Tag: Botwulf

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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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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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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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.↩

How do hagiographical texts get composed? Folcard tells us

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I seem to be doing a lot of work on hagiographical texts at the moment, most recently with Ethiopian saints.  This is because these texts are neglected.  They are insanely neglected, for the most part.  So even someone like me, can contribute something.

Hagiographical texts are not history, and tend to accumulate anecdotes over time.  They are more like folk story, although they may often contain genuine information; or be complete invention.  They are story, inspiring story, not documentation.

The medieval “Life” of St Botolph (BHL 1428), about an Anglo-Saxon saint from East Anglia, whom I have mentioned before, is prefixed in two of the manuscripts by a dedicatory letter composed by its author, a certain Folcard of St Bertin.  He came over with the Norman conquest, and was abbot of Thorney Abbey in Cambridgeshire, which possessed some of the relics of St Botolph.  This letter is interesting.  I’ll give the Latin first, then a translation.

Desiderantissimo Patri et Domino suo, et aeque reverentissimo Praesuli, Uualcelino, monachorum minimus, frater Fulcardus, obsequia totius devotionis.

Nullo praecedente vitae merito, sed e contra, proh dolor! peccatis meis agentibus, sub specie pastoralis curae in coenobium Thornense incidi, ibique venustate illustrissimae habitationis captus, ipsa eadem loci delectatione inhaesi. Res diversae occurrebant quae nolentem iniquitatis animum ad affectum sui inclinabant; in primis, quia titulus ejusdem loci Beatae Dei Genitrici Mariae potissimum ascribitur, cui quia Mater misericordiae dinoscitur lapsis resurgere volentibus, sub optentu veniae prior et principalis respectus habetur. Deinde solitudo illa, sanctae religionis amica, nulli incuriae pervia, silvisque amoenissimis et continuis paludibus atque interfluentibus aquis irrigua; praeterea desiderio et affectu devotissimi Deo Praesulis Adeluuoldi illustrata, et tot Sanctorum pignoribus pio ipsius studio ditata; in qua, ut aiunt, et satis credi potest, cursum praesentis vitae finire delegerit in conversatione theorica. His enim infirmarum rerum causis alligatus sum, ut asinus vel bos ad praesepe Domini; apud quem, ut jumentum factus, semper adhaerere, donec transeat iniquitas ex ejus gratia, proposui.

Videns autem Sanctos in eadem basilica pausantes, nulla scriptorum memoria commendatos, indignatus antiquitati, quae de eis addiscere potui, tuis auribus primum offerre volui, ne rusticior sermo, nullo suffultus defensore, derisioni expositus, aemulorum cachinnum potius optineret quam auditum. Reperta sunt tamen quaedam in veteribus libris vitiose descripta, quaedam ab ipso praecipuo praesule in privilegiis ejusdem coenobii sunt breviter annotata, caetera ex relatione veterum, ut ab antiquioribus sunt, eis exhibita. Omnia tamen ex devotione cordis tibi, eximie pater, tuoque examini discutienda, exhibeo, ut si quis aemulus caninas erexerit cristas labori nostro, humilitatis nostrae opusculum tuae auctoritatis paterna contegat defensio.

To his most beloved Father and Lord, and likewise most reverend Bishop, Walkelin,[1] the least of monks, Brother Folcard,[2] offers the service of all devotion.

Without any previous merit in life, but on the contrary, alas! while living in my sins, I found myself, under the appearance of pastoral care, placed in the monastery of Thorney. There, captivated by the loveliness of its most distinguished building, I held fast to the very delight of that place.  Various things happened which inclined my unwilling and sinful mind to love it; first of all, because the title of the same place is most especially ascribed to the Blessed Mary, the Mother of God, to whom, because she is known as the Mother of Mercy, the first and foremost application is made by those who have fallen and wish to be restored during a request for pardon.  Next, that solitude, the beloved of holy religion, impervious to careless, and watered by the most pleasant woodlands, continuous marshes, and flowing streams.  Moreover, it was ennobled by the desire and devotion of the most devout Bishop of God, Aethelwold,[3] and enriched by his pious effort with so many relics of the Saints; among whom, as they say, and it is quite believable, he chose to end the course of his present life in godly society.  For I was tied there by these rather earthly reasons, like an ass or an ox to the Lord’s manger, to whom, having been made his donkey, I have resolved to stick, always, until my sins pass away through His grace.

But seeing the Saints resting in the same basilica, commended by no written record, and jealous for antiquity, I wanted to offer those things that I was able to learn about them to your ears first, lest an unlearned discourse, unsupported by any defender, exposed to mockery, should be subject of laughter of rivals rather than get a hearing.  Yet certain things have been found in old books, albeit badly written, and some were briefly recorded by the principal bishop himself among the privileges of the same monastery. The rest were gathered from the narration of the older monks, as set forth by those older still.  All these things, however, I present to you, distinguished Father, out of the devotion of my heart and for your judgment, so that, if any rival should raise his dog-like hackles against our effort, then the paternal shield of your authority may cover the little work of my humility.

Folcard was inspired to write the Lives of the saints venerated at Thorney Abbey because he saw that they were there, and could find no account of them.  The materials that he used were:

  1. Whatever he could find in “old books”.
  2. Notes among the “privileges” of the abbey – i.e. its charters and other documents.
  3. Stories told to him by the older monks, as being handed down from their predecessors.

Out of this, he composed his Life of St Botolph.

The entrance to the remains of Thorney Abbey. Part of the nave of the abbey church was converted into a parish church, the rest was demolished.
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  1. [1]Lit. Walcelinus.  Norman bishop of Winchester after the conquest.  See R. Browett, “The Fate of Anglo-Saxon Saints after the Norman Conquest of England: St Æthelwold of Winchester as a Case Study”, in: History 101, no. 2 (345) (2016), pp.183-200. JSTOR: “Importantly, Folcard’s text was dedicated to Walkelin. In manuscripts, the Translatio is prefaced by his dedicatory letter, and Folcard’s Life of St Botulph. The letter survives in two manuscripts: the century London, BL, Harley 3097, fos 61b-64b, and the thirteenth century London, BL, Cotton Tiberius D III, fos 223b-225b.”↩
  2. [2]Abbot of Thorney Abbey.↩
  3. [3]Founder of Thorney Abbey.↩