While trying to finish up the St. Botolph material, I came across a sentence in a fascinating article about St Botolph in Scandinavia. This referred to Scandinavian breviaries which might contain a “Life” of St. Botolph. I already knew that a very abbreviated “Life” of St Botolph was to be found in the Schleswig Breviary of 1512. But now…
The other printed breviaries that have this Vita are Aarhus, Uppsala and Linköping. This means that although the theory that this Vita was composed in Scandinavia still holds, there is no longer evidence to fix it to Denmark.1
No reference is given.
Where to start?
Luckily there is a splendid website on early printed breviaries in Hungary: Usuarium, A Digital Library and Database for the Study of Latin Liturgical History in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. You can search for each town, and it will give you a list of early printed liturgical texts. It even has online copies, and detailed lists of contents.
I started with the Uppsala breviary (Breviarium Upsalense), which can be found here. This was printed in Stockholm in 1496. The site also gives a broad list of contents, which is incredibly handy. This tells me that the “sanctoral offices” are on pages 453-741.
Looking for Botolph in this vast sea of saints, in no obvious order, in a terrible font, was a nightmare. I completely failed the first time, retiring hurt, to think and guess again. I had thought initially that it might be in alphabetical order of saint name – it begins with Andrew – but not so. Then I thought perhaps Saint’s day order, but I couldn’t see it. Paging through hundreds of pages of hard-to-read text, hoping to spot one small word… was futile.
But I did succeed, so I will share how I did this. I was able to download a PDF of the whole volume, thankfully, and used my elderly copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 to add bookmarks when I located stuff.
I could see from the website contents that it began with “St Andreas”, i.e. St Andrew. I googled, and found that St Andrew’s day was Nov. 30.
The orginal volume is unhelpfully without any page or folio numbers. But the Usuarium site helpfully says that the Sanctoral offices start on p.453 of the PDF/online copy. So there I went. Sure enough, St Andrew was there. I bookmarked this, “Andrew (Nov 30) – 453”.
Next I went to page 741, the end of the sanctoral offices. Or so Usuarium told me – I could not have determined this myself. I bookmarked this as “end”. I then paged back a bit, and found St Katherine. Back to Google, search “St Catherine Day”. It tells me Nov 25, so I add a third bookmark, “Katherine (Nov 25).
I went back to Andrew, paged down and found… St Barbara (Dec. 4). Bookmarked that too. That’s a good start.
So… it looks like the offices are in order of saints’s days. And the name of the saint is in the fat red text, the rubric.
Botolph is June 17. So he should be somewhere in the middle. I picked page 600, and jumped. Luckily on this page I discovered St Margaret. Another Google gave me July 20. Added a bookmark for that, and started paging back, looking up saints as I went.
And… eventually… I found St Botolph, on page 558.
I then located the Aarhus breviary, which had defeated me last night. It was harder to read, which had not helped. But the same method worked:
- Mark the start and end of the sanctoral offices.
- Add bookmarks for the saints as you find them, with saint’s day, so you can see how far you are through the liturgical year.
- Do a bit of simple arithmetic to guess which pages are halfway between where you are and what you’re looking for. Then see if you are too early or too late.
- Repeat and rinse.
Here it is, on p.548:
I do wish there was someway to feed back my book marks to Usuarium. One area that the web has NOT solved is collaboration with random strangers.
Some may ask why I didn’t simply use a modern calendar of saints. The answer is that I couldn’t find one that looked useful! Probably one exists… somewhere!
Just to round up the search, I found that the Linköping breviary was not at Usuarium. But google revealed that there was a “Breviarium Lincopense” in 1493. Indeed it led me to a website Alvin here, which had it online and in PDF, and with a link to the manuscript catalogue with detailed description (on p.125) of the contents. The breviarium is folios 1v-23r. The last line of the catalogue informs us that Botolph is on folio 14r. And the folios are indicated in the download of the PDF!
This is a manuscript, tho. I’m not looking forward to collating this text *at all*!
All the same, this is simply fabulous. The raw material of scholarship is just a click or four away… *if* you can find the right search query!
- John Toy, “St Botulph: an English saint in Scandinavia”, in M.O.H.Carver (ed.), The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300, York (2003), pp.565-570.[↩]