Western Medieval Manuscripts : Middle English commentary on the Gospel of Matthew

Western Medieval Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'>There existed in late medieval England a broad and varied culture of the use of the vernacular for the study of the Bible, beyond that associated with the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, his followers or the Lollard movement. This manuscript illustrates one strand of that culture, being one of only two surviving copies of a Middle English commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, and the only copy to contain the text of the prologue. The other copy is found in <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:IAMS032-001983906'>London, British Library, MS Egerton 842, ff. 1r-244v</a>, though there the text is in a different, and thought to be original, order. Similar commentaries on the Gospels of Mark and Luke are preserved in <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/zq542pz5281'>Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 32</a>. It had previously been thought that the three were related, even the work of a single author, but this has since been questioned.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>A rubric at the opening of this manuscript points to the northerly origins of the translated commentary on Matthew: 'A man of the north country drew (i.e. translated) this in to English' (spelling modernised). Linguistic analysis of this manuscript has localised the dialect to Nottinghamshire, and that of the Egerton and Corpus manuscripts to the same region. Although this does not mean that these manuscripts originated in that specific location, nevertheless it points to a shared tradition of vernacular Biblical exegesis in the north, distinct both geographically as well as intellectually from that taking place in Oxford under Wycliffe's aegis.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This is reflected in the presentation of the text in these three manuscripts. In Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, passages of Bible text (translated into English) were written in a larger script, and alternated with passages of commentary (also in English) written in a smaller script. By contrast, the set of manuscripts to which MS Ii.2.12 belongs follow the pattern set by another northern biblical translation, the <i>English Psalter</i> of Richard Rolle: a quotation from the Latin Vulgate, distinguished by the use of larger or more formal or rubricated script (or a combination thereof), is followed closely by an English translation, and then the commentary. (For comparable examples of the presentation of Rolle's text, see: <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/6f67de24-8947-4f34-99ed-20b0fa9e2d22'>Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Tanner 16, f. 2v</a> and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/c1e003d5-82ae-405a-85ce-a15b9d9c96b3'>Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 953, p. 3</a>).</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Unlike Rolle's text, however, the commentaries on Matthew and Mark (and, to a much lesser extent, Luke) include marginal notes that identify the sources of their interpretations. The system is also different to that found in the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, in which references were embedded in the columns of text. On the subject of sources, close comparative study of this small family of vernacular commentaries reveals important differences between them. Whereas the commentaries on Mark and Luke in Corpus MS 32 drew on the <i>Glossa ordinaria</i>, the commentary on Matthew drew on the <i>Catena aurea</i> of Thomas Aquinas. Notably, this is the same source used by the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, but of which the compilers made very different uses, the Matthew commentator melding them into a continuous text rather than a series of discontinuous glosses, and adopting a freer style of translation.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Furthermore, the Matthew commentator drew from a wider variety of sources than did the Mark and Luke commentator, not all of them commentaries, and produced a much longer text as a consequence. It is likely, then, that the commentary found in this manuscript and Egerton 832 was the product of an author or team of authors working independently to the person or persons responsible for the commentary in Corpus MS 32, albeit with a shared aim of bringing scholastic exegesis to new audiences through the use of the vernacular.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>(For further details of the above, and additional analysis of these commentaries, see: Kraebel (2014)).</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr James Freeman<br /> Medieval Manuscripts Specialist<br /> Cambridge University Library</p>