Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
1 - Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
TWO SCRAPS OF parchment, each about 3½ inches long and an inch high (90 × 23mm and 95 × 22mm respectively), were presented publicly for the first and perhaps last time as Lot 1 at an auction at Sotheby's in London on July 8, 2014. They were described as
The West Saxon Gospels, two fragments from a gospel book, in Anglo-Saxon, manuscript on vellum [England (probably south-west England), second half of the Tenth Century (c. 960–80)]
One fragment has parts of John 8:52–53 on the recto:3
ne bið he næfre dead;
[Cwyst þu þæt þu sy mærra þon]ne ure fæder Abraham.
[…he will never be dead; / Are you saying that you are greater than our father Abraham?]
And part of John 9:2 on the verso:
leorningcnihtas hine a[xodon 7 cwædon; Lareow. hwæt syngode]
þes oððe his magas þæ[t]
[…disciples asked him and said, ‘Teacher, who sinned, / this one or his parents, that…’].
The second fragment, in the same hand and ink and approximately the same size, has the remains of a single line from John 8:54 on its recto:
min Fæder is þe me [wuldrað. be þam ge cweðaþ þæt he sy ure god]
[It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘he is our God’].
The blank space below the line and the somewhat elongated descenders of f, s, and þ indicate that this was the last line on the page; the verso is blank.
The fragments, recently discovered in an unidentified private collection outside the United Kingdom, were reused as endbands in a sixteenth-century English binding; the second fragment is still attached to a scrap of binding with some stitching. The two fragments were sold for £128,500 (about $200,000 at the time) to a private collector in the United States.
These fragments are important for numerous reasons. The first is their rarity. Very few new manuscripts of Old English [hereafter OE] are discovered these days, and still fewer go on the auction block. The Sotheby's fragments may well be the only newly-found OE to emerge for public sale for many years to come. For this reason alone, they are worth close consideration, despite their small size.
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- Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: The European ContextEssays in Honour of David F. Johnson, pp. 15 - 28Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022