Tag: Botolph

The Society of St Botolph

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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.

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Manuscripts of the “Life” of St Botolph (BHL 1428)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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.

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Happy St Botolph’s Day! English Translation of the Epitome in the Schleswig Breviary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

June 17 is the day on which St Botolph is commemorated in the Roman calendar, so Happy St Botolph’s day to you all.

In honour of the day, I thought that I would post an English translation of the abbreviated “Life”, found in the printed Schleswig Breviary of 1512 (Breviarium Slesvicense).  It’s the latest of the late-medieval abbreviations of the “Life”.  I’ve put a Word .docx version at the end.

    *    *    *    *

Epitome of the Life of St Botolph, from the Schleswig Breviary[1]

1.     After the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ became well-known throughout the world, there was a man worthy in God, named Botolph, descended from the noble lineage of the kings of Scotland, who, when he was pressed to accept the throne after the death of his father,[2] for the love of God not only relinquished the throne, but also his homeland, and journeyed to England. There, he was received with reverence by Edmund, King of England, and not long after, by the command of the same king,[3] he was raised to holy orders.

2.     But when he had stayed with the same king for seven years, he petitioned him to grant him a place where he might more freely serve the Lord.[4] The king assigned him a most beautiful place, surrounded on all sides by the streams of a certain river.  There he built a church to the honour of God, and began through divine grace to become well-known for many miracles.  Now while the man of God was staying there with his disciple, one day a poor man knocked at the door, begging for alms in the name of God.

3.    When the holy Father ordered the disciple to give him something, he replied that he had nothing for all their[5] food, except a single loaf of bread: which he ordered to be divided into four parts, and one of them to be given to the poor man.  Then what?  When three other poor men came, he distributed the three remaining pieces.  When the disciple therefore murmured about this, the holy man said, “Do not be troubled, my son, for God is able to give it all back to us again.”  Hardly had he finished his words, and behold: four little boats loaded with food and drink were being drawn along the aforementioned river, which Almighty God, through His faithful ones, provided for the holy man.

4.    But one day, when he was visited by the aforementioned king, he petitioned for another place to live, because in the first site he was exceedingly pestered by unclean spirits. The king, granting his request, gave him a more suitable place on the River Thames;[6] in which place the man of God built a church in honour of St. Martin.  Then, staying in the same place, he began to raise hens, which an eagle from a nearby forest used to come and carry off. But one day, when it had carried off a cockerel, the man of God rebuked[7] it, and it immediately came and placed the cockerel alive at his feet, and then fell down dead.

5.    After thirteen years had passed in that place, the ancient enemy[8] came in the form of a snake and inflicted a nasty bite on the man of God. Because of this, he again approached the king to give him another place; who led him far from the sea, into a vast wilderness: where, as he proceeded through thorny places, he came to a certain valley, which had a small stream of water; and the man of God said, “This is the place.”[9]  And so in that place given to him by the king, he built two churches, in honour of the apostles Peter and Paul. When these were completed, he went abroad[10] to Rome for the purpose of prayer, to visit the shrines[11] of those same most blessed apostles.

6.    Returning from there and bringing with him many relics of the saints, before entering his own cell, he restored sight to a blind girl through his prayers. King Edmund, hearing of the return of the holy man, met him with great joy, and stayed with him for three days.  After these things, Botolph, the man of God, passed over to the Lord. His disciples honorably committed his body for burial.  Many miracles happen at his tomb, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be honour and glory forever. Amen.

[1] The Schleswig Breviary is a service book printed in Paris in 1512 at the order of Gotteschalk von Ahlefldt, the last Catholic bishop.  Two copies are held in the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen.  This text was reprinted in the Acta Sanctorum, with notes by D. Papebroch, which are translated below, prefixed by a, b, c etc.  This translation and other notes by Roger Pearse, 2025, and improved by comparison with the unpublished translation of D. G. Dalziel, kindly made available to me by Denis Pepper of the the Society of St Botolph.

[2] a. It seems that this was Eugenius IV, who died in the year 620; nor was the kingdom offered immediately to Botulph, but only after the princes and people were no longer able to tolerate the crimes of his successor Ferquard: so great that it was decided to throw him into prison, in which he later died, say around the year 624. But when Botulph fled, the administration passed to another of the brothers, Donald, who then reigned after Ferquard’s death until the year 646. (See Wikipedia article on Legendary Kings of Scotland – RP)

[3] b. Or rather, the Christian mother of the still pagan king, who took him as her chaplain, and as an instructor in the pious education of her daughters.

