{ "viewingDirection": "left-to-right", "metadata": [ { "label": "Origin", "value": "Canterbury. Mid-11th century (after 1039).

The latest event to which the 'Cambridge Songs' refer in Part IV is the death of the emperor Conrad II (d. 1039). The production of the rest of the manuscript is contemporary (Robinson). The connection with (Benedictine abbey of St Augustine) is made on the basis of palaeographical evidence: specifically, the use of a punctuation system similar to that found in other of the abbey's books (Bishop).

T.A.M. Bishop, English Caroline Minuscule<\/i>, Oxford Palaeographical Handbooks (Oxford, 1971), esp. pl. iv(b). <\/div>
Rigg and Wieland (1975), pp. 117-119.<\/div>
Robinson (1988), no. 44. <\/div><\/div>
<\/p>" }, { "label": "Origin Place", "value": "Canterbury." }, { "label": "Provenance", "value": "iii verso<\/a>: 'D. xi Gra ii': pressmark of the Benedictine abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury.A catalogue of the library of the Benedictine abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury, compiled between 1375 and 1420, survives in a transcription made between 1474 and 1497. Though this catalogue refers to the location of books using the same pressmark system as that found inscribed in this manuscript on f. iii verso (see above), this manuscript is not found among those books recorded in the catalogue. Barker-Benfield argued that further leaves may have been lost from the end of that manuscript and, furthermore, through the use of cross-references, it is possible to reconstruct what their likely contents were - among them, the present manuscript.
Dublin, Trinity College, MS 360<\/div>
Barker-Benfield (2008), pp. 3, 1615, 1701, 1709-1714; BA1.M1847<\/div><\/div>
The manuscript remained at the Benedictine abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury through the 15th century: folio numbers were added to the leaves of the manuscript and to the table of contents by the hand of Clement Canterbury (fl. 1463-95).
Barker-Benfield (2018), p. 1839<\/div>
Gibson et al. (1983), p. 144 and n. 14 (citing identification by Bruce Barker-Benfield.<\/div><\/div>
Titles of texts from this manuscript are among those recorded in a fair copy of notes by John Leland on the occasion of a visit to the Benedictine abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury (these notes were later published in 1715 as Leland's De rebus Britannicis collectanea<\/i>). Leland's recording of monastic traditions as related by the monks themselves, and other evidence, confirms that this visit must have occurred prior to the abbey's Dissolution on 30 July 1538.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. gen. c. 3, p. 5<\/div>
Barker-Benfield (2008), pp. 1673-74, 1684-86; BA7.21a-g.<\/div><\/div>
" }, { "label": "Extent", "value": "Codex: ii + 1 + i + 1 + 443 + iii leaves. Leaf height: 215 mm, width: 145 mm." }, { "label": "Funding", "value": "Wellcome (conservation)" }, { "label": "Date of Creation", "value": "Mid-11th century (after 1039)." }, { "label": "Classmark", "value": "Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.5.35" }, { "label": "Additions", "value": "

Folio ii recto<\/a>: Inscription in Greek transliterated into Roman characters, written in rustic capitals<\/i>, with interlinear gloss in Latin, in Caroline minuscule<\/i>. Below, a fragment of the Pater Noster written in Caroline minuscule<\/i>, inverted.<\/p>

Folio iii verso<\/a>: Table of contents, written around the 12th century and later annotated in the second half of the 15th century by Clement Canterbury, who added folio numbers and additional descriptions. This leaf also contains an ownership inscription and pressmark for the library of St Augustine's, Canterbury (see Provenance), written by other hands.<\/p>

Folios ii* verso-iii recto<\/a>: Table of contents, written by a 17th-century hand.<\/p>

List and descriptions of the contents of the manuscript (referred to as 'Codex AngloSaxonicus\") on 447v-448r<\/a>, signed 'J.M.K.' = John Mitchell Kemble, undated but probably c. 1832-1835 (see entry in the Oxford DNB). Kemble also included a reference to his notes on f. i verso<\/a>. Two, perhaps three, later hands have annotated Kemble's list with folio numbers and additional titles or entries.<\/p>

Notes of losses on ff. 276<\/a> and 447r<\/a>, signed 'J.P.' and dated 14 February 1848, presumably Joseph Power, University Librarian 1845-64. <\/p>

