Category: From my diary

From my diary: Cotton manuscripts at the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Bollandist fathers in Belgium have maintained a wonderful database of the medieval manuscripts containing copies of material about the saints, especially their “Lives” and this has been fed into the new Legendiers Latins website.  But the information is not comprehensive.  For instance, for St Botulf, it does not contain any mention of British Library manuscript Cotton Tiberius D. iii.

I don’t know much about the Cotton manuscripts.  As so often with major manuscript libraries, the “Cotton” collection is so called because it was assembled by an individual, whose manuscripts came into the British Library in a bunch.  In this case the donor was Sir Robert Cotton, or rather his grandson, and the circumstances may be read at Wikipedia here.

Cotton divided his manuscripts into groups, which he named after Roman emperors.  Apparently each group was in a particular book case, with the bust of the emperor on the top.  So the shelfmark tells us that this manusccript could be found in the “Tiberius” bookcase shelf D, number 3.

Unfortunately the Cotton manuscripts were all damaged in a fire in the 18th century.  Some were preserved intact; others burned to a crisp; and everything in between.  Scholars still needed to be able to consult the remains, so ingenious solutions were found such as this:

Cotton MS Tiberius E VI

The British Library has a webpage which has links to digitised copies of the manuscript catalogues.  There are two catalogues for the Cotton manuscripts, one from 1696, one from 1802.  Oddly the newer catalogue is less comprehensive.  Here is the entry for our MS:

The Smith catalogue entry is:

Entry 53 is our text, and tells us that  it contains the letter “ad Walchelmum episcopum”, i.e. the dedicatory letter to Wakelin, bishop of Winchester.  There’s no folio numbers, but Hardy’s “Descriptive catalogue of materials” tells us that it’s folios 223v-225v, and 13th century.

The truth is that looking at the Smith catalogue is an overwhelming experience for anyone interested in the history of our people.  This is a vast collection of material, all of it of the highest importance for English history.  Cotton even owned a Magna Carta!  He collected all this stuff from the ruined monasteries.  It’s one thing to read words about how important the collection was for historical purposes.  It’s quite another to read through the list of saints – all English or British – and realise that this is the raw stuff of medieval England.

This leads us to the next question – what survives of BL Cotton Tiberius D. iii?

I don’t know the answer.  I do know that back in 1901 when Horstmann issued a new edition of the Nova Legenda Anglie of Capgrave, originally printed in the 15th century by Wynkyn de Worde, he collated the “Life” of St Botulf with the Cotton manuscript.  There are variants in the footnotes!  So it must be readable to at least some extent?

I do have a readers’ card for the British Library manuscripts department.  Sadly it is no longer valid since the cyber-attack a few years ago.  The BL website informs me that I would have to get a new letter of introduction from an academic in order to get another.  Curiously I must get a fresh one every time I renewed the readers’ card (!).  Getting a new letter of introduction is awkward for an independent researcher like myself.  Indeed I don’t quite know whom I would ask.  I don’t really want the journey anyway.

I will pop an email over and see if there is another way!

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From my diary: Cambridge, St Johns College Library MS H.6

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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!

By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

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.

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Hey! Teacher! Leave them texts alone! Some critical thoughts on the text of the Life of St Botulf

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The “Life” of St Botulf by Folcard of St Bertin was first printed in 1668 by the librarian of the Maurist fathers, Luc D’Achery, whose sole source was a manuscript from “Utica” – i.e. St Evroul in Normandy, plus his imagination.  It was then printed again in 1701 as part of the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum.  As sources, the unknown editor of the AASS text had only D’Achery’s edition, and his own imagination; but also two further manuscripts – notable because the first few chapters were missing – one from Rooklooster, the other from Cologne.  The text has not been edited since.

For the last week or so, I have been comparing manually those manuscripts in my possession with the texts printed by D’Achery and the Bollandists.  As part of this, I am compiling a collation in a word document.  Going through this repeatedly is beginning to reveal the truth about the editions, and indeed about the text.

For the last couple of days, I have been collating the Lincoln Cathedral manuscript.  This, unlike the others, is also lacking the first few chapters.