[4] c. In order to obtain this more conveniently, I believe he had first persuaded the Queen to send her daughters to one of the Frankish monasteries.

[5] SB actually has “eorum”; but strangely the AASS copy has “corporis,” which would make this “he had nothing for all the food of the body.”

[6] d. This confirms what I have said, that Edmund ruled in Surrey on the right bank of the Thames, and that it was a part of Southern England. Perhaps also the saint was moved to leave the court because he saw that he was wasting his time in trying to lead the king to faith.

[7] Cf. Mark 4:39.

[8] Satan.

[9] [e] Thus far, that is, up to around the year 644, Botulph had lived as a hermit, when it seemed divinely inspired to him to cross over into Gaul, there to be trained in monastic discipline (though this is here omitted) and to visit various monasteries, especially staying at the one where his spiritual daughters, the sisters of the King, resided, who had taken monastic vows. And so he will first have returned around the year 654, advanced in age and now fitted to establish and promote monastic discipline among the South Angles; and from this point begins that opening part of the earlier “Life,” which alone we approve, as written by a near-contemporary.

[10] [f] I would think that this happened after the year 660, suppposing that the saint returned while Edmund was still alive; who (unless the South Angles had different kings from the East Saxons, for which there is no evidence) received as his successor about that year Edelwalch, baptized in 661 (as Alford believes). At that time St. Vitalianus was the Pope of the Roman Church. (This refers to Fr. Michael Alford S.J. (1587-1652), Fides Regia Britannica, sive Annales Ecclesiae Britannicae, Liege (1663).  – RP)

[11] “limina”, lit. “thresholds”, but indicating the tombs and basilicas – Niemeyer, “Mediae Latinitas Lexicon Minus.”

Downloads:  (Update: I have added in the Latin)

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The Schleswig Breviary (Breviarium Slesvicense)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Duchy of Schleswig is the most northern district of Germany, and since 1920 has been divided between Denmark and Germany.  In 1510 a man with the interesting name of Gottschalk von Ahlefeldt (1475-1541) became bishop of Schleswig.  The Ahlefeldt family were originally of the Danish nobility, but by this time was settled in Germany.  Ahledfeldt seems to have been a clever and competent man, who set about restoring his bankrupt diocese, even mortgaging part of his own income to satisfy the creditors.  Sadly all his efforts were swept away by the rise of Lutheranism in the 1520s, which offered both moral and financial incentives to the local nobility to convert, and he was the last Catholic bishop.  His biography in Danish records that, shortly before his death, he advised the nobility of Holstein not to “lightly let the old doctrine go.”

Soon after his election, in 1512, he commissioned the creation of new service books for his diocese.  Two of these, a Liber Agendarum, and a Breviarium, were printed in Paris that year.  Two copies of the Breviarium Slesvicense are held in the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen (KB København, LN 033 8° copy 1, and copy 2), and catalogued on the Hungarian Usuarium liturgical texts site, here and here.

Here’s the title page of the Breviarium Slesvicense, from KB København, LN 033 8° copy 2:

A single page introduction explains why the work was commissioned.

I.e.

Reuerendus in Christo pater et dominus: dominus Godschalcus de Ahleuelde: dei et apostolice sedis gratia episcopus ecclesiae Sleszuicensis.  Attendens in sua diocesi librorum breviariorum paucitatem: et ex hoc clericis iuxta ordinarium dicte diocesis horas canonicas legere debentibus oriri turbationem et defectum. Quibus pastorali cura inederi cupiens hec breviaria sanctorum ordinarium prefate sue ecclesie et diocesis correcta et impressa auctoritate ordinaria approbauit et confirmauit.  Ac omnibus et singulis Christi fidelibus confessis et contritis ex eisdem libris horas canonicas communiter aut diuisim deo omnipotenti per suam diocesim rite quantum poterint persoluentibus totiens quotiens de omnipotentis dei misericordia: ac beatorum petri et pauli apostolorum eius auctoritate confisus quadraginta dies indulgeniarum de iniunctis ipsis et cuilibet ipsorum penitentiis misericorditer in domino relaxavit. Anno domini Mdillensimo quingenesimo duodecimo.

