Bald's Leechbook: its sources and their use in its compilation

1983 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 153-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
The Third ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Distinct Unit ◽  
Medical Writings

Among the surviving medical writings in Old English, Bald's Leechbook holds a deservedly important place. It is preserved uniquely in London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, a manuscript which may be dated on palaeographical grounds to the mid-tenth century (s. xmed), and which may arguably be attributed to a scriptorium at Winchester.1 Linguistic evidence suggests that this manuscript is in turn a copy of a manuscript written perhaps half a century earlier. Although it is written by one scribe throughout, the manuscript contains three distinct books. A metrical colophon at the end of the second book contains the hexameter ‘Bald habet hunc librum Cild quem conscribere iussit’. Neither Bald nor Cild can be identified, and the ambiguity of conscribere in medieval Latin makes it difficult to determine whether Bald ordered Cild to compile the book or simply to transcribe it. (Because of this ambiguity, I shall refer to the person responsible as the ‘compiler’.) In any case, it is clear that the first two books form a distinct unit, and it is these two books that are customarily described as Bald's Leechbook2 (a practice I shall follow in the present essay). The third book is a collection of medical recipes, of lesser scholarly import, entirely separate from and unrelated to Bald's Leechbook; it will not be discussed further here.

scholarly journals The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

Two composite texts from Archbishop Wulfstan's ‘commonplace book’: theDe ecclesiastica consuetudineand theInstitutio beati Amalarii de ecclesiasticis officiis

1998 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 233-271
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Editorial Work

The great monument of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon monastic liturgy, theRegularis concordia, has been particularly fortunate in its twentieth-century devotees. The most prominent was Dom Thomas Symons, who published numerous learned articles on the text and, in 1953, an edition and translation that are still immensely valuable. More recently, Lucia Kornexl has re-edited theConcordiawith its continuous Old English gloss from London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and provided an exhaustive collation against the second Latin copy in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina B. iii. Building on this detailed editorial work, Kornexl's introductory chapters also suggest new and helpful ways of regarding the transmission of this text and the authority of its two extant manuscripts.

Variant versions of Old English medical remedies and the compilation of Bald's Leechbook

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 235-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey L. Meaney
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Library ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Writings

Over a hundred years ago, T. O. Cockayne published his Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, in which he edited the texts of all the medical writings in Old English he could find. It is massive in its scope, and no modern scholar is ever likely to produce its equal. Yet we, metaphorically standing on Cockaynes's shoulders, and equipped with aids provided by more recent research, are able to examine more closely than he could some of the special features of the field which he revealed to us. Its English substrata have been comparatively neglected, however, and therefore I propose in this paper to examine closely the relationships of the hundred or so medical remedies in Old English which have been preserved – usually in different manuscripts – in two or three versions so close that it is obvious, even on a superficial view, that they either derive from the same English original, or are copied the one from the other. These remedies usually begin by specifying the ailment for which they are recommended, and then go on to set out the ingredients and method of making the appropriate herbal concoction. Nearly all the repeated remedies are found at least once in the Leechbook manuscript, now London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, and so I will begin by describing it, and use it as the basis of the argument. Then I will describe briefly in turn the other manuscripts in which the remedies are found, discussing as I proceed those with minor parallels to Bald's Leechbook; and then, separately and in detail, the important duplications in the two final manuscripts under consideration. It may thereafter be possible to draw some conclusions about the method of compilation of Bald's Leechbook.

scholarly journals The Homiliary of Angers in tenth-century England

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 163-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winfried Rudolf
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
First Time ◽  
Made In

AbstractLatin manuscripts used for preaching the Anglo-Saxon laity in the tenth century survive in relatively rare numbers. This paper contributes a new text to the known preaching resources from that century in identifying the Homiliary of Angers as the text preserved on the flyleaves of London, British Library, MS Sloane 280. While these fragments, made in Kent and edited here for the first time, cast new light on the importance of this plain and unadorned Latin collection for the composition of Old English temporale homilies before Ælfric, they also represent the oldest surviving manuscript evidence of the text.

Wynflæd's wardrobe

1979 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 195-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gale R. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Relative Value

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

The Preface to the Old English Bede: authorship, transmission, and connection with the West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 31-93
Author(s):  
Greg Waite
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
British Library ◽  
The West ◽  
Actual Creation

AbstractLexical and stylistic features indicate that the Preface to the Old English Bede was composed by a writer different from the anonymous Mercian who translated the body of the text. The Preface, therefore, cannot be taken to reveal aspects of the original translator's aims or attitude to the text. Recently discovered collations of the burnt manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Otho B. xi, made by John Smith prior to the 1731 fire, provide further insight, indicating that a copy of the West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List was attached to the Preface by the mid-tenth century. Thus the origins of the Preface may lie in an Alfredian or post-Alfredian initiative to disseminate the translation at some time later than its actual creation.