The shortened Lincoln manuscript has a great number of minor changes, when compared to the near unanimity of three other manuscripts of the full text.  This leads inexorably to a conclusion: the text in the Lincoln manuscript is not just shortened at the front.  It is actually a separate recension, a separate version of the text, with its own particular readings.

One fingerprint is that the creator of the shortened text had a habit of reversing words in the text, for no obvious reason.  So the full text reads “pascua ducendo”, but our boy writes “ducendo pascua”.

The same trait appears in the Bollandist’s edition, when compared with D’Achery.  I have yet to check the Rooklooster manuscript, but I suspect that it will show the same trait.

All these little changes mess up the otherwise impressive unanimity of the witnesses of the full text.  I have decided to show them in light blue, because they really have nothing to do with the text.  These are changes, not errors.

This means that the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina needs an amendment; in addition to the full text, which is BHL 1428, there needs to be a BHL 1428b, which denotes the text where the first few chapters are missing.

As originally written, the “Life” began with a nervous-sounding letter of dedication to Wakelin, the tough new Norman bishop of Winchester, who was busy kicking the stuffing out of the cult of St Botulf there, and promoting the cult of St Swithun.  But none of the manuscripts in my hands contain this.  It was printed by Hardy a couple of centuries ago from an English manuscript that does, and I gave a translation of his text a while back.

It is no mystery why this would be omitted.  The manuscripts are divided into chunks, but without consistency.  What they often contain is “lectio i” or something like that.  These are texts being used for liturgical purposes.  A political letter from Folcard to Wakelin has no place in a liturgical compendium of Lives.

Nor is it a mystery why someone would choose to omit the opening chapters either.  These are about St Adulf, the brother of St Botulf, who doesn’t even appear until chapter 4.  It is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, that the creator of the new version felt able to mess with the text in small yet annoying ways.

The process of collation is also revealing D’Achery’s editorial changes, limited as these are.  None of them are worth retaining, I suspect.

Once I collate the Rooklooster manuscript, now in Vienna, I imagine that the changes in the Bollandist edition will also pop out.  Most likely these will all be dross, because they come from the shortened version.

To my great surprise, a PDF of the St John’s College Cambridge manuscript arrived today.  This appears to be a copy of the full text, and should therefore confirm much of what I already suppose.  Better yet, it even includes the dedicatory letter.  On the face of it, since nobody has got editorial with it, this ought to have a very pure text.  But we will see.

The lesson of today is to editors: please leave the text alone!  Transmit to us what you have.  Don’t “fix” it.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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.

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Working on MS Lincoln Cathedral Library 7

Posted on by Roger Pearse

On Monday I wrote to Lincoln Cathedral Library.  I wanted copies of three pages from their 12th century manuscript 7.  These contain a copy of the Life of St Botulph on folios 82r-83r.  The email bore speedy fruit, considering that Monday was a holiday.  On the Tuesday  Claire Arrand, the manuscript librarian, responded.  She advised me that she could take some photographs of the three pages for £15 (about $20), there and then, and that there was an admission charge of £25 ($33) if I came and did it myself in person.  I had made clear that smartphone photographs would be ideal, so long as I could read the text.  I gladly agreed, and the photographs arrived an hour or so later.  Frankly that was excellent service!

The images were marvellously clear, which was a nice change from fuzzy microfilm scans.  Here’s an excerpt from folio 82r, showing the start of the text.

There seems to be a tummy bug going around, and I have not escaped.  But yesterday and today, I took the d’Achery edition of the “Life”, which I have in Word format, and started to transcribe the photographs.  The idea is that I can do electronic comparison of the various witnesses to the text.

I must say that I have rather enjoyed it.  You feel far closer to the text once you do this.  The printed edition helps a lot with the abbreviations.  Although I have just noticed that, having opened the d’Achery word document a little while ago, to correct a typo, I got confused and started modifying that instead of my Lincoln file!  Luckily I am using Git to control both documents, and I can compare changes since the last commit and just revert.