The Reverend Father and Lord in Christ, Lord Godschalk of Ahlefeldt, by the grace of God and the Apostolic See, Bishop of the Church of Schleswig, observing the scarcity of breviary books in his diocese and the resulting confusion and deficiency among the clergy who are obliged to recite the canonical hours according to the ordinate of the said diocese, desiring to provide for these matters with pastoral care, has approved and confirmed, by his ordinary authority, these corrected and printed breviaries of the saints according to the ordinate of his aforesaid church and diocese. Moreover, trusting in the authority of Almighty God and the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, he has mercifully granted in the Lord, to each and every one of Christ’s faithful who, being confessed and contrite, duly recite the canonical hours either together or separately from these books throughout his diocese as best they can, forty days of indulgence from the penances enjoined upon them and upon each of them, as often as they do so. In the year of our Lord one thousand five hundred and twelve. (DeepSeek)

The volume ends with a lengthy colophon.

This tells us who did the work of compiling it:

Expresis venerabilis virorum dominorum et magistrorum Johannis tetens sacre theologie baccalarii formati lectoris ordinarii: ac Andree Frederici prepositi Wyda i dicta ecclesia canonicorum ibidem necnon providi wesseli goltsme des incole husemen. Cura per vigili domini Seszeconis beszeconis presbyteri medullitus prospectu, ac per venerabilis viros et magistros wilhelmum mercator et Thomas Kees civem in urbe Parisiensi.

Which DeepSeek, slightly cleaned up, renders as:

Produced by the venerable men, the lords and masters, Johannes Tetens, Bachelor of Sacred Theology,[1] and ordinary reader; and Andreas Fredericus, provost of Wida and canon of the said church there, as well as the prudent Wessel Goltsme, resident of Husemen. Carefully overseen with deep insight by the vigilant lord Seszeconis Beszeconis, priest, and by the venerable men and masters, Wilhelm Mercator and Thomas Kees, citizens in the city of Paris.

Guilliemus Marchand and Thomas Kees were the printers.  The work was completed on 16 July 1512.

There is a useful table of contents on the page for copy 1 here, and part of the Breviarium is the “sanctoral offices.”  Each office includes an abbreviated life of the saint.

On folio 347 of copy 1, or 344 of copy 2 (page 704 of the PDFs in both cases) begins the office of St Botolph, and the “Life” is over the page, broken up into 6 readings or lectiones.  This “Life” was copied into the Acta Sanctorum, not very accurately, and is assigned the reference number BHL 1430.

But more about this in the next post.

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  1. [1]baccalaureus formatus is apparently an academic rank: see here.↩

From my diary: British Library manuscripts of the Life of St Botulf.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of days ago I wrote to the British Library manuscripts department to enquire about the two manuscripts that contain versions of the medieval Latin “Life” of St Botulf.  Yesterday I received a really quite helpful reply.

Cotton MS Tiberius D III is a Special Access (Select) manuscript, so I’m afraid it’s not permitted to take photographs of that. However, there is a surrogate microfilm, Microfilm 2492, which you could take photos of for personal reference use.

Cotton MS Tiberius E I has been divided into two volumes, and it looks like the “Life” of St Botulf [Botulph] is now in Volume 2, at ff.14v-15v:

Cotton MS Tiberius E I/2    John Tynemouth, Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae
ff. 1r: Sts Petroc (Bibliotheca Hagiogrphica Latina 6640), continued from the previous volume; ff. 1r–3v: Boniface (BHL 1406); ff. 3v–4v: Gudwal (BHL 3690); ff. 4v–6v: Robert of Newminster (BHL 7269); ff. 6v–7v: William of York (BHL 8910); ff. 7v–10r: Columba (BHL 1891); ff. 10r–11v: Ivo (BHL 4624); ff. 11v–13v: Margaret of Scotland, with marginal genealogies (BHL 5326); ff. 13v–14v: Odulphus (BHL 6321); ff. 14v–15v: Botulph (BHL 1429); ff. 15v–19r: Alban; … …
Decoration: Each life opens with an initial, either red with blue pen-work or blue with red pen-work. Small initials in blue and red throughout.    A parchment codex.    2nd half of the 14th century    Latin

There are no access restrictions for this, so you can take photos from the original manuscript.

