Gift of the Duchess: Margaret Holand, Stephen Dodesham, and Syon Abbey’s Sanctilogium salvatoris
Tuesday 18 April 2023, 5-6pm (on Zoom)
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Speaker: Professor Virginia Blanton (Curators’ Distinguished Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City)
Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Cod. St Georgen 12 exists out of time and place, an English manuscript from Syon Abbey housed in a German archive. There is little doubt this deluxe, illuminated codex “went abroad” with the Syon nuns in 1539 when the English monasteries were dissolved, but how it ended up in the Benedictine priory of St. Georgen at Villingen by 1642 remains a mystery. The where and how of this book’s transmission is particularly intriguing, as the manuscript is one of the original two-volume collection of saints’ lives commissioned by Margaret Holand, Duchess of Clarence (before 1388–1439), for Syon, titled Sanctilogium salvatoris. Based on an extensive index in the surviving volume, as well as an elaborate calendar of the saints’ feasts, it is possible to discern the scope of the entire collection: in twelve books, over 800 saints were featured; miracles and other material made up two additional books. Stemming from at least three sources (based on marginal annotations to the lives), the collection was drawn from the Legenda aurea, the Roman martyrology, and John of Tynemouth’s Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae, et Hiberniae, containing 156 saints. The duchess is highlighted as the donor of the two volumes in Syon Abbey’s booklist. They were copied by the celebrated scribe Stephen Dodesham, likely before 1439, the date of Margaret’s death, and the first volume features illuminated initials (possibly from the workshop of Herman Scheere) to open each of the eight books in the first volume. St Georgen 12 has not been studied in any detail, yet the manuscript shows a number of interventions by the scribe and later readers. This paper compares the manuscript’s source materials to account for marginal corrections (generally complete sentences or passages that were redacted) by Dodesham himself. One possibility seems to be that Dodesham used the Martirologium of John of Tynemouth for some lives of local saints, of which only extracts survive in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 240, but then corrected his work using a copy of John’s Sanctilogium, such as the one in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius E. i. As a result, St Georgen 12 has a series of corrected lives that help uncover not only Dodesham’s process but also more about John’s lost oeuvre.
Bio: Virginia Blanton is University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English Language and Literature. She is co-editor of the three-volume series Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe (2013–2017) and author of Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–1615 (2007). She is also a founding member of the multidisciplinary NEH-funded team, CODICES, which conducts optical, chemical, and computational analyses of manuscripts and early printed books: http://daedalus.umkc.edu/CODICES/. Forthcoming work includes a critical edition of the saints’ lives in Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 2604, titled ‘Lyves and Dethes’ for Medieval English Nuns.
Story submitted by Renée Ward
rward@lincoln.ac.uk