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Add MS 12524
- Record Id:
- 032-002042307
- Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:
- 032-002042307
- MDARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100000000046.0x000269
- LARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100165141846.0x000001
- SLARK:
- Format:
- ISAD(G)
- Reference (shelfmark):
- Add MS 12524
- Title:
-
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women; Gilbert Banester, Tale of Guiscardo and Ghismonda
- Scope & Content:
-
This manuscript contains an imperfect copy of The Legend of Good Women, a Middle English dream vision by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (b. c. 1340s, d. 1400). The volume also contains a copy of The Tale of Guiscardo and Ghismonda, a Middle English verse adaptation of the story from Bocaccio's Decameron, written by the composer Gilbert Banester (b. c. 1445, d. 1487). The poem's closing stanza and note indicate that Banester wrote the poem at the request of a certain 'John Raynere'.
Other copies of The Legend of Good Women housed at the British Library are Add MS 9832 and Add MS 28617. Another copy of Banester's poem now survives in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 86.
Contents:
ff. 1r-17v: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, written in Middle English with Latin incipits for each legend; the text beginning imperfectly at l. 1640, '...Ne shulde hyr neuer falsen nyght nor day / To been hyr hysbonde till he lyff may...' (see Boffey and Edwards, A New Index (2005), no. 100).
ff. 17v-28v: Gilbert Banester, The Tale of Guiscardo and Ghismonda, written in Middle English rhyme royal, beginning 'Whilom ther was ane hyght & mighty prince / In Salern tawker þei clepyd hys name…'; ending with a Middle English rubric, 'heyr endyth the legend of ladyse / and bygyneth the compleynte of /Mars and Venus' (see Boffey and Edwards, A New Index (2005), no. 4082).
Decoration:
Large initials in red at the beginning of each legend (ff. 1v, 4v, 9v, 12r, 15r, 17v).
Initial for each line tricked in red. Rubrics and running headers in red.
- Collection Area:
- Western Manuscripts
- Project / Collection:
- Additional Manuscripts
- Hierarchy Tree:
- [{ "id" : "032-002042307", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Add MS 12524: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women; Gilbert Banester, Tale of Guiscardo and Ghismonda" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]
- Hierarchy Record Ids:
- 032-002042307
- Is part of:
- not applicable
- Hierarchy:
- 032-002042307
- Container:
- not applicable
- Record Type (Level):
- Fonds
- Extent:
- 1 volume
- Digitised Content:
- http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100165141846.0x000001 (digital images currently unavailable)
- Thumbnail:
-
- Languages:
- English, Middle
Latin - Scripts:
- Latin
- Start Date:
- 1475
- End Date:
- 1499
- Date Range:
- 4th quarter of the 15th century
- Era:
- CE
- Access:
-
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- User Conditions:
- Physical Characteristics:
-
Material: Parchment.
Dimensions: 180/195 x 130/140 mm (written space: 155 x 100 mm).
Foliation: ff. 28 (+ 1 unfoliated paper and 2 parchment flyleaves at the beginning and at the end).
Script: Gothic cursive.
Binding: Post-1600. Brown morocco leather, tooled in gold.
- Custodial History:
-
Origin:
England.
Provenance:
Samuel Smith the Younger (d. 1731), bell-founder of York: gave the manuscript to the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby; inscribed, 'Mr Smiths gift Ra Thoresby' (f. 1r).
Ralph Thoresby (b. 1658, d. 1725), antiquarian and Leeds historian: acquired the manuscript from Samuel Smith (see above); recorded it in his Ducatus Leediensis (1715), item 109 (see Ducatus Leediensis (1715), p. 530); his sale, S.C. Bristow, 27 February 1764.
Horace Walpole (d. 1797), 4th Earl of Oxford: probably bought by him at Thoresby's sale, 27 February 1764; the sale of his Strawberry Hill library, Sotheby's, 30 April 1842, lot 102 (see note f. [iii] recto); bought by the British Museum for £8.8s.
- Publications:
-
Ralph Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, or, The topography of the ancient and populous towns and parish of Leedes, and parts adjacent, in the West-Riding of the county of York... extracted from records, original evidences, and manuscripts (London : printed for Maurice Atkins, and sold by Edward Nutt at the Middle-Temple Gate in Fleet-Street, 1715), p. 530.
Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years 1841-1845 (London: British Museum, 1850), p. 58.
Early English versions of the Tales of Guiscardo and Ghismonda and Titus and Gisippus from the Decameron, ed. by Herbert G. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1937) [edition].
Janet M. Cowen, 'Eighteenth-century Ownership of Two Chaucer Manuscripts', Notes and Queries, 28 (1981), 392-94.
Götz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 200-01.
Michael Seymour, 'The manuscripts of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women', Scriptorium, 47 (1993), 73-90 (pp. 75, 76, 86-87).
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Legend of Good Women, ed. by Janet Cowen and George Kane (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1995), p. 3 [edition].
Carole Meale, 'The Tale and the Book: Readings of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women in the Fifteenth Century', in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Lester (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999) pp. 118-38 (pp. 123, 133).
Nicola F. McDonald, 'Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader', The Chaucer Review, 35 (2000), 22-42 (p. 41 n. 35, 37, 39).
Magnus Williamson, 'Royal Image-Making and Textual Interplay in Gilbert Banaster's 'O Maria et Elizabeth'', Early Music History, 19 (2000), 237-78 (p. 240).
Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, 'The Legend of Good Women', in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 112-26 (p. 114).
Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British Library, 2005), nos. 100, 4082.
Lucy M. Allen-Goss, Female Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 39, 156 n. 45.
- Material Type:
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Legal Status:
- Not Public Record(s)