Tag: Manuscripts

The 1412 inventory of the manuscripts of Amelungsborn Abbey

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I reported yesterday on the discovery of two new sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in a monastery in Poland.  One statement in the press release is also of great interest.  The discoverer, Prof. Christian Tornau, of the University of Würzburg, stated:

“An old catalogue from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption with absolute certainty, however, as the entire library holdings of Amelungsborn Monastery were destroyed by fire during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).

The “old catalogue” in question is the inventory of 1412 of the Cistercian Abbey of Amelungsborn. This takes a little locating.

The inventory is listed in a catalogue of surviving medieval inventories, published by Theodor Gottlieb, Ueber mittelalterliche Bibliotheken (1890 – online here).  Amelungsborn is on p.18-19:

The footnote reads:

Im Anniversarienbuch sind 7 Schenkungen von Büchern aufgeführt; dies wird pg. 18 gesagt. – Ferner ist auf einer Seite des Catal. ein Verzeichniss von Büchern mit der Ueberschr.: Hii de Corbeja, (von woher sie nach Dürres Vermuthung  zur Abschr. entlehnt waren).

The anniversary book lists seven donations of books; this is mentioned on page 18. Furthermore, on one page of the catalogue, there is a list of books with the heading: “Hii de Corbeja” (from where, according to Dürre’s presumption, they were borrowed for copying).

The inventory of 1412 is preserved, then, in a manuscript, once in the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel, today in the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv (NLA) where it has the shelfmark “Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel VII. B. 111.”  A monochrome microfilm is online.  Each image is two pages: the catalogue is right at the end, on pages 101-105, i.e. images 54-56.  Here is the start of it:

Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel VII. B. 111, folio 101r, top (image 54)

The inventory has been printed, but those seeking it may find that it can take a bit of time to locate thanks to a pleasant custom in 19th century German scholarship, whereby the author publishes the article twice under the same title in the same year but with different contents.  So it has been here.

The actual article, that contains a transcription of the inventory of 1412, is this:

H. Dürre, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn”, Programm des herzoglichen Gymnasiums zu Holzminden. Ostern 1876, p. 3-24; esp. 19-24.

This may be downloaded from here, and the inventory starts on page 19 thus:

But the unwary or unlucky researcher will search Google for “Dürre Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn” or something of the sort and will be presented with this:

H. Dürre, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn”, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen. 1876

In this volume, Dr Dürre’s article is the fourth, begins on p.179, and ends on 212, omitting the transcription of the inventory altogether.  It was only when you start to search for Programm des herzoglichen Gymnasiums zu Holzminden that you will make progress.

Looking at the inventory, the entry for the new sermons is on p.22, line 220 of the printed inventory.

The manuscript:

NLA WO VIII B 111, fol. 103r, column 2, part way down.

So there is the reference explained.

I think we will all be very interested to see the text of Dr Tornau’s discovery in full!

Another two sermons of St Augustine discovered: on the Witch of Endor

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Excellent news from the University of Würzburg, where a researcher has discovered two unknown sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in Poland!   The reporting (by Martin Brandstätter) is unusually good:

One day in 2024, the phone rang for Professor Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg: An employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania asked him to decipher a 12th-century manuscript that originally belonged to Bad Doberan Abbey but is now kept in its daughter monastery, Pelplin, in Poland. The manuscript contained six sermons by the Christian Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354-430).

What initially seemed like a routine philological assignment turned into a discovery: “Two of the six sermons are previously undiscovered writings by Augustine,” Professor Tornau rejoiced at the unexpected find. He is currently working with Professor Dorothea Weber and Dr. Clemens Weidmann from the CSEL series (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum) on an edition of the two Latin sermons.  …

The newly discovered sermons deal with the Old Testament story of the Witch of Endor from the First Book of Samuel. “Saul believes himself to be in a hopeless situation shortly before a battle against the Philistines. God does not hear his prayers. He turns to a witch,” explains Tornau. At Saul’s request, she summons the supposed spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel, who foretells his death in battle.

