Christ's College : Act and Epistles book

Christ's College

This manuscript is an Acts and Epistles book, probably copied in the 12th century and slightly incomplete. It is a relatively high-quality production, written on good parchment and ornamented with gold. Its content is straightforward, comprising only the main text without supporting material. One unusual feature is the repetition in brief form of the heading of each book at the top of the page on which it begins.A number of folios were replaced at the time of production, the text of the replacement leaves being copied apparently by the same scribe as the rest of the text, presumably due to some defect in the copying or damage during the production process. In some cases (pp. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(41);return false;'>33-34</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(75);return false;'>67-68</a>) the text of these folios is indistinguishable from that of the rest of the manuscript. However, a number of replacement folios (pp. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(569);return false;'>561-562</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(575);return false;'>567-568</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(583);return false;'>575-576</a>, <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(595);return false;'>587-588</a>) bear text in a a different ink from the rest, although the hand appears the same, suggesting that the original scribe had returned to recopy them at some later date, unless these are the work of a very skilled imitator. The reasons for these replacements must be a matter for speculation, but this could reflect an exacting level of quality control, leading to the rejection and replacement at a late stage of folios which had initially been accepted as satisfactory. A different hand has made a considerable number of corrections to the text.The manuscript attracted considerable attention from early modern scholars of the Biblical text. In the later 17th and 18th centuries it was examined by Thomas Gale and J.J. Wetstein, and fully collated by John Mill for his edition of the New Testament, by Richard Bentley, and by John Wigley on behalf of John Jackson, for another planned edition.Dr Christopher Wright