Initially I ignored the punctuation, but as I progressed through it, I became aware that these are sense groups, intended for reading aloud, and therefore of value for the translation, a guide to how the medieval reader understood the text.  So now I shall go back and correct it again.

Interestingly the ancestor of the semi-colon is in use, the “punctus elevatus”, which looks like an upside-down semi-colon.  See for example column 1, line 6, after “fervore”:

The “full stop” appears to be a comma.  New sentences start with a capital – see “Erant” on line 8 in the first image.  I don’t know what the squiggle after “patrie sue” is!  The text is abbreviated.  The elevated “9” after words is “us”.  The “7” over “conusatione” is “er”, i.e. “conversatione”.  The next word starts with P with a squiggle, the abbreviation for “pro”.  Some very common words just get a macron, e.g. “gra” for “gratia”.

Here’s my transcription of the first column, with line breaks here in case anyone wants to compare:

Sancti Botulphi abbis. Lectio prima.
Beatus pater Botulphus divina
reservatus pietate, ut doctrina
& san­cta conversatione prodesset nativae
patriae suae, postquam Dei gratia, & divi­no
profecerat sanctae religionis fervore; disposuit
iam ad Angliam pro caritatis
studio repedare. Erant autem in eodem
monasterio quo morabatur, sorores duae
Ethelmundi regis, qui tunc australibus
praeerat anglis, quae diligebant­ praecipue

And a quick translation, since it is tedious to work with words that one does not understand:

Of Abbot Saint Botulph. First Lesson.
Blessed Father Botulph, preserved by divine piety, so that he might benefit his native country through his doctrine and holy way of life, after he had made progress by the grace of God, and by his divine fervor for holy religion, now resolved to return to England for the sake of doing good. Now in the same monastery where he was staying, there were two sisters of King Ethelmund, who then ruled over the southern English, who especially loved [Father Botulph].

How different is this from the d’Achery text? Not very, I think.  It’s quite close to the full text, and just missing chapters 1-3.  But it will be easier to see it, once I have done an electronic comparison.

Onward.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve taken the plunge and written to Lincoln Cathedral Library today, to ask if I can get photographs of the Latin text of Folcard’s “Life of St Botulf”, as contained in their manuscript 7.

Pleasingly, they have an online catalogue, which is very detailed.  From it I see the following details:

38. Sancti Botulphi abbatis. Beatus pater Botulphus diuina reseruatus pietate . . . in eodem quod construxerat monasterio xv. kal. Iulii ubi eodem interueniente multa gloriosa fiunt miracula, ad laudem et gloriam omnipotentis Dei, qui… Ff.82-83. 3 lessons. 17 June. BHL 1428 (Folcard, Vita Botulphi 4-11; AS Iun. III, pp.402-403). F.83v blank.

That’s undoubtedly our text, although the opening is different.  It must be an abbreviated version of the text, to only take up three pages – folios 82r-83r, in fact.

We have so many manuscripts online these days, that it has been a long time since I went out on the road with my camera.  I hunted out a PDF of the letter of introduction that I used to use.  I wonder if I still  have the weighted “snakes” that I used to hold down the pages?

Smartphones make such a difference tho.  I remember photographing an early edition at Norwich Cathedral Library, rather a lot of years ago, with a film camera.  When the photos came back, they all had an unexpected blue tinge from the adjacent window!

But of course they may not allow me to do anything so simple.  If it’s going to cost a lot of money, I will do without.  But I have hopes!

It will be quite a journey to make, but fun to do, if it happens.

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A manuscript from the “Abbey of the Red Valley” – Rookloster, Rooklooster, Rouge-Cloître, Rougeval, or Rubea Vallis?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the electronic version of the Bollandist preface to the “Life” of St Botulf or Botolph, we find the following words about manuscripts used:

Eamdem Vitam olim Ioannes Capgravius, omisso Prologo redactam in compendium, Legendæ suæ inseruerat: & ejus partem potiorem jam pridem habebamus ex duplici Ms. altero Canonicorum Regularium Rubeæ-vallis prope Bruxellas, cujus ecgraphum curaverat Rosweidus: altero Coloniensi, unde aliud Bollando transmiserat Grothusius etiam noster.