Quire signatures ('1-45') in the bottom right-hand corner of the recto side of the first leaf of each quire, written in pencil by a hand of the 19th/20th century. <\/p>

Collation formula by the hand of Arthur Owen, c. 1974 (rear pastedown<\/a>).<\/p>" }, { "label": "Subject(s)", "value": "Poetry" }, { "label": "Associated Name(s)", "value": "Clement Canterbury; Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz, 784?-856; Kemble, John M. (John Mitchell), 1807-1857; Joseph Power; Owen, A. E. B. (Arthur Ernest Bion); James, M.R. (Montague Rhodes), 1862-1936; Leland, John, 1506?-1552; Hacket, John, 1592-1670; Casaubon, Méric, 1599-1671; Sampson Kennard" }, { "label": "Format", "value": "Codex" }, { "label": "Data Source(s)", "value": "This catalogue entry draws on the descriptions provided by A.G. Rigg and G.R. Wieland, 'A Canterbury classbook of the mid-eleventh century (the \"Cambridge Songs\" manuscript), Anglo-Saxon England<\/i>, 4 (1975) and Paul Binski and Patrick Zutshi, with the collaboration of Stella Panayotova, Western Illuminated Manuscripts: A Catalogue of the Collection in Cambridge University Library<\/i> (Cambridge, 2011) (used here by kind permission of Cambridge University Press)." }, { "label": "Language(s)", "value": "Latin" }, { "label": "Binding", "value": "

Rebound in full red goatskin<\/i> by Douglas Cockerell and Son, 1974 (note by Arthur Owen, rear pastedown<\/a>).<\/p>

Former binding:<\/i><\/p>

The manuscript may have been rebound around the beginning of the 20th century, since it was described as 'New' in an unpublished description of the manuscript by M.R. James, c. 1926-1930; see UA, ULIB 7/3/74/36).<\/p>

Two friction holes and rust stains near the fore-edge of f. ii<\/a> suggest the presence on a former binding of a single clasp.<\/p>" }, { "label": "Condition", "value": "The manuscript has been trimmed at previous rebindings; in places, the text and marginal glosses now run very close to the edges, though pricking marks for horizontal ruling are frequently still visible. The fore-edges of the leaves are fragile, even brittle in places, with many very small closed tears. There is water- or damp-staining to a number of the leaves. The lower part of the leaves at the fore-edge are noticeably more grimy and stained than the rest, perhaps as a consequence of frequent and heavy handling of the manuscript during its lifetime. Where the parchment has become particularly fragile, stabilisation repairs have been applied. Some of the erotic poems within the 'Cambridge Songs' section of the manuscript have been erased through scraping and attempts to restore the text in some of these locations during the nineteenth century through the application of chemical reagent have left dark brown stains (for example, ff. 438v-439r<\/a>, 440v<\/a>, 441v<\/a>). The manuscript as a whole was rebound during in 1974, at which point each of the quires was mounted on paper guards." }, { "label": "Script", "value": "

The manuscript is written throughout in Caroline minuscule<\/i>, by five scribes, working in close collaboration. For a detailed breakdown of their respective stints, see Rigg and Wieland (1975), pp. 113-15.<\/p><\/div><\/div>" }, { "label": "Physical Location", "value": "Cambridge University Library" }, { "label": "Abstract", "value": "

Introduction: the history of the manuscript<\/b><\/p>

Copied by perhaps four scribes during the mid-11th century, this manuscript contains a wide variety of classical, late antique and early medieval poetic texts. Alongside works by such authors as Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, Boethius, Rabanus Maurus and Aldhelm, the manuscript also preserves a variety of other kinds of text, including several prayers transliterated from Greek, prose medical texts, and riddles and hymns. One part (ff. 432r-443v<\/a>) perhaps more than any other has been the focus of scholarly attention over the last century and a half: a collection of forty-five works, most of them poems, and some set to music, which has prompted the application to this manuscript of the epithets 'Carmina Cantabrigiensia', 'Cambridger Lieder' and the 'Cambridge Songs'.<\/p>

