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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- The Early History of the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper and its So-Called ‘Oaths’
- Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 201 and its Copy of Piers Plowman
- Did John Gower Rededicate his Confessio Amantis before Henry IV’s Usurpation?
- Le Songe Vert, BL Add. MS 34114 (the Spalding Manuscript), Bibliothèque de la ville de Clermont, MS 249 and John Gower
- Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33: Thoughts on Reading a Work in Progress
- The Rawlinson Lyrics: Context, Memory and Performance
- Linguistic Boundaries in Multilingual Miscellanies: The Case of Middle English Romance
- What Six Unalike Lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253 Have Alike in Manuscript Layout
- Evidence for the Licensing of Books from Arundel to Cromwell
- Bishops, Patrons, Mystics and Manuscripts: Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love and the Arundel and Holland Connections
- The Choice and Arrangement of Texts in Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125: A Tentative Narrative about its Material History
- ‘Thys moche more ys oure lady mary longe’: Takamiya MS 56 and the English Birth Girdle Tradition
- Bookish Types: Some Post-Medieval Owners, Borrowers and Lenders of the Manuscripts of The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy
- Laurentius Guglielmus Traversagnus and the Genesis of Vaticana Codex Lat. 11441, with Remarks on Bodleian MS Laud Lat. 61
- The Travels of a Quire from the Twelfth Century to the Twenty-First: The Case of Rawlinson B 484, fols. 1–6
- William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection
- Gutenberg Meets Digitization: The Path of a Digital Ambassador
- A Bibliography of Toshiyuki Takamiya
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- York Medieval Press: Publications
The Rawlinson Lyrics: Context, Memory and Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- The Early History of the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper and its So-Called ‘Oaths’
- Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 201 and its Copy of Piers Plowman
- Did John Gower Rededicate his Confessio Amantis before Henry IV’s Usurpation?
- Le Songe Vert, BL Add. MS 34114 (the Spalding Manuscript), Bibliothèque de la ville de Clermont, MS 249 and John Gower
- Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33: Thoughts on Reading a Work in Progress
- The Rawlinson Lyrics: Context, Memory and Performance
- Linguistic Boundaries in Multilingual Miscellanies: The Case of Middle English Romance
- What Six Unalike Lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253 Have Alike in Manuscript Layout
- Evidence for the Licensing of Books from Arundel to Cromwell
- Bishops, Patrons, Mystics and Manuscripts: Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love and the Arundel and Holland Connections
- The Choice and Arrangement of Texts in Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125: A Tentative Narrative about its Material History
- ‘Thys moche more ys oure lady mary longe’: Takamiya MS 56 and the English Birth Girdle Tradition
- Bookish Types: Some Post-Medieval Owners, Borrowers and Lenders of the Manuscripts of The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy
- Laurentius Guglielmus Traversagnus and the Genesis of Vaticana Codex Lat. 11441, with Remarks on Bodleian MS Laud Lat. 61
- The Travels of a Quire from the Twelfth Century to the Twenty-First: The Case of Rawlinson B 484, fols. 1–6
- William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection
- Gutenberg Meets Digitization: The Path of a Digital Ambassador
- A Bibliography of Toshiyuki Takamiya
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- York Medieval Press: Publications
Summary
In 1984 Bernard Quaritch, Ltd of London published catalogue No. 1036, offering for sale 134 leaves and fragments of leaves abstracted from medieval manuscripts, entitled Bookhands of the Middle Ages, and carrying as a subtitle on the first page, Medieval Manuscript Leaves Principally from a Collection Formed in the 19th Century. The catalogue proved to be the first of a series that was to have an important effect on the preservation of medieval manuscript leaves and fragments, though it did so at least in part by assigning prices to each of the 134 items that at the time seemed really very high – though in most cases they have not seemed so since. The fact that many of the items came from the collection formed by the Oxford antiquary Philip Bliss (1786–1857), having been acquired by him from local binders, according to Sir Frederic Madden, ‘for the price of a pot of beer’, no doubt helped to allay objections from those medievalists who object to commerce in such manuscript leaves for fear that their sale will encourage the breakup of medieval manuscripts for profit. In any event, the catalogue was a watershed, and brought not only higher prices, but also greater attention and interest to what proved to be a burgeoning market.
Perhaps the most intriguing item in the catalogue was one that appeared at the very end of a section called ‘Medieval Schooling and Intellectual History’, no. 108, and was described thus:
Aristotle. Small fragment of text from the second book of the Poetics in which Aristotle argues that the tendency to laughter is a force for the good which can have an instructive value; in Greek, on a charta lintea (or cloth-parchment) of Silos or Burgos manufacture, written in brown ink, in an archaistic square minuscule by an Arabic or Spanish scribe; approx. 55 × 116mm., one outer edge coated with a yellowish pigment, perhaps a size or similar strengthening agent, other edges charred and now very fragile; preserved within a bifolium from a 14th-century monk’s personal notebook of miscellenea containing abecedarian sentences, several quotations from Albertus Magnus, and a curious 6 ll. verse warning or anathema beginning, ‘Pagina … /Quam si quis tanget, morietur morte suprema/ …’. 185 × 136 mm.
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- Information
- Middle English Texts in TransitionA Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th birthday, pp. 104 - 115Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014
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