Michael Johnston (at Purdue) has been in touch to let me know that the provenance information for a manuscript in the massive online resource Medieval Libraries of Great Britain 3 (MLGB3) has been updated on the basis of a brief note in my book.
This might seem a very small thing, and in some ways it is! But MLGB3 is a vitally helpful tool, the product of many hours of labour, first by N. R. Ker, creator of its first two incarnations, and then by those who have more recently put it online as a malleable reference tool. You can read about the steady, painstaking, done-when-it’s-done nature of Ker’s scholarship on another of his projects here. It’s difficult and pleasing to add anything to his output!
The manuscript in question is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 99. I’ve been returning to this book every now and then since I was a fresh postgraduate student. It contains a copy of The Prick of Conscience, and, before that, a set of synodal statutes.
The copy of The Prick of Conscience is memorably graced by marginal drawings of fish (and what looks like at least one eel), and small heads drawn into the ascenders of some letters in the top lines of some pages. Whimsy in book decoration in this period existed well beyond the de luxe productions which make it into exhibitions and coffee-table books today.
At the end of the poem, a note attributes the copying to a Brother John Stanys, canon of Thetford. Earlier incarnations of MLGB assigned it to the Cluniac priory at Thetford, but it struck me that this was a collection curiously focused on pastoral care for that house, especially when Thetford also hosted an Augustinian community which held pastoral responsibilities. And Stanys describes himself a canon. It is therefore more probable that this book originates among the Thetford Augustinians.
I’m slightly embarrassed that I didn’t think to propose this to MLGB3 myself! But, nevertheless, it’s nice to think that my work has contributed. This kind of thing is unglamorous, but such little atoms of scholarship can combine over time into remarkable structures, and occasionally prove unexpectedly crucial to someone else’s researches.
Comments