Contrary to these denominations, the manuscript had no medieval connection with its present home; rather, a 13th-century ownership inscription and pressmark (f. iii verso<\/a>) prove that it belonged to the Benedictine Abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury, where it was almost certainly produced and where it remained through the fifteenth century and until the abbey's dissolution in 1538. The presence of German and macaronic German-Latin poems in this section - including six in praise of Frankish emperors Henry II (973-1024), Conrad II (c. 990-1039) and Henry III (1017-1056), as well as others that mention archbishops Heriger of Mainz (d. 927), Heribert of Cologne (d. 1021) and Poppo of Trier (d. 1047), among other material - indicate that these contents derived from a continental, probably German exemplar. The mention in one of these works of the death of Conrad II means that the production of this portion of the manuscript must have post-dated 1039. The manuscript thus bears witness to the continuation to the very cusp of the Norman Conquest of a cultural and intellectual exchange between Anglo-Saxon England and the German lands - an exchange truncated by subsequent political events and the development of much closer ties between English monasteries and foundations in northern France.<\/p>

Various theories have been advanced to explain the rationale behind the production of this manuscript, its compilation and the arrangement of the texts it contains (see Ziolkowski (1994), pp. xx-xxv for full details). A suggestion that the 'Songs' part had belonged to a peripatetic poet-musician and were only bound later into the manuscript was disproven by the material evidence: the texts are not confined to one quire but extend into another, and moreover were copied by the same scribe responsible for many other parts of the rest of the manuscript. That these contents are unlikely to have derived from such an exemplar is indicated by the narrow subject-matter - references to various emperors, and to four nuns in a specific German convent, for example - that would have been unlikely to appeal to foreign audiences; moreover, some of the songs were intended for performance not by a single person but by multiple voices, including a pair of choirs. Others have argued that the songs may have been compiled as a manual of instruction for such an aspiring performer, but whether that role was ever performed by or in the context of a monastic institution has not yet been demonstrated.<\/p>

That the manuscript represents a compilation of a wide variety of (often incomplete) poetic works has lent weight to the proposal that it was a florilegium, a gathering of many different literary genres, topics and themes from a variety of sources and exemplars, by an enthusiast for both ancient and contemporary poetry. The glossing of some of these texts with neumes - a form of medieval music notation - has further prompted others to argue that it was their musical rather than literary characteristics that inspired their compilation. Adopting a broader scope, seeking to understand the contents of the manuscript as a whole, A.G. Rigg and Gernot Wieland in 1975 proposed instead that the manuscript originally comprised three 'classbooks', to which the 'Songs' component was soon after appended: the compilation of poetic works were \"graded according to difficulty\", in order to fulfil a distinct pedagogical purpose, and therefore offer \"a remarkable insight into educational practice in the late Anglo-Saxon period\". Plentiful interlinear and marginal glosses provided additional instruction or clarified the meaning of the texts they accompanied, with the songs added \"either because of their interest as a lyric collection\" or because they had been copied by the same hand as other parts of the manuscript. Alternatively, the manuscript may have been made not as a book for teaching in the classroom, but for reference use as a convenient compilation of a wide variety of poetic texts.<\/p>

Though the manuscript was seen at Canterbury by John Leland shortly before the abbey's dissolution, its provenance thereafter is unknown, as are the precise stages by which it reached the University Library. There is evidence, however, to suggest that it did not stray far from its original home. It was purchased in 1672 using funds raised from the sale of duplicate books bequeathed to the Library by John Hacket (d. 1670), bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Four other such purchases contain evidence of former ownership by the scholar Meric Casaubon (d. 1671), who had lived and died in Canterbury. Three others whose purchase was funded by the Hacket sales had belonged to another Canterbury resident, Sampson Kennard (d. 1635), and four others are also of Canterbury provenance.<\/p>

The manuscript is now no longer complete, nor was it when the book was foliated by the 15th-century librarian of St Augustine's, Clement Canterbury. For example, in quire 45, Clement's numbering indicates the presence of two leaves between those he numbered *441<\/a> and *444<\/a>. However, at the time of his numbering, neither of these leaves can have been conjoint with another in the second half of the quire, where Clement's numbering runs without interruption from *453<\/a> to *454<\/a>, indicating that these two leaves had already been lost by that time. Further portions have been lost since then, including at the end of the manuscript a quire or quires containing a text entitled 'Oraciones ciceronis' in the 12th-century contents list on f. iii verso<\/a>, and found on 'ffo. *455 usque in finem' according to Clement's annotation. Between the end of Quire 27 and the beginning of Quire 33, a discrepancy occurs in the contemporary quire signatures: Quire 27<\/a> is numbered 'XXVII' but Quire 33<\/a> is 'XXXIIII' (no quire signatures are visible on the intervening leaves). This may simply reflect an error in numbering; however, taken with the loss of the three final leaves from Quire 28 (after f. 276<\/a>), it is possible that a whole quire is missing from the manuscript between Quires 28 and 29. The loss of the three leaves from Quire 28 must post-date Clement's foliation: its last leaf, was numbered *277 by him - and the next leaf, the first of the next quire, *281. <\/p>

