My apologies. I have just discovered that no emails are being sent from the site. I appreciate all those who took time to comment. I was unaware of this. I am trying to debug the issue.
Month: July 2025
From my diary
How the days fleet past! Today vanished, waiting around for an engineer to come and upgrade my broadband. Then a trip to take a couple of things to a sick lady, and then waiting for a plumber who never appeared. Of course it is summer, and it seems a waste to be indoors sat in front of a screen.
Last month I had to stop doing everything in order to try to buy a house. In the end I withdrew, after finding that the house needed much more work doing than I had thought. Curiously the agent seemed quite uninterested in my offer to buy, at full price, or my decision not to. I infer that the “sale” was bogus, designed merely to obtain a market valuation. Oh well.
Tis’ the season to be travelling abroad, like Irish monks. Not that I will be going overseas, but I do need to get away, as we all do. I must book something or it just will not happen.
However today I have managed to return to working on Folcard’s “Life of St Botolph,” and I am going through the Latin and English and creating a combined version with notes and apparatus. I’ve started work on chapter 5 today, out of 11. I have a draft translation of the whole thing. But it needs revising against the new critical text.
I am slightly uncomfortably aware that I have been working on Botolph for two years now. That’s ridiculously slow. But thus does life pass.
Commentaries by Oecumenius now online in English
An interesting email from John Litteral:
I just wanted to let you know that I have started translating the Bible commentaries by Oecumenius. So far I have translated James, 1-2 Peter, and I am starting on the epistles of John now. I plan to do them all, Acts-Jude, and perhaps Revelation, but since that has been translated into English multiple times I may not do Revelation.
I have already published James and 1-2 Peter, and I have put them on Archive for free.
Oecumenius has been my favorite Bible commentator for a long time, so I am excited to be the first to translate his commentaries on the Catholic Epistles and God willing to do Acts and Paul’s epistles.
- Here’s 1-2 Peter commentaries on Archive.org: https://archive.org/
details/1-2-pet-oecumenius - Here’s the James commentary: https://archive.
org/details/oecumeniusarchive
The translations have been made from the Patrologia Graeca text.
Excellent news! Let us hope that the author does still more of the commentaries!
Translating the mega-sentence…. how?
The first sentence of the “Life” of St Botolph reads as follows:
Omnipotentis Dei benignitas, compatiens errori humani generis, quod ab antiquo serpente caelitus concessa denudatum gloria, ignorantiae damnatur tenebris; divitias misericordiae suae in eius restauratione exhibere voluit, ut ad gloriam lucis de qua caecum aberraverat, rediret per lumen quod ei ineffabili gratia administravit.
I.e.
The benevolence of almighty God – compassionate towards the error of the human race, which, having been stripped by the ancient serpent of the glory granted to it by heaven, is condemned to the darkness of ignorance – wished to display the riches of His mercy in the restoration of it, so that (the human race) might return to the glory of the light from which it had blindly strayed, through the Light which He bestowed upon it, by His ineffable grace.
I’ve been staring at that, and wondering how to turn that into English without departing too far from the original.
Suggestions anyone?
The Society of St Botolph
Few will be aware that there is actually a society devoted to the study of St Botolph, and the churches dedicated to him. But there is.
The Society of St. Botolph (https://www.botolph.info/) is an association which is free to join. It’s purposes are:
The primary object of the Society is to remember, celebrate and raise the profile of Botolph, Britain’s most important forgotten Saint.
The secondary object is to provide communication, fellowship and a sense of ‘family’ between our relatively small cluster of seventy Botolph’s churches.
It has a regular newsletter, the Botolphian, full of material about Botolph, and the churches that bear his name. Far from being purely superficial, this also contains some serious scholarly research. For instance the April 2022 issue contains a very careful analysis of the sources to determine whether the relics of St Botolph spent a period at Burgh, or at Grundisburgh.
Thankfully the website is archived at Archive.org.
The secretary is D. S. Pepper, who took over from the founder and has run things enthusiastically for the last 12 years. Highly recommended.
Capgrave is not the author of the “Nova Legenda Anglie”
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Anybody who works with the texts known as the “Lives” of the saints will encounter a volume called the Nova Legenda Angliae (NLA), the “New Legends of England”. First printed in 1516, it consists of a mass of abbreviated “lives” of various saints, in alphabetical order by saint name.
Very often, the author of the NLA is said to be a writer named John Capgrave. This claim is not true, and has been known to be false since 1970. The real author was a man named John of Tynemouth. Yet the false attribution persists, especially online. It seems worth a post to debunk it.
Let’s take this step by step.
