Investigating the Provenance, Organisation and Themes of Erfurt, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, I. 81

Abstract

Erfurt, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, I. 81 is a fourteenth-century English manuscript which contains sixty-five hagiographical texts dealing with around fifty saints, all of them born or buried in Britain. Unusually among legendaries of its kind, it is laid out by category: martyrs, confessors and virgins. Many of the texts it contains are obscure and some are unique to it. It was first fully catalogued in 1940, and has since been used as a witness by countless scholars of British hagiography. The manuscript’s date and English provenance are established by its script, but the circumstances and exact location of its creation have long remained unknown. Since its main use has been as a witness to individual texts, very few scholars have had time to investigate its provenance in more detail, or indeed to look at the manuscript as a whole. This thesis aims to do both. It begins by introducing the context of fourteenth-century compilation in which the manuscript sits, and the history of scholarship on the manuscript. It then examines the manuscript as a whole, providing a fresh palaeographical and codicological description, an annotated and updated catalogue of its contents, and a survey of hitherto-unknown references to the manuscript in medieval sources, which reveal that the manuscript spent a period of time at the Dominican friary in Thetford. The compiler’s choice and layout of saints is discussed in detail and contextualised by a comparison with other hagiological documents of all types from the ninth to the fourteenth century: this places the manuscript within a fourteenth-century tradition of ‘national’ hagiographical compilation and an older tradition of catalogues of saints’ resting-places, but also shows that the compiler chose and arranged their selection of saints carefully and deliberately, and that they had a unique and specific interest in saints culted in a zone running from the West Country up the Severn to the West Midlands, and in royal martyrs in particular. This interest is further demonstrated by extensive marginalia in the hand of the copyist (who, it is argued, is likely to have been the compiler) throughout the manuscript. These marginalia are transcribed in full in the Appendix, and discussed in detail alongside later marginalia of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which show that readers’ uses of, and responses to, the manuscript changed as it left the copyist’s location (somewhere between Bodmin and Shaftesbury) and made its way to Thetford. At an early stage in its history, the manuscript was used as a source by the author of the Cathalogus sanctorum in Anglia pausancium, a catalogue of saints’ resting-places: the Cathalogus’ debt to the manuscript is examined in full, and contextualised with reference to the Cathalogus’ possible origin point and its other sources, some of which show signs of a similar trajectory northeast. Finally, this thesis draws the above material together to offer some suggestions for the manuscript’s point of origin – chief of which is Exeter Cathedral – and to discuss the manuscript’s function and context there and elsewhere. It argues that the logic underlying the manuscript’s compilation was contingent on both historical and geographical context, and that new meanings had to be found for the manuscript as it moved in space and time.