Missing Books in the Folk Codicology of Later Medieval England

Abstract

Such a collection Dennistoun had hardly dreamed of in his wildest moments. Here were ten leaves from a copy of Genesis, illustrated with pictures, which could not be later than A.D. 700. Further on was a complete set of pictures from a Psalter, of English execution, of the very finest kind that the thirteenth century could produce; and, perhaps best of all, there were twenty leaves of uncial writing in Latin, which, as a few words seen here and there told him at once, must belong to some very early unknown patristic treatise.In M. R. James's ghost story 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book', an antiquarian encounters a haunted collection of manuscript fragments. 1 The metaphor offered by this story for the study of surviving manuscripts, an activity which might be understood as the raising of ghosts, has been noted by John Scattergood in a brief, perceptive reading. 2 But 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book' points more particularly to the problem posed by missing manuscripts. The scrap-book or album paradoxically preserves exciting material while also reminding its readers of a larger body of lost evidence: all the manuscripts from which the scraps were taken. 3 Such scrap-books are frustrating evidence. Complete medieval manuscripts are more comforting, and they survive in comfortingly large numbers, relative to individual scholars' research time: for example, there are around ten thousand Western examples in the Bodleian Library, or enough for forty years of study with a new manuscript every working day. These numbers are, however, tiny relative to the numbers which are lost: it is estimated that ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of all the medieval manuscripts once produced have disappeared. 4 Furthermore, the manuscripts which remain constitute a patchy collection of unusual survivors, preserved for reasons which are hardly neutral, such as size, beauty or a particular provenance. Canon Alberic's fragmentary and haunted scrap-book is, then, a fine synecdoche