The same Life was inserted into his Legenda by John Capgrave, omitting the prologue, and reduced to a compendium: and we had long had the more important part of it from two manuscripts, one of the Canons Regular of Rubeæ-vallis near Brussels, of which made a copy: the other from Cologne, from which another was transmitted by our own Grothusius to Bolland.

Here is the printed version:

In fact I was quite unable to find out where this might be, until a kind commenter came to my assistance.  I thought that a quick post with the varying names of this place might help others, googling hopelessly.

The Latin name of the place is “Rubea Vallis”.  So this refers to the canons regular of “Rubra Vallis”, the “Red Valley.”   But I have also seen “Rubra Vallis.”  There is another place of this name in Picardy in France, so it is correctly qualified as “proper Bruxellas”, “the one near Brussels”.

In literature in French the place seems to be  known usually as “Rouge-Cloître.”  But “Rougeval” is also used sometimes – i.e. “red valley” -, again qualified with “Brussels” to distinguish from Rougeval in France.

In Dutch the place seems to be known usually as “Rooklooster,” although the Wikipedia article also  gives “Roodklooster” or even “Rood klooster”.

In German the place seems to be referred to as “Rookloster” –  no doubt under the influence of German “Klöster”.   Thus we see “Rookloster bei Brüssel” here. This spelling also makes its way into articles in other languages.

This was an Augustinian Priory near Brussels, which was closed in 1782 by the reforming Austrian Emperor Joseph II.  The manuscripts ended up in the Austrian National Library, but with a few bumps along the way.

In fact there is a fascinating website about Rooklooster and its manuscripts: The Rooklooster Register unveiled.  From this I learn the following:

Rooklooster boasted an important library and an active scriptorium as a result of the many authors, copiists, miniaturists and binders that worked in the priory.

And:

When emperor Joseph II, ruler of the Austrian Netherlands, decreed the suppression of the monasteries of most contemplative monastic orders in 1783-1874, the Rooklooster Register and many other manuscripts ended up in the Chambre Héraldique (“Heraldic Chamber”) of Brussels.

When French revolutionaries occupied the Netherlands in 1792/94, the chairman of the Chambre Héraldique, Ch. J. Beydaels de Zittaert (†1811), took the codices of his society with him as he roamed around the Northern Netherlands and Germany. After his peregrination, he eventually offered them to emperor Franz I of Austria in 1803. Parts of the manuscripts ended up in the so-called Familien-Fideikommiss-Bibliothek, the personal library of the emperor.

Being a bibliophile himself, the emperor believed he had a right to the book collection. After Franz’ death in 1835, the manuscripts remained in the possession of the imperial family.

The Rooklooster Register was kept in the library as reference number 9373. A year after the Imperial and Royal Court Library of Vienna was transformed into the National Library in 1920, the manuscripts formed a Series nova, in which the Rooklooster Register was given the book number 12694.

So the first place to look for a Rooklooster manuscript is in Austria.  But …. this last bit of the article holds a trap for the unwary.  The shelfmark for these manuscripts is NOT “12345”, or “Ser. n. 12345” but “SN12345”.  If you don’t know this, you will search manuscripta.at in vain.

So where is our manuscript, after all that?  It is SN12814, online here, where it has the shelfmark Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB), Cod. Ser. n. 12814, and the page states:Vorbesitzer: Rooklooster (Rougecloître) bei Brüssel!

Sanctilogium
Johannes, Gielemans, 1427-1487 [VerfasserIn]
Rooklooster bei Brüssel: 1470. – 273 x 208 mm. – Handschrift; I+231+I Bll.

Apparently there is a digitised microfilm available.  As ever, you have to know the trick in order to download it.

Once downloaded, it is worrying to find that it has only 239 pages.  For the Legendiers Latins entry says that Botulf is on “ff.960r-961r”.  Luckily there  is a table of contents at the front, with the saints in alphabetical order:

So what do these numbers refer to?  Well, it looks as if there are two sets of folio numbers.  At the top of PDF page 25, folio 21r, is the numbering “928”.  Clearly this manuscript has been rebound.  And in due course, on folio 63r (page 67 in the PDF) we find the Vita Sancti Botulfi.

Sadly the microfilm is not going to do my eyes any good.  But… we got there!

Phew, that was hard work!

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Editing the Latin text of the “Life” of St Botolph? Do I want to?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of days ago, I completed a draft translation into English of the “Life” of St Botolph by Folcard of St Bertin.  So far, so good.  I made the translation from the 1701 text in the Acta Sanctorum (=AASS) for June 17th (in “June”, vol. 3), which is “annotated by Daniel Papebroch” – some careful phrasing there, which implies that he did not edit the text.

Since then I have started to look at the Latin text, and compare it with the 1672 text in the Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti,(=AASSOSB) by D’Achery and  Mabillon.  This is supposed to be a copy of the MS. Paris BNF lat. 13092, originally from S. Evroul in Normandy (S. Ebrulfi Uticensis).  I have a PDF of a rotten b/w microfilm of this.

Also at my disposal is another manuscript, acquired when I was looking at St Nicholas: MS British Library Harley 3097.  This is a modern colour reproduction, also in PDF, and a pleasure to use.

In fact, as I was writing this, I went to look at the list of manuscripts and saw that MS Cambridge Corpus Christi College, Parker Library, MS. 161, was listed – and I happen to know that the Parker Library are all online.  It took little time to locate that either, so I have just acquired another witness to the text.

Ms. Cambridge CCC Parker 161, ff. 61v-62r (excerpt)

Four more manuscripts are listed in my notes, all in England:

  • another MS in Cambridge, this time MS St John’s College 209;
  • MS Lincoln Cathedral Library 7, which won’t be online, but might be possible to visit and photograph, and where I might conceivably have a connection through a relative;
  • MS London, Gray’s Inn Library 3, owned by the legal profession.
  • MS British Library Cotton Tiberius E. 1, which was a copy of John of Tynemouth’s collection of saints’ lives, but partly destroyed by fire.

Finally there is a manuscript in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, fonds principale, ser. no. 12814, a very late 15th century.

The Bollandists used two more manuscripts, one from the “red valley” near Brussels, wherever that might be; and the other from Cologne.  These started at chapter 4, omitting the opening material which was mainly about St Adulph, Botolph’s cousin.  Where they might be now I do not know.  The Bollandist “Legendiers Latins” site, which replaces the BHLms, does not list them.

The English bias of the manuscripts is obvious, and unsurprising since the author, Folcard, was the abbot of Thorney Abbey in Cambridgeshire.

I have begun to collate the witnesses available to me.  This went reasonably well for the first three chapters, where the Bollandist editors only had Mabillon’s edition.

So in chapter 1, we had a single word attested differently, but only in the Harley MS.  In chapter 2 we had half a sentence missing from the Bollandist text, but found in all the others.  That looks bad: it can only be a copying mistake by the unknown Bollandist editor, who lost most of a line from the edition of d’Achery that he was copying.  Chapter 3 has one word different in the Bollandist text from all the other witnesses: presumably an emendation.

But chapter four, where the Bollandists have these MSS from the “red valley” and from Cologne… oh my!  There are slight word-order differences in various places, all of which make the text harder to understand.  Extra words are found, or not found.  The text is clearly somewhat different, although not enough to affect the meaning.  Exactly the same happens in chapter five.

The impression that I am getting is that these are not copyist variants on a common text.  This is a somewhat different recension of the text.

There are different recensions around.  There are two separate epitomes listed in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina.  The two Bollandist manuscripts certainly differ, in that they omit chapters 1-3.  It is, I think, defensible that they represent an edition, made on the continent, and somewhat altered by the editor.  If so, the English text will be more authentic.  Unfortunately, without access to either of the Bollandist manuscripts, it is hard to tell whether some of this is just the carelessness of the Bollandist editor, or whether this hypothesis is correct.

It is hard work, making a collation.  Do I want to do this?  Do I want to simply leave these textual issues alone, and issue a translation of the AASS text?  After all, I set out to make a translation, not grapple with the textual history.

Decisions, decisions.

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Mabillon, the “Acta Sanctorum OSB”, and St Botolph

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Dom Jean Mabillon OSB (d. 1707) is remembered today mainly as the inventor of paleography.  But he had a wider career, which is described very nicely at this link here.  An excerpt relating to the Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti:

In Saint-Germain, he was at last among congenial company, and results followed quickly. D’Achéry was the custodian of the Abbey’s well-stocked library. Every week, on Sundays after Vespers, there met in his room a group of men who were already scholars of reputation – Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, Etienne Baluze, d’Herbelot, Cotelier, Renaudot, Fleury, Lamy, Pagi, and Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont. Mabillon soon took a prominent place among them.

D’Achéry had asked for him to help him in his projected “Lives of the Benedictine Saints,” but the first task he undertook was editing the works of St. Bernard. This was published within three years, in 1667, and was recognized as a masterly accomplishment.

Meanwhile Mabillon had been arranging the materials already brought together by D’Achéry. The first volume of the “Acta Sanctorum OSB” was published in 1668, a second volume in 1669, and the third in 1672.

The Acta being thus completed, Mabillon made a “literary journey” to Flanders, in search of documents and materials for his work, and in 1675 he published the first of four volumes of “Vetera Analecta” in which he collected the fruit of his travels and some shorter works of historical importance. Mabillon had now joined the ranks of Renaissance philology, and was soldiering in its front lines; its lines of discovery.

He had however not left the Acta behind him. Faith and reason do not comfortably mix at any time, and the unquestionably devout Mabillon had been using Reason as a broom to tidy in the House of Faith. The very scholarly conscientiousness of his work on the Benedictine Saints had scandalized some of the other monks, and in 1677 a petition violently attacking it was presented to the general chapter of the congregation, demanding its suppression and an apology from its author. Mabillon defended himself with such humility, and such learning, that the opposition was silenced, and he was encouraged to continue.

There is room for confusion here.  The Bollandist Acta Sanctorum (abbreviated AASS) must be distinguished from this earlier work, the Acta Sanctorum OSB (abbreviated ASS OSB), the Acts of the Saints of the Order of St Benedict.

The volumes of the AS OSB can be found on Archive.org here.  The work is divided into “saecula” (“centuries”) but in fact each “saeculum” may cover a number of centuries.

“Saeculum III” covers 700-800 AD.[1]  This is the volume of interest to us, for St Botolph, and is online here.

The section on Botolph is on p.3, after the interminable preface, p117 of the PDF.  The Life is followed on p.7 (PDF p.121) by the very short “Translatio”, or account of the transfer of the saint’s bones elsewhere after his death.

The prefatory remarks begin with:

Scripta ab auctore subpari, ut videtur ex num 10. Ex MS Cod. Monasterii Uticensis.

Written by an inferior author, as appears from number 10. From the MS Cod. of the Monastery of Utica.

We are quickly told that this manuscript:

ex membranis Coenobii Uticensis seu S. Ebrulfi in Neustria hodierna: quibus in membranis haec Vita in novem lectiones, Responsoriis totidem adhibitus, pro more officii Ecclestiastici distributa legitur.

from a parchment manuscript of the Utica Monastery or Monastery of St. Ebrulsus in modern Neustria: in which ms this Life is read in nine lessons, with the same number of responses, distributed according to the custom of the ecclesiastical office.

I found incredible difficulty in working out which monastery this was, as I read “Ebrulsi” with the long-S, rather than Ebrulfi.  But it seems to be St. Evroul in Normandy, since a certain “Ebrulsi abbas Robertus le Tellier,” i.e. Robert le Tellier, is attested as abbot in this link, who was abbot of St Evroul.  The Wikipedia link gives the Latin name as “Ebrulphus Uticensis,” rather than the “Ebrulsus Uticensis” that I had presumed – drat the long-s!  Likewise it took some effort to find that references to “St. Ebrulf at Utica in Normandy”, such as this link.

