This article provides the first detailed study of a manuscript held in the archives of Downside Abbey in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Somerset, United Kingdom. The manuscript, Downside 78291 (henceforth F), contains a Latin prose chronicle that has not previously been described or identified. The present article demonstrates that it is a copy of the chronicle known as the Latin Prose Brut. After a codicological and paleographical study of the manuscript itself, I contextualise this witness within the wider Latin Prose Brut tradition and make some suggestions about the kind of person who might have contributed to the unique variants presented in this version. These variants evince a pro-Lancastrian bias common to many Latin Prose Bruts of the 15th century; but there is also evidence of an author keen to emphasise England’s historic victories against France.

This article investigates the role that reader-oriented, unlimited intertextuality – that is, intertextual references only as perceived or even mis-perceived by readers – might have had to play in the transmission, adaptation, and development of the Bevis of Hampton narratives across English and Francophone traditions. In recent years, a number of studies have demonstrated the importance of the multi-text manuscript as a medium for texts to be integrated into new reading communities, and I therefore use multi-text Bevis manuscripts as a starting point for my enquiry. In particular, this article focuses on an Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone manuscript (Leuven, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS G. 170 or the ‘Firmin-Didot manuscript’, now lost), an English Bevis of Hampton manuscript (British Library, Egerton MS 2862) and a copy of the so-called “first version” of the continental French Beuve de Haumtone (Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Fr. 25516). Beginning with the “intratexts” that occur within the confines of the Firmin-Didot codex, this article moves forward to consider, in more hypothetical terms, the different textual encyclopedias that may have been available to the historic readers of Bevis manuscripts, and the ways in which readerly understandings (and misunderstandings) of a text’s intertextuality could prompt new narrative branches to sprout forth, and eventually lead to the emergence of new traditions.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract