Origins and Originality: Reading Lawman's Brut and the Rejection of British Library MS Cotton Otho C.xiii

Abstract

The privileging of the text of British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ix over that of BL MS Cotton Otho C.xiii led to the rejection of the latter version and determined ideas about the text and its manuscripts for many decades. Scholarly enquiry into Lawman's Brut should embrace Cotton Otho as a text read before the invention of modern medieval studies that should be read again.