Abstract
Palimpsests are a fairly rare phenomenon in late medieval manuscripts,1 despite the extant evidence of willful defacement. Manuscript Egerton 3245 at the British Library is an instance of such destructive rubbing. The verso of the opening folio still boasts an architectural structure at the top end of the page, filled with a T-shaped rubbed patch clearly meant to accommodate a standard representation of the Trinity, such as those commonly featured in alabaster panels, for example.2 The image of God the Father holding the crucifix in his lap with the Holy Spirit hovering over it has been carefully erased, leaving the prayer written in the space below it:
Ffadir sone and holy gost
Allmyhtty god sittend in trone
Here me lord of myhttis most
To the for help I make my mone
Thre personis & oo god alone
I preyende to ƥyn heyh mageste
Here ƥat ƥow graunt me wel to done
And on me haue mercy and pite.
To ƥe blissful Trinite be don al reuerens
In whos name I begyn ƥe prik of consciens.
Anxious late-medieval vernacular authors saturated their texts with references to engraved writings. These often refer to inscriptions on wax tablets, a fragile albeit professional medium.
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Notes
This page can be viewed in the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/. For a recent study on English alabasters, see Francis W. Cheetham, Alabaster Images of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).
Cf. Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British Library, 2005), nos. 790.5 & 3769.8. Hereafter abbreviated NIMEV.
See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie. La fréquentation des livres au XIVe siècle (Paris: Hatier, 1993).
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book of Troilus,” ed. B.A. Windeatt (London: Longman, 1984), Book V, 11. 1793–96.
Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81.1 (2006): 97–138.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 27–35 (my italics). This and all subsequent quotations from the Pearl poems are from Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987).
John Lydgate, Temple of Glas, ed. Josef Schick, EETS e.s. 60 (1891), p. 12, 11. 298–307 (my italics).
St. Erkenwald, 11. 49–56 (my italics). Quoted from Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson, eds., The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, trans. and intro. Casey Finch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); in this bilingual edition, St. Erkenwald is reproduced from the 1977 edition by Clifford Peterson.
A recent edition of the two fourteenth-century versions is Brian Murdoch and J.A. Tasioulas, eds., The Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve. Edited from the Auchinleck Manuscript and from Trinity College, Oxford, MS 57 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002); all following data on the various versions is taken from the volume’s very thorough introduction.
Cf. R.E. Lewis, N.F. Blake, and A.S.G. Edwards, Index of Printed Middle English Prose (New York: Garland, 1985), no. 25.
Lines 613–16, 627–32, 681–88 (my italics), from David Burnley and Alison Wiggins, eds., The Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland (July 5, 2003), http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/.
Carl Horstmann, ed., “The Lyfe of Adam aus MS Bodley 596 (c.1430),” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 74 (1885): 53 [345–65].
Printed by R.H. Robbins in his Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 140–3.
John Lydgate, Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. Ernst Sieper, EETS e.s. 84 (1901), p. 149, 11. 5683–99 (my italics).
John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. H. Bergen. EETS e.s. 97 (1906), Book II, pp. 159, 11. 507–516 and pp. 161–62, 11. 607–612 (my italics).
William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (London: Arnold, 1978), Passus 3, 11. 51–52, 68–70, 73–74 (my italics).
John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 (1911), Book II, p. 367, 11. 792–98.
— Olga Weijers, ed. Vocabulaire du livre et de l’écriture au moyen âge, CIVICIMA: Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Åge 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989), in particular the essays by Pierre Gasnault, “Les supports et les instruments de l’écriture à l’époque médiévale,” pp. 20–33, and Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “The Vocabulary of Wax Tablets,” pp. 220–32;
— Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “Wax Tablets,” Language and Communication 9 (1989): 175–191;
— Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “The Vocabulary of Wax Tablets,” Harvard Library Bulletin n.s. 1.3 (1990): 12–19;
— Elisabeth Lalou, ed., Les Tablettes à écrire de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne, Bibliologia 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), which is most helpful as it contains many photographs of extant tablets, many with inscribed accounts.
Cf. Clare Donovan, The Winchester Bible (London: British Library, 1993).
British Library, Additional MS 47682, fol. 10. Cf. The Holkham Bible Picture-Book: A Facsimile, commentary by Michelle Brown (London: British Library, 2007).
Cf. Ruth Mellinkoff, “The Round-Topped Tablets of the Law: Sacred Symbol and Emblem of Evil,” Journal of Jewish Art 1 (1974): 28–43.
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 1224, fol. 71. Cf. Michelle P. Brown, ed., Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (London: British Library, 2007), p. 33.
Cf. Otto Pächt, L’Enluminure médiévale (Paris: Macula, 1997), p. 184, fig. 91.
Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.17.1. See Margaret Gibson, T.A. Heslop, and Richard W. Pfaff, eds., The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury, Publications of the MHRA 14 (London: MHRA, 1992).
See also André Crépin, “Le ‘Psautier d’Eadwine’: l’Angleterre pluri-culturelle,” in Journée d’études anglo-normandes organisée par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Palais de l’Institut, 20 juin 2008, eds. André Crépin and Jean Leclant (Paris: De Boccard, 2009), pp. 139–70.
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 1586, fol. 26. A description may be accessed via the BnF’s “Mandragore” database at http://mandragore.bnf. fr. Cf. Robert Bartlett, Medieval Panorama (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), p. 222, fig. 3.
British Library, Additional MS 47682, fol. 18v. Cf. Michelle Brown, ed. The Holkham Bible Picture-Book: A Facsimile (London: British Library, 2007).
Sarah M. Horrall, general editor, The Southern Version of the Cursor Mundi, vol. 2, ed. Roger R. Fowler (Ottawa: University of Ontario Press, 1990), p. 63, 11. 11086–90.
Transcribed from the Vernon manuscript, fol. 105, col. a (my italics). Cf. Ian A. Doyle, ed., The Vernon Manuscript. A Facsimile (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986).
Particularly following the publication of Lois Ebin, ed., Vernacular Poetics in the Later Middle Ages, Studies in Medieval Culture 16 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984).
Cf. Mary Caroline Spalding, ed. The Middle English Charters of Christ, Bryn Mawr College Monographs 15 (1914), in The Middle English Compendium, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AFW1075.0001.001.
On the medieval notion of the book as metaphorical body, see the seminal study by Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985),
Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
On medieval graffiti in England, no study has yet superseded Violet Pritchard’s English Medieval Graffiti (1967; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Vernon Manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Eng. poet. a 1, fol. 231. In addition to the complete facsimile, the page is reproduced with great clarity and abundantly analyzed by Avril Henry, “‘The Pater Noster in a table ypeynted’ and some other Presentations of Doctrine in the Vernon Manuscript,” in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 89–113.
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© 2011 Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec
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Bourgne, F. (2011). Vernacular Engravings in Late Medieval England. In: Carruthers, L., Chai-Elsholz, R., Silec, T. (eds) Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118805_7
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