The story raises a theological question: “Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet? This, in turn, opens up the problem of theodicy: How can an omnipotent God allow this, or is he not truly omnipotent?” the Latinist explained. Theologically, there are two interpretations: Either it must be a case of deception by the witch, or God permitted the summoning to warn Saul of certain death.

The sermons play with these interpretations. “The first sermon was given during the Sunday service and ends with the question of theodicy and its interpretations. Only the second sermon, on the following Wednesday, weighed the options,” Tornau explained. The congregation was thus given a certain degree of freedom to form their own thoughts on the biblical passage.  …

There have already been cases in which supposed writings by Augustine turned out to be forgeries. Therefore, the professor of Latin studies proceeded cautiously: He analyzed the text together with the expert Clemens Weidmann, conducted meticulous research, and organized a summer school in Vienna in the autumn of 2025. Twenty other Latinists attended to discuss and verify the authenticity of the text. In the end, everyone agreed: The sermons are genuine.

Reconstructing the transmission history of the sermons proved challenging. “First of all, the creation of such a manuscript in the 12th century is unusual. A copy from the beginning of the 8th or 9th century would be more typical,” says Latinist Tornau. He therefore considers it very likely that the manuscript is based on an earlier version from the Lower Saxon monastery of Amelungsborn.

“An old catalog from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption with absolute certainty, however, as the entire library holdings of Amelungsborn Monastery were destroyed by fire during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).

The first edition will address the transmission of the texts and contextualize their content and authenticity. “This isn’t a sensational find like the 30 Augustinian writings discovered in Mainz in 1990. But we are supplementing Augustine’s extensive body of work with two further fascinating texts in a critical edition,” Tornau summarizes. The edition is expected to be published by CSEL at the end of 2026.

The article even includes a legible photograph of the first page of the manuscript, and clearly identifies it – a first, in my experience.  The red title reads, I think: “Sermones Augustini de phitonissa et de resuscitatione samuelis”, (i.e. de pythonissa…?)

Excerpt from the manuscript (in red): “Augustine’s sermons on the fortune teller and the appearance of Samuel.” Source: Pelplin, Diocesan Library, Codex 114 (195), fol. 14r. (Image: Biblioteka Diecezjalna im. Biskupa Jana Bernarda Szlagi w Pelplinie)

The town of Pelplin originated from the monastery, itself populated by monks from Bad Doberan in Mecklenburg, according to Wikipedia.  The Biblioteka Diecezjalna library has a website here, although it does not seem to have any manuscript material online.  There is a website for the “Friends of Bad Doberan monastery,” mentioned in the article, here.  I was unable to locate a publication of the “old catalogue” of Amelungsborn unfortunately.

It’s very good news, and it will be most interesting to see what Augustine had to say on this curious passage of the bible.

Update (16 June 2026): The “old catalogue” of Amelungsborn, mentioned by Dr. Tornau, is discussed in my next post.

British Library Manuscripts Catalogue back online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Bluesky (is this a first?) I learn that the British Library Manuscript catalogue is now back online, two years after the cyber-attack destroyed it.  The post is from Calum Cockburn who is the curator of medieval manuscripts

An interim version of the Explore Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue is now available through the BL website: searcharchives.bl.uk It contains all the catalogue data from the eve of the 2023 cyberattack, and features embedded links to all currently available digitised content within the records.

The site traffic on Bluesky is so low that nobody seems to have read the post, so it’s well worth reposting here.

A search for “Tertulliani” correctly lists the three manuscripts of Tertullian that they hold, plus someone’s notes in a Lansdowne manuscript.

Where the manuscript is online, they include a link to it and a thumbnail image to the right.  The Tertullian manuscripts were never photographed, so have none.  (Possibly I should go down there and photograph them myself!)

Clicking on the link for the oldest, Royal MS 5 F XVIII:

Something I really do like is that link which I have circled in red: a list of all the manuscripts in that collection, the Royal manuscripts, the original deposit at the founding of the British Library.  (Others are “Additional”, etc).  That is very handy indeed.

Good to see progress!

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had no luck in getting away for a break.  The prices for hotels are simply ridiculous, and somehow other things creep in.

