 | |  |
Notes
I am very grateful to my colleagues William O. Harris and Robert N. Essick for reading this paper and making a number of suggestions which led to its improvement.
For biographical data, see George R. Keiser, "Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91: Life and Milieu of the Scribe," Studies in Bibliography, 32 (1979):158-179; and "More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton," Studies in Bibliography, 36 (1983):111-119.
See the seminal discussion of P. R. Robinson, "The 'Booklet': A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts," Codicologica, 3 (1980):46-69; and some caveats in "Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations," Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986):100-111.
For Lincoln 91, the basic description is that of D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen eds., The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91) (Scolar, 1975; rev. 1977); see pp. viii-ix on booklets, pp. xii-xvi on collation; pp. xvii-xx for contents. The paper-stocks were identified by Sarah M. Horrall, "The Watermarks of the Thornton Manuscripts," Notes and Queries, 225 (1980):385-386; when I use the term "paper-stock" I mean to identify one of Horrall's separate watermarks. Below I italicize watermarked folios; all half-sheets except London f. 144 and perhaps Lincoln ff. 268-270 are the result of cancels or lost leaves and are not original.
An error in the original Scolar collation of the quire was noted by Keiser; see Owen, "The Collation and Descent of the Thornton Manuscript," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6 (1975):218-225, further corrected on provenance by Keiser, "A Note on the Descent of the Thornton Manuscript," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6 (1976):346-348. On the initial status of the quire (it likely began with f. 154 and has been reversed), see John J. Thompson, "The Compiler in Action: Robert Thornton and the 'Thornton Romances' in Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91," in Derek Pearsall ed., Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England (1983), pp. 113-124.
Keiser, "'To Knawe God Almyghtyn': Robert Thornton's Devotional Book," in James Hogg ed., Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache (2 vols.; Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik, 1984), II:103-129, makes a number of important suggestions about this booklet. He proves its integrity (as against Brewer, who wished to divide it into three separate booklets) and gives revised collation diagrams with paper-stocks marked; these include new interpretations of quires 13 and 15.
This collation, revising that of the facsimile, was proposed by Thompson, "Textual Lacunae and the Importance of Manuscript Evidence: Robert Thornton's Copy of the Liber de Diversis Medicinis," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1982):270-275.
For contents and discussion, see Karen Stern, "The London 'Thornton' Miscellany," Scriptorium, 30 (1976):26-37, 201-218. Horrall, "The London Thornton Manuscript: A New Collation," Manuscripta, 23 (1979):99-103, was the first to attempt a collation: since all the leaves are now mounted individually, such an effort is entirely dependent upon pairing watermarked and unwatermarked leaves. I offered some probable corrections of Horrall's collation, Studies in Bibliography, 37 (1984):122-130; these are incorporated below.
Angus McIntosh, "The Textual Transmission of the Alliterative Morte Arthure," in Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn eds., English and Medieval Studies presented to J. R. R. Tolkien (1962), pp. 231-240; the body of the article discusses the Lincolnshire exemplar, the second being mentioned pp. 231-232 and 231, n. 3. For convenience (and with no claims for geographical accuracy) I simply refer to this source as "the Doncaster exemplar."
The only description occurs in A. I. Doyle, "The Manuscripts," in David A. Lawton ed., Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background (1982), pp. 93 and 143-144, n. 18.
These three romances appear to have circulated together in other exemplars than the Doncaster; they recur several times in the same manuscripts, e.g. Cambridge Univ. Library Ff.ii.38; British Library, Cotton Caligula A.ii; and Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61. In contrast, the romance texts which follow in quires 8-9 may well have been derived from separate exemplars: the St. Christopher is unique, and Degrevant appears elsewhere only in Cambridge Univ. Library Ff.i.6 (the Findern anthology).
See Keiser, "'To Knaw,'" pp. 105-107. Keiser discusses "þe Holy Boke Gratia Dei" at Viator, 12 (1981):289-317.
These dates depend on Horrall's identifications of the paper-stocks. P, the unique form of Booklet IV, is associated with Briquet 7903-7904, stocks first recorded 1413, but with variants to as late as 1442. All the other datable paper-stocks belong to the period 1427-1444.
The Lincoln ms. could reflect a binding done for or by Robert Thornton; at least, down to 1832, the manuscript had what sounds like a fifteenth-century binding of oak boards with white leather. See Sir Frederic Madden, Sir Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems, Bannatyne Club, 61 (1839), p. Ln.
Some of the rules governing disposition of religious pieces into different fascicles are worth noting. The booklets now in the London ms. all seem to have been conceived as verse collections; in any event all prose was reserved for the Lincoln Booklet III. London fascicles also seem to have been reserved for fairly extensive religious poems with a narrative content; Lincoln tends much more toward the lyrical in its verse pieces. Anything smacking of Rolle was saved for Lincoln as well. Generally, as Keiser has suggested, London fascicles seem to have been thought of less as materials for devotion than as "salvation history." Even the romances of London Booklets IIa and III have a strongly religious ethos, a crusading spirit.
| | |