The Wanderings and Homes of ManuscriptsJames, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)
History
The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
James, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)
Book collecting; Books -- History -- 400-1450; Books -- History -- To 400; Manuscripts
In one of its Homilies the same
Vercelli MS. presents us with a translation of the Apocalypse of St.
Thomas, a book of which until recently only the name was known. Two
early MSS. contain short quotations in Latin from Cosmas Indicopleustes,
a traveller of Justinian's time whose work remains only in a few
copies, and is in Greek. Another has a fragment of the lost _Book of
Jannes and Jambres_; another a chapter of the _Book of Enoch_, valuable
as one of our few indications that a Latin version of it was current.
John of Salisbury quotes a story about St. Paul which seems to come from
the ancient apocryphal Acts of that Apostle. First on the list (twelfth
century) of the library of Lincoln Minster (but lined through as if
subsequently lost) is a title _Proverbia Grecorum_. What this book was
is obscure; probably it was a translation from Greek by an Irish
scholar. It is quoted extensively by Sedulius, the Irishman, and also in
a collection of treatises by an unknown York writer (the Germans call
him the _Yorker anonymus_) of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The
work of Irenæus _Against Heresies_ (we only have it complete in Latin)
was always rare, but there were at least two copies of it in England,
one in the Carmelites' Library at Oxford, the other given by Archbishop
Mepham to Christchurch, Canterbury. The latter, I believe, we still have
in the Arundel collection in the British Museum. The MS. of Tertullian
which Gelenius got from England is gone, and our knowledge of the
treatise _On Baptism_ which it contained depends wholly on his printed
text.
I cannot doubt that among the books imported in the seventh century from
Italy by Benedict Biscop and Theodore and Hadrian, and in the great
library of York, which Alcuin panegyrizes in his poem on the saints of
York, there were texts now lost. But the Danes made a clean sweep of all
those treasures, as they did of the whole vernacular literature of
Northumbria, undoubtedly a rich one. The scattered indications I have
collected in the preceding paragraphs point to the fact that some
strange and rare books did lurk here and there in English libraries. It
is almost a relief that catalogues do not tell us of supremely desirable
things, such as Papias on the Oracles of the Lord, or the complete
Histories or Annals of Tacitus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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