Archangel in the Margins: St. Michael in the Homilies of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41

Traditio ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 63-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Johnson

In the preface to his edition of the ninth-century Book of Cerne (Cambridge, University Library, MS L1. 1.10), A. B. Kuypers notes “two great currents of influence, two distinct spirits, Irish and Roman” at work in the composition of the prayers in this private devotional book. Moreover, Kuypers asserts that “these influences are traceable through the whole range of the strictly devotional literature of the period.” Since it is generally acknowledged that the two great forces shaping the early Anglo-Saxon church were the Roman missionaries in the south and Irish monks in the north, it is reasonable to suspect that the Anglo-Saxon devotional practices to St. Michael the Archangel were also influenced by both traditions.

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Nila VáZquez

Scribal Intrusion in the Texts of Gamelyn One of most important steps in the process of editing a manuscript is the identification and correction of the mistakes made by the scribe or scribes involved in its copying process in order to obtain the best text. In some cases, the changes introduced by the scribe, or by the editor who was supervising his work, can easily be noticed because we find out "physical" elements throughout the folio, such as dots under a word as a sign of expunction or carets indicating that a missing word is being added. However, there are many instances of scribal intrusion where only a detailed analysis of the text itself, or even the comparison of different manuscripts, can lead us to the identification of a modified reading. For instance, orthographical changes due to the dialectal provenance of the copyist, or altered lines with a regular aspect. The purpose of this article is to analyse the scribal amendments that appear in some of the earliest copies of The tale of Gamelyn: Corpus Christi College Oxford MS 198 (Cp), Christ Church Oxford MS 152 (Ch), Fitzwilliam Museum McClean 181 (Fi), British Library MS Harley 7334 (Ha4), Bodleian Library MS Hatton Donat. 1 (Ht), British Library MS Lansdowne 851 (La), Lichfield Cathedral MS 29 (Lc), Cambridge University Library Mm. 2.5 (Mm), Petworth House MS 7 (Pw) and British Library MS Royal 18 C.II (Ry2).


1968 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. E. Bosworth

It is not too much to describe the Ṣaffārids of S‚stān as an archetypal military dynasty. In the later years of the third/ninth century, their empire covered the greater part of the non-Arab eastern Islamic world. In the west, Ya'qūb. al-Laith's army was only halted at Dair al-'Āqūl, 50 miles from Baghdad; in the north, Ya'qūb and his brother 'Arm campaigned in the Caspian coastlands against the local 'Alids, and 'Amr made serious attempts to extend his power into Khwārazm and Transoxania; in the east, the two brothers pushed forward the frontiers of the Dār al-Islām into the pagan borderlands of what are now eastern Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier region of West Pakistan; and in the south, Ṣaffārid authority was acknowledged even across the persion Gulf in ‘Umān. This impressive achievement was the work of two soldiers of genius, Ya'qūub and 'Amr, and lasted for little more than a quarter of a century. It began to crumble when in 287/900 the Sāmānid Amīr Ismā'īl b. Aḥmad defeated arid captured ‘Amr b. al-Laith, and 11 years later, the core of the empire, Sīstān itself, was in Sāmānid hands. Yet such was the effect in Sīstān of the Ṣaffārid brothers’ achievement, and the stimulus to local pride and feeling which resulted from it, that the Ṣaffārids returned to power there in a very short time. For several more centuries they endured and survived successive waves of invaders of Sīstān—the Ghaznavids, the Seljūqs, the Mongols—and persisted down to the establishment of the Ṣafavid state in Persia.


Author(s):  
Simon Roffey

Winchester lays claim to being one of the most important cities in British history. The city has a central place in British myth and legend and was once ancient capital and residence of the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman kings. Winchester is also one of the most extensively excavated medieval towns in England and was the training ground for modern British archeology. Situated in south-central England, Winchester was close to key communication routes via the south coast and the important medieval port at Southampton. Founded in the Roman period as Venta Belgarum, close to the site of the Iron Age market settlement, Winchester quickly grew into a prosperous Roman civitas. After the decline of Roman power in Britain, Winchester remained as an important power center in the south and by the mid-7th century was the pre-eminent town in the newly established Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. With the consolidation of Wessex’s power in the 9th and 10th centuries and the eventual re-establishment of control over the former Viking-influenced areas of the midlands and the north, Winchester became the seat of English royal power. With the Norman Conquest in 1066, the early Norman kings sought to keep Winchester as the royal seat. However, with the rising pre-eminence of London in the mid-12th century, Winchester’s power declined as royal and secular power shifted to London. Nevertheless, Winchester was still to remain of some importance throughout the medieval period and its bishop one of the most powerful, influential, and richest lords in medieval England; a status still attested to by the city’s medieval cathedral. As a city of many religious foundations, Winchester’s fortunes waned after the Reformation to be briefly reborn in the later 17th century with the planned construction of Charles II palace on the site of the former medieval castle. Charles’ plans to reinvent Winchester as a revitalized English royal city were aborted with his untimely death in 1688, with the palace, designed by Christopher Wren, barely finished.


