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Harley MS 2372

Record Id:

040-002048203

Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:

040-002048203

MDARK:

ark:/81055/vdc_100000000709.0x000370

LARK:

SLARK:

Format:

ISAD(G)

Reference (shelfmark):

Harley MS 2372

Title:

A Mirror for Recluses

Scope & Content:

This manuscript contains an imperfect copy of A Mirror for Recluses, a Middle English translation of the Speculum inclusorum, an early 15th-century rule or guide for male anchorites.

A complete copy of the text (the only other in existence) survives in a manuscript sold at Christie's, London, 16 July 2014.

Contents:

ff. 1r-37v: A Mirror for Recluses, imperfect at the beginning and now opening mid-sentence: 'sager your unworthi be what is moost plesaunt to the in her lyf. or what may be moost expedient or speedful unto her helthe'; and ending: 'More over every cristen man schal stydefastly byleve þat in same manere as wel þe body of Crist as ys blood which he took of þe blessyd virgine and in which he appeared is in þe breed and wyn'.

The manuscript contains a few additions:

f. 1*recto: A medical recipe for gout, entitled 'Thes be good medesens for the gowtte that doues folwy'; beginning: 'The fyrst sagye lory Camemelle Parytor of ychye of thame'; and ending: 'for powder yn there mettys' (Robbins, 'Medical Manuscripts' (1970), p. 403); written in the late 15th or early 16th century.

Decoration:

Large (3-4 lines) in 'Champ' initials in gold set against blue and pink backgrounds with white filigree (ff. 13v, 17r, 22r). Minor initials touched in yellow. Paraphs alternating between blue and red with contrasting penwork decoration. Rubrics and running titles in red.

Collection Area:

Western Manuscripts

Project / Collection:

Harley Collection

Hierarchy Tree:

[{ "id" : "040-002048203", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Harley MS 2372: A Mirror for Recluses" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]

Hierarchy Record Ids:

032-002045828
040-002048203

Is part of:

Harley MS 1-7661 : Harley Manuscripts

Harley MS 2372 : A Mirror for Recluses

Hierarchy:

032-002045828[2373]/040-002048203

Container:

View / search within Archive / Collection: Harley MS 1-7661

Record Type (Level):

File

Extent:

1 volume

Digitised Content:

Languages:

English
English, Middle

Scripts:

Latin

Start Date:

1430

End Date:

1470

Date Range:

Mid 15th century

Era:

Access:

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User Conditions:

Physical Characteristics:

Materials: Parchment.

Dimensions: 230 x 155 mm (text space: 145 x 90 mm, ruled in red ink for single columns of 23 lines.).

Foliation: ff. 1* + 37 (+ 2 blank unfoliated modern paper flyleaves at the beginning + 2 at the end); old foliation in pen, followed here.

Collation: i^8-2 (ff. 1-6; 1st and 2nd leaves missing before f. 1), ii-iv⁸ (ff. 7-30), v^8-1 (ff. 31-37; 4th leaf missing before f. 34); indicated by catchwords that are present on all quires (ff. 6v, 14v, 22v, 30v) except quire v, which is missing the lower part of its final leaf; the catchword on f. 30v does not match the opening of f. 31r, indicating the loss of leaves here, perhaps a whole quire. This is further indicated by quire signatures on quire iv ('c') and quire v ('e').

Script: Gothic hybrid (Bastard secretary).

Binding: Post-1600. 18th-century binding of mottled brown leather over pasteboards with gilt- and blind-tooled decoration, possibly attributable to Christopher Chapman: the gilt-tooled roll of the front edges is identical to Chapman's roll no. 2 reproduced in Nixon, 'Harleian Bindings', in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard (1975), pl. 14.

Custodial History:

Origin:

Hertfordshire (see McIntosh and others, Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval England (1986), I, p. 111 (no. 9430)).

