The Gospel-book, BL, Additional MS 40,000, is one of the many Continental volumes that crossed the English Channel at an early date. Though not unknown to students of Anglo- Saxon England and of Brittany, being listed in all the relevant repertories and mentioned in passing in various studies, it has not hitherto been the subject of detailed investigation. The present chapter will examine in turn the codicology, text, script and decoration of the manuscript, highlighting their implications for the question of its date and origin; the various strata of additions that it received will then be surveyed and their relevance for the history of the volume considered (the added liber vitae, which is of course scrutinised in the other parts of the present collection, is only mentioned in passing here). The absence of full and up-to-date information on many ninth- and tenth-century Gospel-books – there is as yet no conspectus of them akin to that which is available for earlier copies – inevitably restricts the extent to which one can compare it with its peers. However, a clear and systematic account of the volume itself should facilitate fuller comparative analyses in due course – when a larger number of contemporary examples have been published in detail.

CODICOLOGY

BL, Additional MS 40,000 is an unpretentious but competently made volume. Though in fairly good condition overall, it now breaks off incomplete at John 20.5. It is also possible that material has been lost from the front: while Mark, Luke and John all have both a preface and a capitula list, Matthew has neither; nor are there any general prefatory texts (the presence of canon tables might have led one to expect Nouum opus and/or Eusebius Carpiano, the letters which note and expound them). The circumstance that the front of the volume was evidently reworked at an early date means that prior losses are less likely to be represented by physical traces in the form of offsets or leaf-stubs. The manuscript now consists of eighty-seven folios, four of which were added after it had moved to Thorney.