Manuscripts
Manuscript:
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1815
No catalogue entry available
Roberts, Brynley F., Richard Sharpe, Helen Watt, and Cultures of Knowledge, “The correspondence of Edward Lhuyd”, Early modern letters online (EMLO), Online: Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2013. URL: <http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?catalogue=edward-lhwyd>. 
abstract:
The second Keeper of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Edward Lhwyd was an important naturalist, archaeologist, and linguist. He published the first catalogue of English fossils, the Lithophilacii Britannici Ichnographia (1699), in a limited edition of 120 copies, and many of the specific fossils he illustrated survive still in Oxford’s collections. A keen naturalist, he assisted (among many others) John Ray with his botanical work. Perhaps Lhwyd’s greatest claim to scholarly significance, however, rests upon the extensive tours he made of the Celtic lands to continue his work as a naturalist and for the dual purposes of archaeological and linguistic survey. This resulted, on the one hand, in the most sophisticated archaeological work of the day; and on the other, in the first serious comparative study of the Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic, Cornish, and Breton languages. For this latter achievement Lhwyd is now regarded as the father of Celtic linguistics. His results were printed in Glossography (1707), the first volume of his projected Archaeologia Britannica, giving some account additional to what has hitherto been publish’d, of the languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain: from collections and observations in travels through Wales, Cornwal, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland. This linguistic work, of course, must be associated with Lhwyd’s broader intellectual pursuits in Oxford, where he was not only Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, but also an active member of the Oxford Philosophical Society in its early years.

Results for Oxford (225)

Two folios (foliated 124 and 127) that were originally part of Rawlinson B 512, where they were two of the leaves to have stood between what is now ff. 6 and 7. The fragments contain a part of the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick.

  • s. xv/xvi
Not yet published.

Oxford almanac for 1703, to which Edward Lhuyd has added an Irish grammar, a prosody in Irish and Latin and a few minor items, probably during his tour through Ireland.

  • 1703
  • Edward Lhuyd

Two leaves, now in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1436, which formerly belonged to the Book of the White Earl (see Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 610, ff. 59–72 + 123–146). It contains a part of the Dinnshenchas Érenn, covering ten places in Ireland.

  • 1453 x 1454

A paper manuscript containing copies of 33 saints’ Lives from the Codex Insulensis. It was written in 1627 by John Goolde, guardian of the Franciscan friary in Cashel, whose exemplar is thought to have been Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson 505 (itself a copy from Rawl. 485). The copy was intended for John Colgan and his Franciscan associates.

  • 1627
  • John Goolde [friar and scribe]
Not yet published.

A purely hypothetical ‘very ancient book in the British language’ (quendam Brittanici sermonis librum uetustissimum) containing a history of the deeds of the kings of Britain, from Brutus to Cadwalladr, which Geoffrey of Monmouth alleges to have rendered into Latin when writing his Historia regum Britanniae, a work known for its audacious originality. Geoffrey mentions it in the preface to this work, where he claims to have received the book from Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Whatever his source material may have been, or Walter’s role in supplying it, the claim that so much of this was written in the vernacular and contained in a single volume (implicitly, to which few would have access) is commonly regarded as a spurious appeal to authority.

13th-century English manuscript containing Latin Lives of St Martin (by Sulpicius Severus), St Nicholas of Myra (by John the Deacon), St Edmund of Canterbury and St Margaret, De inventione sanctae Crucis, and Lives St Agatha, St Brendan (Navigatio) and St Brigit (by Lawrence of Durham).

  • s. xiii2
  • Oxford, Balliol College, MS 229
  • Oxford, Balliol College, MS 260