A further loss occurred in more recent times. In March 1981, Margaret Gibson encountered a leaf during a search for manuscripts containing texts of Boethius, at the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt-am-Main, where it was known as Fragm. lat. I 56. A collaboration between Prof. Gibson, Christopher Page and Michael Lapidge subsequently confirmed its identification as a missing leaf from the present manuscript (see Gibson et al., 'Neumed Boethian metra<\/i>' (1983) for a full account).<\/p>

The much-faded Arabic numerals in the upper right-hand corner of the recto side<\/a> of this leaf prove that it was in place when the volume was foliated by Clement Canterbury during the 15th century. The leaf was still bound with the rest of the manuscript in 1839, when it was examined by Georg Pertz. By 1896, however, it had gone missing, since Robert Priebsch noted the absence from the manuscript of the Boethian metra<\/i> described by Pertz over half a century earlier. Alerted to the possibility that the leaf might have been alienated from a manuscript in Cambridge, investigations were undertaken by Dr Gerhardt Powitz, Leiter der Handschriftenabteilung at Frankfurt. The leaf, along with fragments from other manuscripts, had been bequeathed to Frankfurt by the scholar Theodor Oehler (1810-43). From correspondence preserved at Frankfurt, Oehler is known to have visited Cambridge in 1840 and doubtless examined the manuscript at that time. The structure of Quire 45 and the sequence of Clement Canterbury's folio numbers prove that the leaf conjoint with this one had been missing since the 15th century. It is likely, then, that this leaf was already loose, possibly even detached, by the time Oehler came to Cambridge.<\/p>

Papers kept in the running file for MS Gg.5.35 in the Department of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts at the University Library relate the return of the leaf. On 2 September 1982, Dr Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, Director of the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt, wrote to Mr F.W. Ratcliffe, then University Librarian, to offer to return the fragment to its rightful owners. Noting Pertz's recording of the contents of the leaf in 1839 and the fact that 'the fragment appears among the papers of Theodor Oehler only shortly thereafter', Dr Lehmann concluded that 'one can assume that he did not come by it legally'. On 15 November that year, Arthur Owen, Senior Under-Librarian and Head of Manuscripts, wrote to Powitz confirm the safe arrival of the leaf in Cambridge. 'My first action on opening the parcel was to compare the leaf with our manuscript Gg.5.35, and to confirm beyond any doubt that they belong together,' Owen wrote. 'We are deeply grateful to Dr Lehmann and to yourself for your generous action in returning this leaf to the manuscript from which it was removed.'<\/p>

In his letter to Powitz, Owen stated, 'We shall now arrange for the leaf to be bound into the manuscript so as to prevent any future mishap of a similar kind.' This did not occur, however, and for forty years between its return in 1982 and 2022 the leaf remained separate from the rest of the manuscript. It was housed for the latter part (or perhaps all) of this period in a separate melinex folder, within the same box as the rest of the manuscript. Images of the leaf in this state were previously displayed at the end of the sequence on the Cambridge Digital Library, in order to reflect the leaf's storage as a physically discrete item. The inclusion of the manuscript in the Wellcome-funded project, Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries<\/a><\/i>, afforded the opportunity to release the leaf from its melinex folder and rebind it in its correct place in the manuscript, which work was completed in late 2022 by Marina Kruger-Pelissari, Project Conservator. The leaf was then photographed again, in its proper place in the manuscript, by Raffaella Losito, Project Photographer. The reunion of the leaf with the rest of the volume is now reflected in the updated description and display on the Cambridge Digital Library.<\/p>

The description of the contents of the manuscript is divided into five main parts, following the structure proposed by Rigg and Wieland on the basis of the manuscript's collation, changes in hand and layout, and similar details, as follows: