to identifying the sources on which Gerald drew, or to preparing adequate editions of his writings. Geralds familiarity with both the common as well as the rarer classical Latin authors is frequently remarked upon. Manitius and De Ghellinck indicate that he quotes the works of Apuleius, Cicero, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, the younger Pliny, Seneca, and Sidonius among others. Geralds abundant quotations from classical Latin sources have caused scholars to assume that he possessed a broad, profound, and direct knowledge of Latin classical authors from Plautus to Sidonius.2 Only in recent years have modern scholars begun to recognize the degree to which medieval writers drew on intermediate sources, in particular

Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America

George Peddy Cuttino, distinguished scholar of diplomatic and diplomacy, died in Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 October 1991 in his seventy-eighth year. He was born in Newman, Georgia, on 9 March 1914. When Cuttino entered Swarthmore College in 1931, he assumed that he was heading towards a career as a diplomat, but Mary Albertsons seminar soon turned his thoughts to medieval history. After graduating with highest honors in 1935, he received an M.A. from the University of Iowa the following year. He then proceeded on to Oxford, the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and for the next two years he studied at Oriel College. Maurice Powicke, already the Regius Professor, was his official tutor, but increasingly he sought guidance and inspiration from Vivian Galbraith, then a Reader in Diplomatic and the scholar whom Cuttino regarded as having had the greatest formative influence on his own development. He received his D.Phil. in 1938, after which he spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Londons Institute of Historical Research.

The Abbey of the Trésor de Notre-Dame: Sixteen Thirteenth-Century Charters (UCLA Library Special Collections, Rouse DOC/XIII/FRA/8)

Medieval records of women’s abbeys appear seldom in print, in comparison with those of their male counterparts. The description and transcription here of sixteen thirteenth-century charters, from a house of Cistercian women, the Tresor de Notre Dame in Upper Normandy, is one small step toward righting the balance.

Santa Barbara’s Thirteenth-Century Paris Bible: A Second Look

Abstract The Santa Barbara Bible (University of California, Santa Barbara, University Library MS BS 75 1250) was first introduced to scholarship in 1971 by Santa Barbara professor Larry Ayres. In the years since that pioneering study, art historians have advanced our knowledge of the place and date of the Bible’s production. Adding to that an understanding of commercial manuscript production in thirteenth-century Paris, the present article comes as close to clarifying the creation of this lovely book as current evidence allows.

Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America: Claudio Leonardi

Claudio Leonardi, a central figure in the international community of medievalists, died in Florence on 21 May 2010.

Eloi’s Books and Their Bookcase

Audoin’s seventh-century Life of St. Eloi tells us a great deal about the place of books and reading in Merovingian monastic spirituality. The importance of reading to Eloi’s own personal style of asceticism can scarcely be overemphasized, and his providing of books to his monastic foundations is characteristic. His friend and biographer Audoin affords us an intimate glimpse into the saint’s bedroom-study, where he spent his nights alternately praying and reading, consulting the books on the revolving bookcase built perhaps by his hands.

Prudence, Mother of Virtues: The Chapelet des vertus and Christine de Pizan

The fourteenth-century treatise called the Chapelet des vertus survives in fourteen manuscripts and sixteen printed editions, including seven incunables. Descended from an earlier French treatise, the Fleurs de toutes vertus, which in turn was descended from a still earlier Italian treatise, the Fiore di virtu, the derivative Chapelet was the form in which later medieval France knew this material. A simple collection of philosophical, patristic, and biblical quotations arranged topically by the individual virtues and vices, it circulated among members of the royal family and important courtiers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Chapelet des vertus achieved its greatest impact, however, through its use by the French poet and essayist Christine de Pizan in the composition of her Epistre Othea. She was perhaps drawn to it by the Chapelet’s emphasis on prudence, a favorite theme of Christine’s. Her clever manipulation of this resource reveals an aspect of Christine’s scholarly methods previously u...