Provenance:

John Trus (dates uncertain), priest and chaplain to William Brown (d. 1489), founder of Browne's Hospital, Stamford (Lincolnshire). Alan Rogers has suggested that John Trus may have been the same man as John Taylor, clerk of Stamford and warden of the hospital, 1497-1504 (see Rogers, 'The Ownership of The Myrour of Recluses' (2014), p. 188).

Browne's Hospital, Stamford: donor inscription by the hand of John Taylor (see Jones, Speculum inclusorum (2013), p. xlvi; Rogers, 'The Ownership of The Myrour of Recluses' (2014), p. 189): 'Thys ys a good bok ffor holy men or wemen the whyche bok bylongeth to the almos howse off wylliam Brown in stawnford in the dyocesse of lyncoln By the gyft of ser Iohn trus chapleyn to the seyd wylliam Brown sum tyme and prest in the seyd beyd howse. Orate queso legentes pro anima dicti domini Iohannis'.

'John Roouling', 16th or 17th century: inscribed with his name on f. 13v.

The Harley Collection, formed by Robert Harley (b. 1661, d. 1724), 1st earl of Oxford and Mortimer, politician, and Edward Harley (b. 1689, d. 1741), 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, book collector and patron of the arts. (The circumstances of the manuscript's arrival in the Harleian collection are unknown; the volume is not mentioned in The Diary of Humfrey Wanley, ed. by Cyril Ernest Wright and Ruth C. Wright, 2 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1966)). Harleian shelfmarks '100.C.2 / 2372' in ink and '19/I C' in pencil on f. [i]recto.

Edward Harley bequeathed the library to his widow, Henrietta Cavendish, née Holles (b. 1694, d. 1755) during her lifetime and thereafter to their daughter, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (b. 1715, d.1785), duchess of Portland; the manuscripts were sold by the Countess and the Duchess in 1753 to the nation for £10,000 (a fraction of their contemporary value) under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum; the Harley manuscripts form one of the foundation collections of the British Library.

Publications:

A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: Eyre & Strahan, 1808-12), II (1808), p. 672.

'Speculum inclusorum', Auctore Anonymo Anglico Saeculi XIV: Studio e Testo, ed. by P. Livario Oliger, Lateranum, n.s. 4 (Rome: Facultas Theologica Pontificii Athenaei Lateranensis, 1938) [description of the manuscript on pp. 23-31].

R.H. Robbins, 'Medical Manuscripts in Middle English', Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 45 (1970), 393-415 (p. 403, n. 28).

Cyril Ernest Wright, Fontes Harleiani: A Study of the Sources of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts Preserved in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1972), pp. 312, 332, 407.

Howard M. Nixon, 'Harleian Bindings', in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard, ed. by R.W. Hunt, I.G. Pollard and R. J. Roberts, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, n.s., 18 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975), pp. 153-94 (pl. 14).

Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), I, p. 111 (no. 9430).

The Myrour of Recluses: A Middle English Translation of 'Speculum inclusorum', ed. by Martha Powell Harley (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995) [on the text; description of the manuscript on pp. xxvii-xxviii].

E.A. Jones, 'A New Look into the Speculum inclusorum', in The Medieval Mystical Tradition, England, Ireland and Wales, Exeter Symposium VI: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 1999, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 123-45 (pp. 139-45).

Liz Herbert McAvoy, '"Neb...sumdeal ilich wummon & neddre is behinden": Reading the Monstrous in the Anchoritic Text', in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium VII: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004, ed. by E.A. Jones (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 51-67 (pp. 59-63).

Liz Herbert McAvoy, 'Gender, Rhetoric and Space in the Speculum inclusorum, Letter to a Bury Recluse and the Strange Case of Christina Carpenter', in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages [s. n.] (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 111-26 (pp. 111, 119).

Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life, Gender in the Middle Ages, 6 (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2011), pp. 57, 74.

