I’ve spent the last couple of days collating manually the 1669 editio princeps d’Achery/Mabillon edition of the “Life” of St Botolph (BHL 1428) with manuscripts, first Cambridge Corpus Christi College, Parker 161; and then British Library Harley 3097. Today I also compared my collation, at the points where differences were visible, with a vile microfilm scan of the “Codex Uticense” – i.e. the St Evroul manuscript – from the Bibliothèque Nationale Français, which was supposedly the basis for the d’Achery edition.
The results are interesting, but all three are fairly close together.
So it’s time to see what else is out there. There’s a manuscript at St Johns College, Cambridge, MS 209. I’ve just written to them, enquiring about getting photos. The other manuscript is at Gray’s Inn in London. Unfortunately I don’t have the folio numbers for this; only the starting number.
Going back to the St Evroul/Uticense/BNF manuscript, I find extracts from the medieval Office of St Botulph interleaved between the chapters. Unfortunately the microfilm is so bad, the resolution so low, and the text so tiny, that it cannot really be read. This is a pity, as it would have been nice to include these and translate them.
Curiously there is some Scandinavian material with Botulf material, and one article contains chunks of this material. The article is remarkably diffuse, unfortunately. More excitingly there is a fragment of the “Life” from a book binding somewhere. I may have to write to the site to see this, tho. It’s a parchment strip, cut from a page in order to bind a book.
Lots still to do.