Investigating the Provenance, Organisation and Themes of Erfurt, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, I. 81
type: CreativeWork
description: Erfurt, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, I. 81 is a fourteenth-century English manuscript which contains sixty-five hagiographical texts dealing with around fifty saints, all of them born or buried in Britain. Unusually among legendaries of its kind, it is laid out by category: martyrs, confessors and virgins. Many of the texts it contains are obscure and some are unique to it. It was first fully catalogued in 1940, and has since been used as a witness by countless scholars of British hagiography. The manuscript’s date and English provenance are established by its script, but the circumstances and exact location of its creation have long remained unknown. Since its main use has been as a witness to individual texts, very few scholars have had time to investigate its provenance in more detail, or indeed to look at the manuscript as a whole. This thesis aims to do both. It begins by introducing the context of fourteenth-century compilation in which the manuscript sits, and the history of scholarship on the manuscript. It then examines the manuscript as a whole, providing a fresh palaeographical and codicological description, an annotated and updated catalogue of its contents, and a survey of hitherto-unknown references to the manuscript in medieval sources, which reveal that the manuscript spent a period of time at the Dominican friary in Thetford. The compiler’s choice and layout of saints is discussed in detail and contextualised by a comparison with other hagiological documents of all types from the ninth to the fourteenth century: this places the manuscript within a fourteenth-century tradition of ‘national’ hagiographical compilation and an older tradition of catalogues of saints’ resting-places, but also shows that the compiler chose and arranged their selection of saints carefully and deliberately, and that they had a unique and specific interest in saints culted in a zone running from the West Country up the Severn to the West Midlands, and in royal martyrs in part…
abstract: Erfurt, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, I. 81 is a fourteenth-century English manuscript which contains sixty-five hagiographical texts dealing with around fifty saints, all of them born or buried in Britain. Unusually among legendaries of its kind, it is laid out by category: martyrs, confessors and virgins. Many of the texts it contains are obscure and some are unique to it. It was first fully catalogued in 1940, and has since been used as a witness by countless scholars of British hagiography. The manuscript’s date and English provenance are established by its script, but the circumstances and exact location of its creation have long remained unknown. Since its main use has been as a witness to individual texts, very few scholars have had time to investigate its provenance in more detail, or indeed to look at the manuscript as a whole. This thesis aims to do both. It begins by introducing the context of fourteenth-century compilation in which the manuscript sits, and the history of scholarship on the manuscript. It then examines the manuscript as a whole, providing a fresh palaeographical and codicological description, an annotated and updated catalogue of its contents, and a survey of hitherto-unknown references to the manuscript in medieval sources, which reveal that the manuscript spent a period of time at the Dominican friary in Thetford. The compiler’s choice and layout of saints is discussed in detail and contextualised by a comparison with other hagiological documents of all types from the ninth to the fourteenth century: this places the manuscript within a fourteenth-century tradition of ‘national’ hagiographical compilation and an older tradition of catalogues of saints’ resting-places, but also shows that the compiler chose and arranged their selection of saints carefully and deliberately, and that they had a unique and specific interest in saints culted in a zone running from the West Country up the Severn to the West Midlands, and in royal martyrs in part…
author: Smith, Eleanor
language: eng
keywords: Latin palaeography, Medieval history, Hagiography
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b3012d48-e57e-47d4-bffd-cead583c739d/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2024-02-01
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:08Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.117753