The Sources Of Archbishop Parker S Collection Of Mss At Corpus Christi College Cambridge

M. R. James' much-sought-after study of the sources of the Parker manuscript collection at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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Excerpt from The Sources of Archbishop Parker's Collection of Mss at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: With a Reprint of the Catalogue of Thomas Markaunt's Libarary Historians, palaeographers, and archaeologists, will all agree that it is very important to determine the places in which ancient books were written or preserved. If we can trace the career of a manuscript from the scriptorium where it took shape to the library shelf on which it rests to-day, we may find that its history will throw light on the most unexpected matters. It may shew us the origin of a school of handwriting: it may explain the genesis of a type of text: or it may account for the presence of a particular element in the works of a famous writer. Some of the notable results gained by study of the history of individual manuscripts will appear as I proceed. They are probably sufficient to justify the rash attempt I have made to determine the original homes of the books comprising that famous collection, the Parker Mss. at Corpus Christi College. I say that my attempt is rash, because it is not to be expected that any one person should be capable of seizing upon and rightly appreciating all the indications which are significant and might be made to yield the information we seek. Still, it so happens that a very considerable proportion of the books in Archbishop Parker's collection can be assigned to their ancient homes with certainty, or with great probability; and, for the rest, I have noted such indications as may in the future enable myself, or other searchers in the same field, to fill up the gaps I have been forced to leave. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

M. R. James (1862-1936) is probably best remembered as a writer of chilling ghost stories, but he was an outstanding scholar of medieval literature and palaeography, who served both as Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and as Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and many of his stories reflect his academic background. His detailed descriptive catalogues of manuscripts owned by colleges, cathedrals and museums are still of value to scholars today. In this ground-breaking book, first published in 1899, James analysed 482 manuscripts in the renowned Parker Collection at Cambridge for evidence of their provenance. James argued that by discovering what books were owned by individual English monasteries in the middle ages, historians could better understand medieval English intellectual life. He established the origin of nearly 200 of the books, and the results of his investigations (one volume, for example, belonged to Thomas Becket) still make fascinating reading today.

Dr Hackett discovered in the Angelica Library in Rome a manuscript containing a unique text of the first constitution of Cambridge University. The centrepiece of this book is a critical edition of the text with an English translation on facing pages. The importance of his discovery for historians of Cambridge and of medieval university education cannot be overestimated. The Cambridge constitutions form a complete code, promulgated at a remarkably early date (c. 1250). Dr Hackett shows that Oxford lagged more than 50 years behind Cambridge in codifying its statutes and neither Paris nor Bologna, the oldest of all universities, had a written constitution or code of laws at this time.

Not only does the library have a long and complex history and politics, but it has an ambivalent presence in Western culture – both a site of positive knowledge and a site of error, confusion, and loss. Nevertheless, in literary studies and in the humanities, including book history, the figure of the library remains in many senses under-researched. This collection brings together established and up-and-coming researchers from a number of practices – literary and cultural studies, gender studies, book history, philosophy, visual culture, and contemporary art –with an effective historical sweep ranging from the time of Sumer to the present day. In the context of the rise of archive studies, this book attends specifically and meta-critically to the figure of the library as a particular archival form, considering the traits that constitute (or fail to constitute) the library as institution or idea, and questions its relations to other accumulative modes, such as the archive in its traditional sense, the museum, or the filmic or digital archive. Across their diversity, and in addition to their international standard of research and writing, each chapter is unified by commitment to analyzing the complex cultural politics of the library form.

This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.