In 1516 an English printer in London named Wynkyn de Worde produced a printed volume containing a collection of the lives of the saints. This edition may be found online here. The book had no title page, but the colophon says “Explicit nova legenda anglie” (“here ends the New Legends of England”), which title it has had ever since. The colophon gives no author, and states frankly that it reprints existing material, but “emended and corrected”. It is best known in a 2 volume “reprint” by Horstmann in 1901, which unfortunately also interleaved material from elsewhere between the “lives.”
From the 16th century onwards, this Nova Legenda Anglie (NLA) was attributed to the prolific 15th century author John Capgrave (1393-1464).
But already in 1970 Peter J. Lucas demonstrated concisely and conclusively that Capgrave could not have any connection to the work. Unfortunately his article in The Library (5th series, vol. 25, pp.1-10: “John Capgrave and the ‘Nova legenda Anglie’: a survey”) is not easily accessed online.
The actual author of the material in the NLA is John, Vicar of Tynemouth, who flourished around 1366.[1] He composed a “Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae”, composed of abbreviated lives of the saints. In this work, the “lives” appeared in calendar order, the order of the anniversaries of their date of death or commemoration. This is the same order as we find in the Acta Sanctorum, and for the same reason: liturgical use.
A single manuscript of this work survives, containing 157 “lives.” This is MS British Library Cotton Tiberius E.1, of the 14th century, from St Albans, which was damaged badly in the fire of 1731 and is today in two volumes, (E.1/1, and E.1/2).
At some unknown point the contents of the work were rearranged by some unknown person into alphabetical order, into the order of the names of the saints. This makes it less useful for liturgical purposes, but more useful as a reference volume Three manuscripts of the alphabetical order have survived, containing 148, 151, and 153 lives respectively, and others may have existed. None of these copies indicate any connection to Capgrave.
The NLA is also in alphabetical order. It contains 168 lives. Most early printed books were made by taking some manuscript – usually a late manuscript – and printing it. Most likely this is the source for the NLA: a manuscript of the alphabetical order of John of Tynemouth’s Sanctilogium. Unfortunately the manuscript has not survived.
The NLA also contains a prologue and a colophon. But this prologue cannot be by Capgrave. It refers to the book as “newly printed”; and it also refers to the Fasciculus temporum of Werner Rolevinck, published 1474. Capgrave died in 1464, before printing arrived in England, or the publication of Rolevinck. Yet the writer of the prologue and colophon is claims that the text is his own work, even though he accepts that he makes use of earlier, widely available (“apud plures”) material. In the absence of any other indication, this suggests that the writer was a contemporary of De Worde, perhaps a hack employed by him.
So how did all of this material get attributed to John Capgrave? The answer seems to be the obscurity of John of Tynemouth, the multiple names used for him in the manuscripts of his various works, and simply confusion by 16th century bibliographers – John Leland and John Bale – between two authors both called “John.” Dr Lucas goes through this material concisely but conclusively.
I imagine that the Nova Legenda Angliae will continue to cause confusion. But this is what it is; an early printed edition, from a now lost manuscript, of a work by John of Tynemouth.
- [1]Henry of Kirkstede, in his “Catalogus scriptorum Ecclesiae”, formerly attributed to “Bostonus Buriensis” – See Horstmann, vol. 1, p.xxxiv↩
Cheap hand-held multi-spectral imaging for manuscripts?
A very exciting post yesterday on LinkedIn (but visible even if you don’t have an account) from Leonardo Costantini:
Yesterday marked the beginning of a new phase of Digital Humanities applied to manuscript studies.
Imagine a hyperspectral imaging system that weighs 500 grams and gives you instantaneous results, making the post-processing of the images easy and accessible. Its name is ChromaMapper. It’s being developed by PyrOptik Instruments Limited and it will be a gamechanger!
Designed by Dr Mary Stuart, Lecturer at the University of Derby, with the collaboration of Matt Davies and Elizabeth Allen from PyrOptik Instruments Limited, we tested their prototype on the manuscript fragments at the Special Collections of the University of Bristol. Our thanks to Emma Howgill for the kind collaboration.
It has been a mind-blowing experience, and it was so exciting to see the results seconds after the digitisation.
There are no further details, except that the hope is that it should be relatively cheap. The PyrOptik website is here.
This would revolutionise manuscript studies. There must be acres of unsuspected palimpsests out there, reused parchment with an unsuspected lower text.
Manuscripts of the “Life” of St Botolph (BHL 1428)
The 11th century “Life” of St Botolph by Folcard of St Bertin, which is BHL 1428, has reached us in the following medieval manuscripts: (The sigla or abbreviations are by me).
- J = Cambridge, St Johns College, H.6 (olim M. R. James 209), ff.171r-182v. 12th century. Includes prologue and translatio.
