Manuscripts
Manuscript:
Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 122 = Corpus Irish Gospels
  • s. xii
Not yet published
Thomson, R. M., , Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011.  
abstract:
The College of Corpus Christi, Oxford, was a 'Renaissance' institution both as to its foundation date (1517) and the intention of its founder, Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester. Both Fox himself and his choice as the College's first President, John Claymond, were friends of Erasmus, who approved of the foundation and especially of its library. Fox intended his foundation to be a conduit of Italian humanism to Oxford and to the English clergy. In its extraordinary variety, this collection is a challenge to the cataloguer. Some manuscripts relate to the programme of the College's founder and first President, but most of the manuscripts reflect the particular interests of collectors from the late sixteenth century onwards. John Dee's books for example, mostly small, unpretentious and often fragmentary or made up of fragments, constitute a gold-mine for the historian of medieval chemistry and alchemy. These are supplemented by an important group of astronomical, arithmetical and medical texts. There is a substantial clutch of twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts from Lanthony Priory. Noteworthy, too, is the large number of manuscripts in several vernaculars: Old and Middle English and French, Old Irish, Catalan, and even a few words of fifteenth-century Czech. The bindings of the Corpus manuscripts have been wholly neglected. Many books retain important medieval bindings, some as early as the twelfth century, and a substantial number of beautiful blind-stamped bindings of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A special place in the collection is occupied by the approximately 1, 200 manuscript fragments, taken from bindings of books in the library in the late nineteenth century.

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