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    The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
    The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
    The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
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    The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

    By M. R. James

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    "The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts" by M. R. James. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateNov 26, 2019
    ISBN4057664625731
    The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
    Author

    M. R. James

    Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, where his father was a curate, but the family moved soon afterwards to Great Livermere in Suffolk. James attended Eton College and later King's College Cambridge where he won many awards and scholarships. From 1894 to 1908 he was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and from 1905 to 1918 was Provost of King's College. In 1913, he became Vice-Chancellor of the University for two years. In 1918 he was installed as Provost of Eton. A distinguished medievalist and scholar of international status, James published many works on biblical and historical antiquarian subjects. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1930. His ghost story writing began almost as a divertissement from his academic work and as a form of entertainment for his colleagues. His first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published in 1904. He never married and died in 1936.

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      Book preview

      The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - M. R. James

      M. R. James

      The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      goodpress@okpublishing.info

      EAN 4057664625731

      Table of Contents

      HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY. No. 17

      THE WANDERINGS AND HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS

      BY

      M. R. JAMES, Litt.D. , F.B.A.

      THE WANDERINGS AND HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS

      Some Specimen Pedigrees of MSS.

      The Limits of the Subject

      Greek MSS.: Production and Dispersion

      European Centres for Greek MSS.: Continental

      Greek MSS. in England

      Latin MSS.

      Chronological Survey

      Wanderings of Latin MSS.: the Continent

      Latin MSS. in England

      Catalogues of MSS.

      The Evidence of MSS. Themselves

      English Libraries

      English MSS. on the Continent

      Remains of Medieval Libraries

      Disappearance of Classical and other MSS.

      Collectors of Books

      Curiosities of Research

      The Moral

      HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY.

      HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY. No. 17

      Table of Contents

      Edited by C. Johnson, M.A., and J. P. Whitney, D.D., D.C.L.

      THE WANDERINGS AND

      HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS

      Table of Contents

      BY

      Table of Contents

      M. R. JAMES,

      Litt.D.

      , F.B.A.

      Table of Contents

      PROVOST OF ETON

      SOMETIME PROVOST OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

      LONDON

      SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING

      CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE

      NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

      1919

      THE WANDERINGS AND

      HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS

      Table of Contents

      The

      Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts is the title of this book. To have called it the survival and transmission of ancient literature would have been pretentious, but not wholly untruthful. Manuscripts, we all know, are the chief means by which the records and imaginings of twenty centuries have been preserved. It is my purpose to tell where manuscripts were made, and how and in what centres they have been collected, and, incidentally, to suggest some helps for tracing out their history. Naturally the few pages into which the story has to be packed will not give room for any one episode to be treated exhaustively. Enough if I succeed in rousing curiosity and setting some student to work in a field in which an immense amount still remains to be discovered.

      In treating of so large a subject as this—for it is a large one—it is not a bad plan to begin with the particular and get gradually to the general.

      Some Specimen Pedigrees of MSS.

      Table of Contents

      I take my stand before the moderate-sized bookcase which contains the collection of MSS. belonging to the College of Eton, and with due care draw from the shelves a few of the books which have reposed there since the room was built in 1729.

      The first shelf I lay hands upon contains some ten large folios. Four of them are a single great compilation, beginning with a survey of the history of the world and of the Roman Empire, and merging into the heraldry of the German noblesse. It was made, we find, in 1541, and is dedicated to Henry VIII. Large folding pictures on vellum and portraits of all the Roman Emperors adorn the first volume. It is a sumptuous book, supposed to be a present from the Emperor Ferdinand to the King. How did it come here? A printed label tells us that it was given to the college by Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, in 1750 (he had previously given it to Sir Richard Ellys on whose death Lady Ellys returned it: so much in parenthesis). Then, more by luck than anything else, I find mention of it in the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary; his friend Thomas Jett, F.R.S., owned it and told him about it in 1722: he had been offered £100 a volume for it; it was his by purchase from one Mr. Stebbing. It was sold, perhaps to Palmerston, at Jett's auction in 1731. The gap between Henry VIII. and Stebbing remains for the present unfilled. So much for the first draw.

      Next, a yet larger and more ponderous volume, Decreta Romanorum Pontificum—the Papal decretals and the Acts of the Councils. It is spotlessly clean and magnificently written in a hand of the early part of the twelfth century, a hand which very much resembles that in use at Christchurch, Canterbury. I am indeed, tempted to call it a Canterbury book; only it bears none of the marks which it ought to have if it was ever in the library of the Cathedral Priory. Was it perhaps written there and sold or given to a daughter-house, or to some abbey which had a less skilful school of writers? Not to Rochester, at any rate, though Rochester did get many books written at Christchurch. If it had belonged to Rochester there would have been some trace, I think, of an inscription on the lower margin of the first leaf. No; the only clue to the history is a title written on the fly-leaf in the fifteenth century, which says: The book of the decrees of the Pope of Rome, and it begins on the second leaf "tes viii." That does not tell us much; I do not recognize the handwriting of the title, though I guess it to have been written when the book came to Eton College. All I can say is that here is an example of a large class, duplicates of indispensable and common works, which the abbey libraries possessed in great numbers, and often parted with, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to colleges and private purchasers.

      Next we take out a thin folio written on paper. This time it is a Greek book which we open; it has the works of the Christian apologists Athenagoras and Tatian, and a spurious epistle of Justin Martyr, copied in 1534 by Valeriano of Forlí. A single MS. now at Paris, written in 914, is the ancestor of all our copies of these texts; but it has been shown that this Eton book is not an immediate copy of that, but of one now at Bologna. Obviously it was written in Italy. How does it come to be here? Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of the college, spent the best part of twenty years in Italy, mainly as Ambassador to the Court of Venice for James I., and left all his MSS. to the college at his death in 1639. There are numbers of MSS. from Italy in this bookcase, and, though hardly any of them have Wotton's name in them, it is not to be doubted that they came from him. A good proportion of them, too, can be traced back a step farther, for they have in them the name or the arms or the handwriting of Bernardo Bembo of Venice, the father of the more famous Cardinal Pietro Bembo. This Justin volume is not of that number, but we have a clue to its history which may be deemed sufficient.

      I turn to another shelf and open a large book written somewhere about the year 1150, which was given to the college

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