The “select” manuscripts at the British Library are those which require special permission to access.  In this case, I suspect that damage from the fire is the reason.  I’ve written to check.

The first manuscript is a copy of the full text, which is the one that I need, unfortunately.  The other is an abbreviated “Life”, which I will work on later.  But I may as well get what I need now.

Looking at the British Library website, this says that imaging services, i.e. “photography” are unavailable.  This is the legacy of the cyber-attack in October 2023.  The attack must have been very impressive indeed, if it not only destroyed all the IT, and took all the manuscripts offline forever, but also ensured that the library staff were unable to use cameras even a year and a half later, or even hire a reprographics bureau.   Very strong stuff.

But on the positive side it does mean that I can get some perfectly usable photographs with my smartphone with no fuss.  Let us hope the microfilm is readable.

So it seems that I shall have to make a visit to London town.  The journey from here is long and expensive – it’s probably easier and cheaper to get a budget flight from Milan than to travel in by train – but what must be will be.  I’ve not been down for many years.  I prefer the countryside!

It’s now more than forty years since I went down to London one Sunday afternoon, in order to start my working career on the Monday.  I booked into a cheap hotel in Bloomsbury, where the doorman looked down his nose at this nervous lad with his rucksack.  It rained that evening, and I walked down to Denmark Street, and I looked into the window of Forbidden Planet, the Sci-Fi bookshop that used to be there.  London on a Sunday night can be very dark.  But there was a recession on, and I knew that I was lucky to have got a job at all.  It’s funny how some memories remain with you.

Anyway, I shall have to discover how the trains work these days, and the underground.  It will probably be in a couple of weeks.  Meanwhile there is plenty of material to work with.

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From my diary: Gray’s Inn MS 3

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Gray’s Inn is located in central London near the law courts.  It is one of the four “inns of court” to which all barristers and judges must belong.  The inns of court are medieval, but I know nothing much about them.

Gray’s Inn Library contains a collection of 24 medieval manuscripts.  Horwood, the author of the catalogue from 1869, does not know where they came from, and I have been unable to locate any recent scholarship on the manuscripts. But the suggestion is that they were donated by members over the centuries.  Some of these did come from monastic institutions.

Gray’s Inn MS 3 is a collection of saints’s lives.  From the Legendiers Latins website, I learned that it contains a copy of Folcard’s “Life” of St Botulf (BHL 1428), on folios 136r-137r.  This is a copy of the full text, but without either the rather nervous dedicatory letter to Wakelin, bishop of Winchester, nor the “translatio” of Botulf’s relics from Iken to wherever.  The Horwood catalogue from 1869 gives only a very brief entry, which tells us nothing about the origins of the manuscript.  It suggests that the manuscript is 11th century, which seems a bit early to me.

Yesterday I sent an email of enquiry.  Later the same day, I was astonished and delighted to receive a reply, containing a PDF with colour photographs of the relevant pages.  Very efficient indeed!  I am very grateful to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn.

Here’s a bit of folio 136r.  It shows the “explicit” from the previous text – the passiones of SS. Cyriacus and Jullita – and  then in red the “incipit vita sancti botulfi abbatis quae celebratur xv kalend. Julii.” – “the start of the life of St. Botulf the abbot, which is celebrated on 15th day before the kalends of July.”  That’s the 17th June in our calendar.

The images are perfectly clear and readable.  I have started to process the manuscript into my collation of all the manuscripts, which is in a Word document.  You can see in the image above that, as I am the proud owner of a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro – albeit in the elderly version 9 – I have added “sticky notes” to the PDFs, in order to indicate where the start of each chapter is.  This habit assists you markedly in finding passages in the text when you are trying to compare manuscripts.  You learn by doing.

My initial impression is that the variants in this copy feel a bit unsound.  These are later tweaks to the text.  But we will see.

One very interesting feature appears in the names of kings.  The scribe has written them, not as “Adelmundus”, which is what every other manuscript has, but as “Aethelmundus”, complete with ligature “æ” and “thorn” – æþelmundus:

I have never seen this in a Latin manuscript.  Is this an antiquarian at work, perhaps?  I really ought to dig out some paleography materials and try to work out the date of the bookhand.  Maybe later.

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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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