Home The Kassel Fragment from an Early South English Legendary
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

The Kassel Fragment from an Early South English Legendary

  • Dirk Schultze EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 5, 2024
Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Abstract

A print of Siliceus’s Arithmetica (Paris 1526), once preserved in the Landesbibliothek in Kassel, but now lost, contained a fragment of one parchment leaf until it was removed in 1904. The text, vaguely identified by Wiedemann (1994) as a “Vita Thomae Beket”, is here more precisely identified as part of the “Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury” from an early South English Legendary. I describe fragment and text in detail, and the text is analysed with respect to dialect and to its position in the transmission history. A diplomatic edition of the text preserved in this fragment makes this early witness of an important Middle English legendary available for the first time.

Works Cited

Aiello, Matthew. 2021. “English Vernacular Script in the Thirteenth Century (c.1175–c.1325)”. In: Wendy Scase, Laura Ashe, Philip Knox and Kellie Robertson (eds). New Medieval Literatures 21. Cambridge: Brewer. 29–77.10.2307/j.ctv1grbbc0.6Search in Google Scholar

Black, William H. (ed.). 1845. The Life and Martyrdom of Thomas Beket, Archbishop of Canterbury: From the Series of Lives and Legends Now Proved to Have Been Composed by Robert of Gloucester. London.Search in Google Scholar

Blurton, Heather and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. 2011. “Rethinking the South English Legendaries”. In: Blurton and Wogan-Browne (eds.). 3–19.Search in Google Scholar

Blurton, Heather and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds.). 2011. Rethinking the South English Legendaries. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Search in Google Scholar

D’Evelyn, Charlotte, and Anna J. Mill (eds.). 1956–59. The South English Legendary: Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS. 145 and British Museum MS. Harley 2277, with Variants from Bodley MS. Ashmole 43 and British Museum MS. Cotton Julius D.ix. EETS o.s. 235–236, 244. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

DIMEV = The Digital Index of Middle English Verse. Based on the Index of Middle English Verse (1943) and its Supplement (1965). Ed. by Linne R. Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser, Elizabeth Solopova et al. <www.dimev.net>. [last accessed 5 March 2024].Search in Google Scholar

eLALME = An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. 2013. Ed. Michael Benskin, Margarete Laing, Vasilis Karaiskos and Keith Williamson. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. <http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html> [last accessed 5 March 2024].Search in Google Scholar

Furnivall, Frederick J. (ed.). 1862. Early English Poems and Lives of Saints (with those of the Wicked Birds Pilate and Judas). Berlin.Search in Google Scholar

Görlach, Manfred. 1974. The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English.Search in Google Scholar

Görlach, Manfred. 1998. Studies in Middle English Saints’ Legends. Heidelberg: Winter. Search in Google Scholar

Gräf, Holger Th. 2000. “Die Kasseler Hofschule als Schnittstelle zwischen Gelehrtenrepublik und internationalem Calvinismus”. Zeitschrift des Vereins für hessische Geschichte 105: 17–32.Search in Google Scholar

Hanna, Ralph. 2015. “The Sizes of Middle English Books, ca. 1390–1430”. Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 18: 181–191.Search in Google Scholar

Hopf, Wilhelm. 1930. Die Landesbibliothek Kassel, 1580–1930. Marburg: Elwertsche Verlagsbuch-handlung.Search in Google Scholar

Horstmann, Carl (ed.). 1887. The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints. EETS o.s. 87. London.Search in Google Scholar

Huson, Daniel H. 1998. “SplitsTree: Analyzing and Visualizing Evolutionary Data”. Bioinformatics 14: 68–73.10.1093/bioinformatics/14.1.68Search in Google Scholar

IMEV = Brown, Carleton Fairchild and Rossell Hope Robbins. 1943. The Index of Middle English Verse. New York: Columbia University Press.Search in Google Scholar

James, Montague Rhodes. 1912. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Liszka, Thomas Richard. 1989. “MS Laud Misc. 108 and the Early History of the South English Legendary”. Manuscripta 33: 75–91.10.1484/J.MSS.3.1304Search in Google Scholar

Liszka, Thomas Richard. 2011 a. “The South English Legendaries”. In: Blurton and Wogan-Browne (eds.). 23–65.Search in Google Scholar

Liszka, Thomas Richard. 2011 b. “Talk in the Camps: On the Dating of the South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 108”. In: Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (eds.). The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative. London: Brill. 31–50.10.1163/9789004192249_004Search in Google Scholar

Manual V = D’Evelyn, Charlotte and Frances A. Foster. 1970. “Saints’ Lives”. In: J. Burke Severs (gen. ed.). The Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500. Volume 2. New Haven, CT: The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.Search in Google Scholar

MED = Middle English Dictionary. 1952–2001. Ed. Robert E. Lewis et al. (eds.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Online edition in Middle English Compendium. 2000–2018. Ed. Frances McSparran et al. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library. <http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/> [last accessed 1 October 2023].Search in Google Scholar

NIMEV = Boffey, Julia and A. S. G. Edwards. 2005. A New Index of Middle English Verse. London: British Library.Search in Google Scholar