'Speculum inclusorum' / 'A Mirror for Recluses': A Late-Medieval Guide for Anchorites and its Middle English Translation, ed. by E.A. Jones, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013) [on the text; description of the manuscript on pp. xlv-xlvii].

Alan Rogers, 'The Ownership of The Myrour of Recluses (British Library, MS Harley 2372) in the Late Fifteenth Century', The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 15 (2014), 187-92.

E.A. Jones, 'A Mirror For Recluses: A New Manuscript, New Information and Some New Hypotheses', The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 15 (2014), 424-31 (pp. 426-29).

Material Type:

Archives and Manuscripts

Legal Status:

Not Public Record(s)

Names:

Chapman, Christopher, bookbinder, fl 1704-1756
Trus, John, chaplain to William Brown, priest, d bef 1495
William Brown's Almhouse or Hospital, Stamford, Northamptonshire

Related Material:

Former description, produced for the Wellcome Trust Harley Medical Project:

'The Myrour of Recluses with added Medical recipe; mid 15th cent. Middle English. Imperfect at the beginning. The MS. is the only extant copy of a Middle English translation of the Speculum inclusorum (ff. 1-37; text divided into three parts), for which see M. Powell Harley, The Myrour of Recluses: A Middle Enlgish Translation of 'Speculum Inclusorum' (Madison, NJ-London, 1995), with description of the MS. on pp. xxvii-xxviii. A medical recipe for gout has been added by a contemporary hand on f. 1*, title 'Thes be good medesens for the gowtte that doues folwy / The fryst sagye lory camemell parytor of ychye of / thame'. Given in the 15th cent. to the almshouse or Hospital of William Browne (d. 1489) at Stamford, co. Northt., by John Trus (d. bef. 1495?), chaplain to William and priest in the hospital: see contemporary note on f. 1* verso. For the provenance, see C. E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani (London, 1972), pp. 312, 332, 407. The date and circumstances of the arrival of the MS. in the Harleian collection are unknown. The volume is not mentioned in C. E. Wright and R. C. Wright, The Diary of Humfrey Wanley (London, 1966). Owned by Edward Harley (1689-1741), 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, book collector and patron of the arts, and possibly by his father Robert Harley (1661-1724), 1st earl of Oxford and Mortimer, politician. Bequeathed with the Harleian library to Edward's widow, countess Hanrietta, née Cavendish Holles (1694-1755), during her lifetime and thereafter to their daughter, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (1715-1785), duchess of Portland. Sold with the other Harley manuscripts by the countess and the duchess in 1753 to the nation for £10,000 (a fraction of their contemporary value) under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum. The Harleian manuscripts became part of the collections of the British Library on its establishment in 1973. Harleian shelfmarks '100.C.2 / 2372' in ink and '19/I C' in pencil on f. i. The MS. is described in A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts (London, 1808-1812), ii, p. 672. Listed in R. H. Robbins, 'Medical Manuscripts in Middle English', Speculum, 45, no. 3 (1970), p. 403 n. 28. The cataloguing of this MS. was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Parchment; ff. ii (paper)+i (parchment)+37+ii (paper). Old foliation '1-37' in pen (followed here). circa 227 x 155mm. Gathering: i^8-2 (first and second missing), ii-iv⁸, v^8-1 (fourth missing). Ruled in red ink for single columns of 23 lines. Written in English cursive book hands (littera cursiva formata libraria - hybrid secretary) in grey ink. Large initials (3-4 lines; ff. 13v, 17, 22) in gold set against blue and pink backgrounds with white tracery. Minor initials touched in yellow; paragraph marks in alternating red and blue with contrasting penwork decoration; rubrics and running titles in red. 18th-cent. binding of mottled brown leather over pasteboards with gilt- and blind-tooled decoration, possibly attributable to Christopher Chapman: the gilt-tooled roll of the front edges is identical to Chapman's roll no. 2 reproduced in Nixon, 'Harleian Bindings', in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford, 1975), pl. 14.