But I’m making good progress with Botolph.  After my last post, a very kind gentleman, who was visiting the Bodleian Library in Oxford on his own account, kindly offered to photograph the two manuscripts that they hold.  And so he did. (Update: I now have permission to say that this was Peter Kidd of manuscripts.org.uk, to whom I am very grateful indeed!)

These two are manuscripts of the epitome of the “Life of Botolph”, BHL 1429.  The shelfmarks are Bodleian MS Bodl. 240, and Bodleian MS Tanner 15, both manuscripts of the “Sanctilogium” of John of Tynemouth.  The same text appears in the printed “Nova Legenda Angliae” of 1516, and was reprinted with amendments by Horstmann in 1901.

Since these appeared, I have been collating the text.  Starting with Horstmann as a base – because I could OCR this – I compared it to the 1516 edition, to the two Bodleian manuscripts, and to British Library MS Cotton Tiberius E. 1, which I photographed myself.  This latter was damaged by fire, but it doesn’t seem to have much in the way of original readings.  All three manuscripts are 15th century, and much of a muchness.  Horstmann’s edition – based on the 1516 and the BL manuscript – is perfectly sound.  All I will contribute is a larger apparatus, I think.

All the same you really do learn a lot about a text and about the manuscripts by comparing them, word by word.  You get a definite feeling that one of the scribes was in a hurry, copying a not-very-important text, happy to stick a word a bit later if his eye skipped it, and occasionally putting down the wrong word of identical meaning during the process of reading a sentence into his head and writing it out again.  You get a feel for the scribe, and a feel for the language of the author.

Lots of fun!

The full “Life”, BHL 1428, was done, except that I have located the missing Cologne manuscript in Berlin, and need to collate that and establish its relationship to the other manuscripts, especially to the Rooklooster manuscript which is probably its twin. It may mean a change to the family tree (stemma) of the manuscripts.  It will mean changes to the apparatus.  I doubt that it will affect the text or translation.

As of today, I have a text of the epitome, BHL 1429, and a draft translation of it which I will now revise.

The very brief Life in the Breviarium Slesvicense (BHL 1430) was done a while back.

The “Translatio” of the relics of St Botolph (BHL 1431) has been transcribed and a translation made, but I need to do more on this.

So it’s coming along very nicely.  But I still need some summer holiday!

Update: Dr Kidd also advised me about the rather confusing shelfmark for MS 240:

The ‘Bodleian’ is a library but ‘MS. Bodley’ is a shelfmark, which should be abbreviated as ‘MS. Bodl.’. So the shelfmark of one of the MSS I sent is Bodleian, MS. Bodl. 240, not Bodleian, MS 240.

Thank you!

Kassel University online manuscripts -a fabulous interface!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Well here’s something special! (via this twitter post)  The image below (online here) is fairly familiar.  It shows the “serpent column” in Constantinople, as it was in the 16th century before the heads broke off.  The column is still there, in the Hippodrome.  It is, in fact, the ancient Greek monument commemorating the battle of Plataea, where the Greek cities defeated the Persians.  On it are inscribed the names of all the cities that sent soldiers.  But this is not what makes this site special.

Kassel 4° Ms. hist. 31 (Türkisches Manierenbuch / A Book of Turkish Customs), image 33 / f15r

The whole manuscript is there! It’s on folio 15r, which is the 33rd image in the manuscript.  The manuscript itself is a 16th century collection of illustrations of Turks in costume, with a few other things like this.  Such collections of pictures exist at other libraries too.

The interface is actually useful, at least on PC.  You get thumbnails, you get IIIF, you get proper references.  It’s really rather marvellous.  Universität Kassel have excelled!  The platform is something called “Orka”, and frankly this is very nice.

The breadcrumbs at the top make it easy to find the collection, select the Latin manuscripts, display a list of shelfmarks.  Whoever designed this actually talked to people who use these sites.

There are some 474 Latin manuscripts dated before 1500, which is very respectable.  And, blessedly, you can display 100 mss at a time, in various orders.

It’s tremendously useful.  It’s now time to note that the Kassel manuscripts are online, and may be accessible and usable.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!