1994 Prospectus: Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 201 (MS F) Manuscript Description

Location and Identification

Corpus Christi College, Oxford 201

Date

S. xv[1]

Contents

B version of Piers Plowman.

Writing Surface

Written on vellum, "on poor membrane" (Doyle 1986, 40). The surface varies in quality with a few holes which the scribe wrote around. In several instances, the vellum is sufficiently transluscent that ink has bled through, making photocopies virtually impossible to read. The manuscript itself is tolerably clear in such cases.

Size

Size of the page: .......................293 x 173 mm.

Size of written area: .................243 x 110 mm.

Condition

THIS INFORMATION IS YET TO BE COMPILED

Collation

ii + 1[10] (3 & 8 singles) 2[10] (2 & 9 singles) 3[10] (4 & 7 singles) 4[10] (3 & 8 singles) 9[10] (4 & 7 singles) 6[8] (5 & 7 singles) 7[10] (3 & 8 singles) 8[8] (3 & 6 singles) 9[10] [4 & 7 singles] 10[10] (8-10 missing).

Page Layout

Foliation Markers: ....................pencil top right recto

Average number of lines: .........43

Strophic divisions are marked with paraphs, but lines are not skipped at strophe breaks.

Decoration and Structure Markers

The initial illuminated capital with "demi-vinet of late fourteenth-, or early fifteenth-century provincial, style" (Kane-Donaldson, 8, following A. I. Doyle) on fol. 1[r], depicts a sleeping dreamer on a gold-leaf background. Subsequent passus divisions are ornately pen-drawn in green and red [passus 2-?] and later in blue and red. The Latin texts appear in red with green initial capitals, while line-initial capitals and high-lighted proper nouns are touched in red. Paraph markers alternate between green and red through fol. 68v and after that in blue and red. Passus numbers appear sporadically in red roman top right recto:

[LIST FOLS.]

Each passus ends with an explicit, and after the Prologue, each be- gins with an incipit in textura. Passus divisions differ from all other Piers Plowman manuscripts with only sixteen divisions. See Adams "The Reliability of the Rubrics of Piers Plowman B," Medium AEvum 54 (1985): 208-32. At the usual B division for passus six, a sixteenth-century hand correctly marks the division in the right margin.

Writing material

THIS INFORMATION IS YET TO BE COMPILED

Paleographic Description

Script:

The main text script is a workmanlike current anglicana with the Latin quotations, some emphasized proper nouns, and structure markers in fere-textura, some with initial Lombard capitals, by the main text hand. Corrections, for the most part interlinear, are by the main scribe or by contemporaries. A few marginal annotations are in a later, probably sixteenth-century, secretary hand.

Abbreviations and Suspensions

Punctuation:

THIS INFORMATION IS YET TO BE COMPILED

Word Separation:

The scribe frequently separates words beginning with the suffixes a-, be-, by-, de-, for-, mys-, to-, vn-, and y-. We have linked the morphemes in such words with a hyphen. Where the scribe's use differs from the word divisions of OED citation forms, we have linked parts of words separated in the manuscript with a hyphen. When separate words appear to be written together as one, we have again adopted the OED citation form and indicated the manuscript reading in a correction tag. For example "at ese" is often written "a tese," and that spelling probably indicates the scribe's pronunciation of the phrase and perhaps his misidentification of its morphemic structure.

The scribe marks the beginning of every line with a red touch on the initial capital letter, though in some instances, particularly h, the form is the same as the minuscule if it were not touched by the red ink. The scribe appears to have intended as well to mark the end of every line with a punctus. Phrases within the half line are sometimes, though not steadily, marked with a punctus elevatus.

Scribe

THIS INFORMATION IS YET TO BE COMPILED

Corrector

Corrections are contemporary, usually interlinear, and appear to be in the main hand.

Origin

Doyle says it is "attributed to Essex" [1968, 40].

Provenance

Given to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, by W. Fulman, M. A. a former fellow of the college (Skeat, 1869, xxvii).

Binding

date, type, tooling, decoration, history--information to be compiled

Bibliography

Bright, A. H. New Light on Piers Plowman. Oxford: Oxford U P,

1928. Frontispiece is a facsimiles of fol. 1.

Doyle, A. I. "Remarks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman."

in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays

in Honour of G. H. Russell. Ed. G. Kratzmann and J. Simpson.

Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986. 35-48.

Hecht, H., and L. L. Schücking. Die englische Literatur im Mittelalter.

Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1927.

99. [facsimile image of the top portion of the initial page.]

Kane, George, and E. T. Donaldson, eds. Piers Plowman: the B Version.

London: Athlone Press, 1975.

Skeat, W. W., ed. The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman ....

EETS OS 38. London: Oxford U P, 1869.