Add MS 74953

Richard Rolle: Translation and Commentary on the Psalter with the Lollard Interpolations, Psalms 82-113, southern England; early 15^th cent. Middle English. This volume originally formed the second part of Royal MS. 18 D. i, which has been identified as no. 1285 in the 1542 inventory of King Henry VIII’s Upper Library in the Palace of Westminster. See James Carley, The Libraries of Henry VIII (London, 2000), p. 213. Size and layout are identical, the scheme and form of decoration, including spaces for illuminated initials that were never added, are consistent, and the scribe responsible for the last portion of the Royal MS. is the same as the one responsible for the beginning of the present volume. The gap in the text between the end of the two MSS. (middle of Psalm 79 to the middle of Psalm 82) can be ascribed to the loss of a single intervening gathering of eight leaves, which is consistent with the collation to be found in the two portions, with the additional loss of one folio containing the commentary on Psalm 112 and all but the opening column of the commentary on Psalm 113. Since Royal MS. 18 D. i begins with the rubric ‘Here bigynneþ þe prologe vppon þe sauter. þat Richard heremyte of Hampole translatid in to Englyshe. aftir þe sentence of doctours and resun’ the two existing MSS. may have formed part of a single volume, a conclusion which is not contradicted by the collation and manufacturing aids to be found within the two portions. The 1542 inventory description, which refers to the item as Psalterium Ricardi Hampole, does not indicate whether the two portions were separate by this time. Richard Rolle of Hampole (d. 29 Sept. 1349) was the author of a number of mystical works in Latin, but his translation of the Psalms, begun circa 1340, was the earliest of his works in English, and survives in over forty manuscripts, see R. E. Lewis, N. F. Blake and A. S. G. Edwards, An Index to Middle English Prose (New York, 1985), no. 271, plus Bodleian MS. Laud. Misc. 321 and various fragments. His original text was derived, with additions and omissions, from Peter Lombard’s Commentarium in Psalmos, and his efforts to provide a vernacular version of the Psalms predate those of John Wycliffe. According to the metrical prologue in Bodleian MS. Laud Misc. 286, a version of the commentaries made during the reign of Henry VI, Richard Rolle wrote his work at the behest of Dame ‘Merget Kyrkby’ (Margaret Kirby), a nun of Hampole who became an anchoress at Anderby, and that the Bodleian manuscript was a copy of the autograph original that was chained to the author’s tomb at the Cistercian nunnery. The text was originally composed in a northern dialect (see, for instance, Univ. Coll. Oxford MS. 64), but it was modernised and tempered in subsequent redactions, and the commentaries were considerably expanded. The present copy, made in southern England, is one of the later redactions and, on the basis of Dorothy Everett’s analysis of the integral portion to be found in British Library MS. Royal 18 D. i, contains the expanded commentary with the Lollard additions, see H.E. Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole (1947), p. 173. The text is similar to the version to be found in Royal 18 C. xxvi, which also contains part of the second portion of the commentary (Psalms 89 to 117), and it is interesting to note that the preceding portion of Royal 18 C. xxvi shared a similar fate to the present manuscript, for it became separated from the second part and ended up at Lambeth Palace (now MS. 34). Purchased at Christie’s, 29 Nov. 2000, lot 14.

Vellum; ff. ii+135. 400 x 275mm. Collation, i-xvi⁸, xvii^{7 (of 8, wants 7)}, with catchwords on the last verso of each gathering, bottom right. 52 lines written in double columns, in black ink, in a Gothic Bookhand, by three scribes, between two vertical and fifty-three horizontal lines ruled in ink, with a justification of 295 x 185. Five-line and Seven-line initials before Psalms 97 and 109, ff. 50 and 123v, not supplied, two-line initials in blue, with extensive flourishing in red, before each Psalm, one-line initials alternatively in red and blue, but these are not supplied after gathering thirteen, which ends on f. 104v. Lemmata, or propositions acting as section headings, in Latin and English, underlined in red. Modern binding of antiqued brown vellum.