Domiciling the evangelists in Anglo-Saxon England: a fresh reading of Aldred's colophon in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 101-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis L. Newton ◽  
Francis L. Newton ◽  
Christopher R. J. Scheirer
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Lindisfarne Gospels

AbstractThe Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’ (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv, early eighth century) was glossed in Old English by the tenth-century priest Aldred. Aldred's colophon purports to give information about the eighth-century makers of the manuscript, at Lindisfarne. What is actually reliable about this highly literary colophon is Aldred's purpose in writing the gloss: to give the Evangelists a voice to address ‘all the brothers’ – particularly the Latinless. We propose new interpretations of three OE words (gihamadi, inlad, ora) misunderstood before. Aldred was learned; his sources extend from Ovid through the Fathers to contemporary texts.

scholarly journals The Image of Griffin on Byzantine Seals (On the Example of the State Hermitage Museum Collection)

2021 ◽  
pp. 459-474
Author(s):  
Elena V. Stepanova
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Museum Collection ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Single Image ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Military

In the tenth-century Byzantine sigillography, along with the classical iconographic repertoire (images of the Mother of God, saints, and cross potent), there appeared images of birds, real animals and monsters, and even portraits of the owners of seals. An important place among them belongs to the seals showing griffin, an imaginary monster combining the features of an eagle and a lion. Its images on seals comprise three variants: 1) single image of a griffin, 2) griffin trampling an animal, 3) paired griffins in the flight scene of Alexander the Great. Among the lead seals in the State Hermitage Museum collection, the first variant is represented by the seals of Theophylaktos Argyros, anthypatos patrikios; Stephen, protospatharios, episkeptites and the anagrapheus of the imperial domains protected by God; Constantine, imperial spatharokandidatos and kommerkiarios of Thessalonike; Theophylaktos, patrikios, imperial protospatharios, ἐπὶ τοῦ Χρυσοτρικλίνου and chartoularios of the dromos; Demetrios, imperial spatharokandidatos and ἐπὶ τῆς μεγάλης ἑταιρείας; George; and Theophilus (?). The second variant occurs on the seals of Leo, imperial protospatharios, ἐπὶ τῆς μεγάλης ἑταιρείας, and Staurakios, imperial protospatharios, ἐπὶ τῶν οἰκειακῶν and ἐπὶ τῶν βαρβάρων. The third variant shows a unique seal from the State Hermitage Museum featuring an image of SS. Constantine and Helena on the obverse. Taking the seals from other collections along with the sigillographic monuments from the State Hermitage Museum into account, the author of this paper has run to the conclusion that the appearance of the image of a griffin in the tenth century coincided with the Macedonian Renaissance and was connected mainly with the revival of interest in the antique past. It was the time when this image retained only its apotropaic and decorative function. It was placed on the seals of secular officials, civilian and the military persons.

Napier's ‘Wulfstan’ homily xxx: its sources, its relationship to the Vercelli Book and its style

1977 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 197-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Scragg
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Middle Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
Vercelli Book

The item which Napier printed as no. xxx in his collected edition of the homilies of Archbishop Wulfstan and which is extant complete only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, written at Worcester in the third quarter of the eleventh century, has long been recognized as a compilation in which a few sentences of undoubted Wulfstan authorship are fitted into a remarkable patchwork of extracts from pseudo-Wulfstan and tenth-century anonymous writings. Karl Jost has stated that the opening and concluding sections consist of extracts from the Institutes of Polity and from Napier's homilies xxiv, xlvi and ii, while in the middle section he has identified parallels to two Vercelli homilies, nos. iv and ix, and to Napier xlix, which also occurs in the Vercelli Book as homily x. He has speculated that for another passage the compiler may have drawn upon an earlier version of a text now surviving in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, but he missed a parallel with Vercelli xxi which had been noted by McIntosh. What in effect Jost and others have shown is that in a ‘scissors and paste’ homily in which no more than a few sentences can be ascribed to the compiler (and these perhaps only because he took them from books since lost) we find extracts from a considerable number of works. The purpose of this article is to examine again the sources of the compilation, to show that very probably more than half of it was drawn from a single codex similar to the Vercelli Book, and to illustrate the influence Wulfstan's writings and style had on its author.

scholarly journals The Ælfrician Glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barlow 35: A New Edition and Commentary

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-233
Author(s):  
Claudio Cataldi
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
The Third ◽  
Plant Names ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Comprehensive Discussion

AbstractThe present study provides a full edition and commentary of the three glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barlow 35, fol. 57r–v. These glossaries, which were first partly edited and discussed by Liebermann (1894), are comprised of excerpts from Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary arranged by subject. The selection of material from the two Ælfrician works witnesses to the interests of the glossator. The first glossary in Barlow 35 collects Latin grammatical terms and verbs followed by their Old English equivalents. The second glossary is drawn from the chapter on plant names of Ælfric’s Glossary, with interpolations from other chapters of the same work. This glossary also features twelfth-century interlinear notations, which seem to have a metatextual function. The third glossary combines excerpts from Ælfric’s Glossary with verbs derived from the Grammar. Liebermann transcribed only part of the glosses and gave a brief commentary on the glossaries as well as parallels with Zupitza’s (1880) edition of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary; hence the need for a new edition, which is provided in the present study, along with a comprehensive discussion of the glossaries and a reassessment of the correspondences concerning their Ælfrician sources.

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