Likewise I could find no reference to an “Utica” in Normandy, until I find this link,[2], which on p.72 has this entry:

Uticum, Utica: Ouche, abbaye en Normandie, dans le pays d’Hyesmois, voyez le titre S. Evroul, 1 partie.

The “pays d’Ouche” is a region of Normandy, with S. Evroult in one corner.

It is a reasonable first guess that a manuscript in a French abbey would likely end up in the French National Library, especially if it was being used in 1700 by the Maurist monk Jean Mabillon, based at their headquarters at St Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, the abbey of S. Evroul attached itself to the congregation of St Maur.

I find that the French national library does indeed contain a manuscript, Paris BNF lat. 13092, 2, ff.110r-113v, 12th century.  This manuscript is online here, in a not-very-good microfilm scan.  Interestingly two letters in French, one dated 1712, are bound into the manuscript, just before the text of St Botolph.  Sadly I cannot quite read these.

And the first page of the text has written over the top, “ex mon(aste)rio S. Ebrulsi in Normannia” (not quite sure of every letter).

So this indeed our manuscript, the MS. Ebrulphus Uticensis, from which Mabillon printed the text.  Rather a pity that the online image is so low-resolution, tho.

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  1. [1]d’Achery, Luc, and Jean Mabillon, Acta sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, vol. 3: Saeculum III: quod est ab anno Christi DCC ad DCCC, Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, apud Carolum Savreux, 1672.↩
  2. [2]Adrien Baillet, Les vies des saints … avec l’histoire de leur culte, vol. 10 (1739)↩

Back to St Botolph – problems and sources for his Life (BHL 1428)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in April 2021, I got interested in the “Life” of the anglosaxon saint, St. Botolph, which is BHL 1428 in the standard list/repertory of Latin hagiographical texts, the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina.  I even gathered the materials to translate his “Life” here.  But I didn’t do anything more about it, because I learned that someone was preparing a critical edition of the text, and had already made a draft translation.

However this week I got bored, and decided that I don’t feel like waiting.  So I have started to prepare a translation of that Life, from the Bollandist text.  It’s only 11 chapters, so not very long, and the Latin is fairly simple.  I’ll post it here when it’s done.

The Bollandist editor, Daniel Papebroch, adds a few notes, some of which are text critical.  He states that his text is that of Mabillon, who published the Acta Sanctorum OSB in 1672,[1] plus two manuscripts.  He also refers to a “Codex Uticensis,” whatever that may be – I hardly think Cato of Utica was involved here!  So there is room for research.

Something that interests me is the story of the transfer (“translatio”) of Botolph’s remains from his ruined monastery at “Ikanho” – probably Iken in Suffolk – to Burgh (or possibly Grundisburgh) in Suffolk, where they remained for fifty years, until they were transferred to various places, including the great abbey at Bury St Edmunds.  I looked at the “Translatio” text (BHL 1431) but it doesn’t include this information.  So where does it come from?  Another point to research.  [Update: Oops – I did that last time.]

Something that is always worthwhile, in these circumstances, is an intensive Google search using the BHL number.  This I did yesterday, and it brought up something that I had always wondered about.

For patristics, we have the CPL and CPG volumes, listing authors and works.  For hagiography we have the BHL and BHG volumes.  But I never knew that a similar set of volumes existed for medieval texts.  And it does, in 11 volumes: the Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi, published in Italy from 1952 down to our own time.  I was able to find online a copy of volume 4, which covers Folcard, the author of the Life.

I don’t know if there is a standard abbreviation for this – RFHMA? – but it gives some bibliography on p.479.  Some more stuff in there to look into.

The Google search gave me 5 manuscripts.  I imagine the BHLms site would give some as well, but this seems to have gone, according to the Bollandist website, replaced by something at the IRHT called Légendiers Latins.  I’ll have to look into this as well.

So… a few nice things to chase up there!  Expect some more posts soon!

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  1. [1]“Saeculum” (i.e.  volume) III, the saints from 700-800 AD, p.4-7. Online here.↩