<p style='text-align: justify;'>The Gospel Books produced in England during the late tenth century and the first half of the eleventh are among the finest as well as best surviving class of late Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts. Much, however, remains obscure about the precise details of when, where and for whom these books were made.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Pembroke MS 301 is typical of late Anglo-Saxon Gospel Books in many respects: the text of the four Gospels is preceded by elaborately decorated Eusebian canon tables that provide tables of corresponding (or 'concordant') passages in the different Gospel accounts, whilst each Gospel is introduced with a full-page Evangelist portrait followed by elaborately decorated rubrics, opening initial and words of the Gospel text. Rubrics and ornamented initials throughout are in gold, indicating the high status of the book and the expense involved in its production. Yet, like a surprising number of late Anglo-Saxon illuminated books including other Gospel Books, it is unfinished. The accompanying textual apparatus is incomplete: the marginal concordance numbers that provide the reference to the relevant canon table were never supplied, nor were all the rubrics. The illustration and decoration were carried out in two phases, yet were still left unfinished. The canon tables on ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(8);return false;'>1v-6v</a>, the portrait of Matthew and the decorated incipit to Matthew's Gospel were drawn and painted by an artist who employed pale shades of pink, orange, ochre and green, which did not obscure the elaborate pen-drawn ornament and draperies. The remainder of the canon tables (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(19);return false;'>7r-8v</a>) and the other Evangelist portraits and incipit pages were partially painted a little later by at least one other, less skilled artist, in somewhat clumsily applied opaque and darker hues, in particular dark blue and brown.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Textual and scribal evidence has proved inconclusive in establishing where and for whom the book was produced. In general respects, Pembroke MS 301 is textually related to several early eleventh-century English illuminated Gospel Books, but with none is the relationship sufficiently close to indicate a common exemplar or place of origin. An oddity in the manuscript is the inclusion of the preface to Acts after the end of John's Gospel, which might suggest a Bible or New Testament as the exemplar, a possibility reinforced by a close textual relationship with the prefaces and text of the gospels in a late tenth-century two-volume Bible (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:LSCOP_BL:IAMS040-002105787'>London, British Library, Royal MS 1 E.vii</a> and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:LSCOP_BL:IAMS040-002105788'>Royal MS 1 E.viii</a>, which was owned by Christ Church, Canterbury by at least the early twelfth century.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Pembroke MS 301 was written by a single scribe writing an English variety of Caroline minuscule, but in a rather mannered and idiosyncratic fashion. Bishop (1971) believed the hand to be that of the scribe he designated 'Scribe C', who contributed to one of the Gospel Books with which Pembroke MS 301 shared a general textual affinity, the Kederminster Gospels (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:LSCOP_BL:IAMS032-001954609'>London, British Library, Loan MS 11</a>, and to another (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:LSCOP_BL:IAMS040-002105772'>London, British Library, Royal MS 1 D.ix</a>, in both of which he worked in collaboration with the scribe of the Trinity Gospels (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/Manuscript/B.10.4'>Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.10.4</a>. Scribe C also copied the original part of a copy of Bede's <i>Historia ecclesiastica</i> (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_1224'>Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 163</a>), which was at Peterborough by the early twelfth century. Dumville (1991-1995), however, has questioned the attribution of the hand of the scribe of Pembroke MS 301 to Scribe C, and thus there is doubt as to whether the manuscript was produced at Christ Church, Canterbury or Peterborough.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Professor Tessa Webber<br /> Professor of Palaeography, Faculty of History<br /> University of Cambridge</p>
