I started with a list of manuscripts of the “Life of St Botulf” by Folcard. Some I had already in PDF form, others I could find online. For others in English libraries, I have ventured to write to the institution and ask for help. This has been very generously forthcoming.
One of the manuscripts is at Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 209, or H.6, as I gather it is now known. The college has a very nice catalogue for it online here. I wrote a few days ago asking for help. Yesterday, so very quickly, I received a very kind reply from Adam Crothers, the PhD helping out with the special collections. He enclosed a PDF of the relevant pages! The images are in a very clear high-resolution greyscale scan!
This scan was plainly professionally photographed. It is ideal to work with. It calls to you to do so, to start editing, transcribing, collating! The beautifully clear writing is almost an education in paleography itself, as you work through the text and note the abbreviations. Note the “eius” = “ei9”, four lines from the bottom. Underneath it, “ad gloriam”, abbreviated. Or “cecum” (blind), at the start of the last but one.
The manuscript is 12th century, written only a few decades after the composition of the text. It was donated to the college in modern times, but the catalogue tells me that at the top of folio 1 are the (erased) words:
liber ecclesie diui Benedicti de Ramsey
book of the church of St Benedict of Ramsey
So this book came from Ramsey Abbey, only a dozen miles from Thorney Abbey, where Folcard composed the text.
This manuscript does not just include the text of the “Life”. It also includes a copy of the dedicatory letter (“prologus”) by the author to Wakelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester after the conquest. This is not common in the manuscripts of the “Life.”
The presence of this letter is very welcome: it was undoubtedly part of the author’s manuscript, and so this suggests that the text has been less tampered with than in most manuscripts. I have already collated it, and I think that there were only two unique variants, both obviously scribal mistakes. In general it gives exactly the text which I suspect Folcard wrote.
MS H.6 then follows the “Life” with another Botulf item: a “translatio”, an account of the transfer of the bones of St. Botulf from Iken to … well, wherever they ended up. It begins with “Coenobium Thornense…”, another reference to Thorney Abbey. This “translatio” includes a reference to the “Life”, and the author uses very very similar vocabulary. I’ve spent a bit of time today transcribing this into a Word document, but I’ve only done about 20% of it.
I am very grateful to Adam and St John’s College for the chance to work with this very fine manuscript.