Pickering, Oliver S. 2001. “South English Legendary Style in Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle”. Medium Aevum 70: 1–18.10.2307/43630336Search in Google Scholar

Pickering, Oliver S. 2011. “Outspoken Style in the South English Legendary and Robert of Gloucester”. In: Blurton and Wogan-Browne (eds.). 106–145.Search in Google Scholar

Renouard, Philippe. 1894. Bibliographie des Éditions de Simon de Colines, 1520–1546. Paris.10.1163/9789004614413Search in Google Scholar

Robinson, Peter. 1997. “A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century Witnesses to The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”. In: Norman Blake and Peter Robinson (eds.). The Canterbury Tales Project: Occasional Papers. Volume 2. London: Office for Humanities Communication. 69–132.Search in Google Scholar

Robinson, Peter, Norman Blake, Adrian C. Barbrook and Christopher J. Howe. 1998. “The Phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales”. Nature 394: 839.10.1038/29667Search in Google Scholar

Robertson, James Craigie (ed.). 1877. Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Vol. III: William Fitzstephen, Herbert of Bosham. London.Search in Google Scholar

Sawyer, Daniel. 2020. Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350–c.1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780198857778.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Spies, Martin. 2015. “Francis Segar (d 1615) and Abraham van der Doort (1575/80–1640) in Kassel: Two English Artists at the Court of Landgrave Moritz ‘the Learned’”. British Art Journal 16: 20–23.Search in Google Scholar

Taylor, Tristan B. 2023. “Thomas Becket in the South English Legendaries: Genre, Materiality, and Why the Reader Matters”. PhD dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon.Search in Google Scholar

Thiemke, Hermann (ed.). 1919. Die me. Thomas Beket-Legende des Gloucesterlegendars kritisch herausgegeben mit Einleitung. Berlin: Mayer & Müller.Search in Google Scholar

Wiedemann, Konrad. 1994. Manuscripta theologica: Die Handschriften in Folio. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Search in Google Scholar

Wright, William A. (ed.). 1887. The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester. 2 vols. Cambridge.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2024-06-05
Published in Print: 2024-06-04

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Articles
  4. New Judgements on the Artistry of Andreas: The Case of Christ III
  5. The Kassel Fragment from an Early South English Legendary
  6. “Eene schoone engelsche troupe”: William Durham and His Company of Travelling Performers in Ghent (1713) and Germany (1724–1728)
  7. Contours of Status and Power: Seats and Sitting Postures in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
  8. Resisting Ireland’s Necropolitics of Asylum: Refugee Voices in Irish Literature and the Arts
  9. No Country for God: The Brutality of Western Territorial Appropriation in Blood Meridian
  10. Rachel Seiffert: An Interview with Paula Romo-Mayor
  11. Reviews
  12. Michael Lapidge. 2023. Canterbury Glosses from the School of Theodore and Hadrian: The Leiden Glossary. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 17/1–2, 2 vols. Turnhout: Brepols. 824 pp., 1 illustr., €135,00.
  13. Review
  14. Kerstin Majewski. 2022. The Ruthwell Cross and its Texts. A New Reconstruction and an Edition of “The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem”. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 132. Berlin: de Gruyter, 26 + 397 pp., 39 illustr., €154.95 (hc. and e-book).
  15. Olga Timofeeva. 2022. Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English: Records of Communities and People. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 13. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, xv + 204 pp., 29 tables, 14 figures, €99.00 | $149.00.
  16. Christoph Anton Xaver Hauf. 2021. Verbs of Speaking and the Linguistic Expression of Communication in the History of English. Munich Studies in English 47. Berlin: Lang, 324 pp., 52 figures, 36 tables, €76.70 Hardcover | €77.85 Ebook.
  17. Rebecca Brackmann. 2023. Old English Scholarship in the Seventeenth Century: Medievalism and National Crisis. Medievalism 23. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, xii + 235 pp., 14 illustr., £70.00 | $105.00 Hardcover, £29.95 | $24.99 Ebook.
  18. Carolin Harthan. 2022. Medially-Placed Linking Adverbials in Written Academic English: Usage Patterns and Functions. Munich Studies in English 49. Berlin: Lang, 340 pp., 41 figures, 51 tables, €83.20.
  19. Paul Dawson. 2023. The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 246 pp., $ 74.95.
  20. Olaf Kaltmeier, Mirko Petersen, Wilfried Raussert and Julia Roth (eds.). 2021. Cherishing the Past, Envisioning the Future: Entangled Practices of Heritage and Utopia in the Americas. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 163 pp., 3 illustr., € 23.50.
  21. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, Marion Gymnich and Klaus P. Schneider (eds.). 2021. Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World. Cross/Cultures 25. Amsterdam: Brill, 287 pp., € 123.05.
  22. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (eds.). 2021. Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm. London: Routledge, 266 pp., £31.19.
  23. Lasse R. Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jacobsen, James Phelan, Richard Walsh, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen (eds.). 2022. Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 338 pp., 8 illustr., £79.95.
Downloaded on 8.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ang-2024-0020/pdf
Scroll to top button