- H = London, British Library Harley 3097. ff.61v-64v. 1075-1125 AD. Includes prologue, translatio, and extra vita in between.
- T = BL Cotton Tiberius D. iii, ff.223v-225v. 13th century. Badly damaged so only selected readings available. Includes prologue.
- P = Paris BNF lat. 13092, ff.110r-113v. s. XII. (nearly unreadable microfilm.) P omits “ut…monastica”. Is followed by C and L. Also has liturgical prayers.
- G = London, Grays Inn 3, ff.136r-137. Note use of thorn, ae ligature in Anglosaxon names, probably “corrections”. Gloss present. CPL omission present. No prologus or translatio.
- C = Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Parker 161, ff.61v-63v. ca. 1200. [Prefixed with 8 capitula, unlike the other mss]. Often slightly different, and has three omissions.
There are three editions:
- Ach. = Luc d’Achery, & Jean Mabillon, Acta sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, vol. 3: Saeculum III: quod est ab anno Christi DCC ad DCCC, Paris (1672), pp. 3-7. – This is based on P plus emendations. No prologue or translatio.
- AASS = Acta Sanctorum, Jun. vol. 3, 402 (1701), pp.398-406. – A copy of Ach. plus emended from R and K. No prologue, and only part of the translatio from the NLA.
- Har. = T. D. Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue of Materials Relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, Part 1, London (1862) pp.373-4. This is just the prologus.
These other witnesses are a somewhat different version of the text:
- L = Lincoln Cathedral Library 7. ff.82r-83r. 1151-1200 AD. (different recension)
- R = Vienna OSB SN12814 (olim Rooklooster), ff.960r-961r. 1451-1487 AD. (different recension)
- K = an unidentified Koln/Cologne manuscript used for the AASS, but clearly very like R.
- NLA = Nova Legenda Anglie, Horstmann edition. This is an abbreviated version, also found in other MSS.
- SB = Schleswig Breviarium. This refers to Scotland, so must descend from a manuscript of the family of R.
I have compared all of these, and, just for fun, I have worked out the following stemma. The earliest manuscripts are at the top.
So how did I get this? From 5 simple features of the text that jump out at you when you compare the text.
- Is the prologue present?
- Is the translatio present?
- There is an obvious gloss in chapter 11, and this is only found in later manuscripts.
- There is a common omission, found in manuscripts C, P and L.
- Chapters 1-3 are omitted in some manuscripts.
Another feature of the text, not shown above, is whether there is a reference to “Scotis”, “the scots”, i.e. Scotland. This appears in the AASS, and also in R, but nowhere else. But it does appear in the abbreviated and rewritten version of the story that appears in the Sleswig Breviary, which must therefore derive from a manuscript in this late part of the stemma.
The NLA is an epitome, so not very related to the full text. But the presence of an abbreviated translatio tells us where it fits in the tree of transmission.
I also compared how often various witnesses disagreed.
- How often do J and H differ? Only in 5 places, 4 of which are obvious scribal errors.
- How often do JH and G differ? Only in 3 places, 2 of which are anglosaxon names.
- How often do J and P differ? 16 times.
- How often does T disagree with H and H? One obvious scribal error in T, and the gloss is present in T. It does not have the unique readings of H. So… it is derived from J.
and so on.
The introduction of the gloss into otherwise unrelated branches of the tradition must indicate some kind of cross-contamination.
Folcard wrote a biography, with prologue and translatio. This was fed into the liturgical sausage-making machine, ending up as a set of lectiones (readings) for the sanctoral office, the church service read to celebrate the saint on his feast day. So the loss of literary elements, and the presence of liturgical elements will always suggest modification of the text.
J is the prince among these manuscripts because it alone contains the prologue and the translatio. The liturgically useless translatio is still found in the NLA which must therefore derive from J via an abbreviator. H and T are also relatively pure as containing the liturgically useless prologue. Next to go is chapter 1, also liturgically useless. Then the material about Botolph’s brother Adolph, chapters 1-3, is omitted for the same reason, leaving ch 4 as the start. It all makes perfect sense, as the text is transformed into something that can appear in a Sanctilogium, a medieval service book.
This is the second time that I have worked on a Latin text to create a critical text. I have found in both cases that the process of manual comparison gives you something that machine comparison does not. It gives you a feel for the text, and it gives you a feel for the witnesses and the kind of text that they bear. The text starts to become real and alive under your hand. You get a feel for certain witnesses. “Oh yes, it’s gone off on its own again.” After a while certain things just jump out at you. The longer you work on it, the more this happens. The extended period of time that it takes to produce a modern edition is not a vice; it is what the editor needs to do in order to become truly familiar with his text. I really do not see how this process will ever be possible to avoid, or can ever arise purely from machine comparison. Which is food for thought.