Antiquity ◽  
1934 ◽  
Vol 8 (30) ◽  
pp. 185-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. C. Darby

It would seem that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a great part of eastern Britain in the fifth century radiated fan-wise from the gateway of the Wash and of the Fenland Gulf. If this is true, it is not surprising. The position of the continental base of the Anglo-Saxons made the area a natural entry into the Midland plain; and the invaders, with the Wash behind them, gazed upon no unfamiliar scene. The region into which they came may not have been so different from their former homeland on the flats of northern Germany, the homeland which Bede tells us they had so completely deserted. They penetrated by way of the Fenland rivers, up the Nene, the Welland, the Ouse, and the Witham, and this big spread was supplemented to the north and to the south by the smaller river entrances, the Bure, the Yare, the Waveney, the Humber and so on. The archaeological finds, as plotted by Mr Thurlow Leeds, are located along the courses of navigable streams and their tributaries, and are disposed concentrically around the Fenland. Dr Cyril Fox has moreover indicated affinities, during the earlier Saxon period, between the opposite shores of this marshy gulf. All had changed, however, when the tribes emerged into the light of history. The Fenland basin, characterized at an earlier epoch by a certain cultural unity, had now become a frontier region, separating peoples and exercising a repelling action revealed in the making of the Anglo-Saxon States. Kingdoms, finding their limits here, partitioned the marshy wastes between them, and the barrier of the Fens became a permanent feature in the political geography of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.


2001 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 231-245
Author(s):  
Daniel Paul O'Donnell

Until recently, the late Old English poem Durham was known to have been copied in two manuscripts of the twelfth century: Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1. 27 (C) and London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xx (V). C has been transcribed frequently and serves as the basis for Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's standard edition of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. V was almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731. Its version is known to us solely from George Hickes's 1705 edition (H).In a recent article, however, Donald K. Fry announced the discovery of a third medieval text of the poem. Like V, the original manuscript of this ‘third’ version is now lost and can be reconstructed only from an early modern transcription - in this case a copy by Francis Junius no win the Stanford University Library (Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Misc. 010 [J1]). Unlike V, however, Junius's copy is our only record of this manuscript's existence. No other transcripts are known from medieval or early modern manuscript catalogues.


1961 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-207
Author(s):  
C. R. Fay

The writer is Arthur Dobbs (1689–1765), M.P. for Carrickfergus, later Governor of North Carolina, and a lifelong believer in the North-West Passage. The letter is in the Walpole Papers. (Cambridge University Library by courtesy of the Marquis of Cholmondeley), but the Memorandum to which it relates is absent. However, the rough draft of the Memorandum, from which I quote at length, is in the Dobbs Papers from Castle Dobbs, Carrickfergus, now on deposit with the Public Record Office, Belfast, and there marked ‘82, undated’.


Author(s):  
Patrick Zutshi

After a brief introduction, this article provides descriptions of the eight extant Latin manuscripts which are known to have been in the possession of Adam Easton, as well as one manuscript where his ownership is questionable. The manuscripts passed to Norwich Cathedral Priory and are now divided between Cambridge University Library; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Balliol College, Oxford; the Bodleian Library; and the Bibliothèque Municipale, Avignon.


1986 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 119-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle P. Brown

The primary purpose of this article is to draw attention to a little-known Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the early ninth century, now Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 10861, a collection of Latin saints' lives or passions. My interest was first drawn to this manuscript by the brief remarks of J. J. G. Alexander and J. E. Cross (the latter incorporating the personal communication of Bernhard Bischoff), both of whom associated the manuscript with the more famous Book of Cerne (Cambridge, University Library, Ll. 1.10) by virtue of its script and decoration. Closer examination of the manuscript reveals far more complex connections and implications. In particular, the script of BN lat. 10861, which incorporates several distinctive calligraphic features, relates it closely to a group of charters produced at Christ Church, Canterbury, and dated between c. 805 and c. 825. There have hitherto been few attempts to link Anglo-Saxon documentary and book hands, with the notable exceptions of the link between Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 426 (Philippus, Expositio in Iob), which has been dated to the mid-ninth century on the basis of its association with two charters (London, British Library, Cotton Augustus ii. 37, dated 838, and Cotton Charter viii. 36, dated 847) thought to have been written in Wessex, probably at Sherborne or Winchester, and the association of London, BL, Royal 1. E. VI and BL, Add. Ch. 19789, a ninth-century forgery of a document dated 759, recently advanced by Mildred Budny. The establishment of such relationships offers potential for a firmer assessment of the date and place of origin of a particular manuscript than might otherwise be possible; it may also provide a valuable insight into the workings of the scriptorium in question. If, as I believe, a reasonably accurate dating may be advanced for BN lat. 10861 through its association with charter material, further chronological implications may arise, for the decoration of this manuscript places it firmly within the ‘Canterbury’ or ‘Tiberius’ group of manuscripts, and the dating of any one member of the group offers scope for the relative dating of others.


Author(s):  
Avraham Faust

Chapter 3 (‘Ah, Assyria, the Rod of my Anger’: The Assyrian Takeover of the Southwest) briefly outlines the interactions of the Neo-Assyrian empire with the southwest, from the first contacts in the ninth century BCE, to the conquests and annexations of the last third of the eighth. The region was incorporated within the empire quite quickly at the time of Tiglath-pileser III, and Assyrian control was solidified in later campaigns, mainly at the time of Sargon II and Sennacherib. By the end of this century, the entire area was, directly or indirectly, under Assyrian control. The north, with the exception of Tyre, was divided between Assyrian provinces, whereas the south was mostly comprised of semi-autonomous clients.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document