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Harley MS 3490

Record Id:

040-002049321

Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:

040-002049321

MDARK:

ark:/81055/vdc_100000000761.0x0003d6

LARK:

SLARK:

Format:

ISAD(G)

Reference (shelfmark):

Harley MS 3490

Title:

Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum Religiosorum; John Gower, Confessio Amantis

Scope & Content:

Contents:

ff. 1r-6v: Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum Religiosorum.

ff. 8r-215v: John Gower, Confessio Amantis ['The Rede Boarstall Gower']; imperfect.

Decoration:

Large initial in colours and gold combined with a partial foliate bar border with acanthus leaves and feathering including a different coat of arms at the beginning of each book (ff. 8r, 11r, 13v, 33r, 54r, 71r, 94v, 146r, 161v [same arms as f. 8r], 196v [same arms as f. 11r]). Smaller initials in blue with red pen-flourishing including foliate motifs. Paraphs in alternating red or blue. Rubrics underlined in red rather than written in red. A few cadels (e.g. ff. 145v, 161r).

Collection Area:

Western Manuscripts

Project / Collection:

Harley Collection

Hierarchy Tree:

[{ "id" : "040-002049321", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Harley MS 3490: Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum Religiosorum; John Gower, Confessio Amantis" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]

Hierarchy Record Ids:

032-002045828
040-002049321

Is part of:

Harley MS 1-7661 : Harley Manuscripts

Harley MS 3490 : Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum Religiosorum; John Gower, Confessio Amantis

Hierarchy:

032-002045828[3491]/040-002049321

Container:

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

Record Type (Level):

File

Extent:

1 volume

Digitised Content:

Languages:

English, Middle
Latin

Scripts:

Latin

Start Date:

1439

End Date:

1449

Date Range:

c 1444

Era:

Access:

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User Conditions:

Physical Characteristics:

Materials: Parchment.

Dimensions: 365 x 250 mm (265 x 180 mm) in 2 columns.

Foliation: ff. 215 (+ 1 unfoliated paper flyleaf at the beginning and at the end).

Script: Gothic.

Binding: Post-1600. Red leather with gold fillets.

Custodial History:

Origin: England.

Provenance:

Made in c. 1444 for Edmund Rede the Younger (b. 1413, d. 1489), sheriff of Oxfordshire and other counties, knighted in 1469: the arms of Rede: azure three pheasants or (ff. 8r 161v); Marmion of Checkenden, Oxfordshire: vair three mascles gules (ff. 11r, 196v); James: per chevron gules and argent three unicorn heads couped and counter-changed (f. 13v); Haudlo: argent a lion rampant azure crowned armed and gutty or (f. 33r); Fitz-Nigel: argent a fess gules in chief two crescents gules at the base a hunting horn stringed vert (f. 54r); St Amand: or fretty sable on a chief of the second three besants (f. 71r); De la Pole: azure a fess or charged with a plate sable between three leopards’ faces or (f. 94v); Cottesmore of Baldwin Brightwell, Oxfordshire: azure an eagle displayed with two necks argent on its breast and escutcheon gules charged with a leopard's head or (f. 146r). All these arms appear in the so-called Boarstall Cartulary, which was made for Edmund Rede the Younger in 1444 and the years following: they record his title to the Boarstall estate in Buckinghamshire and how it was acquired (see Pearsall ‘The Rede (Boarstall) Gower’ (2000), pp. 95-97).

Unknown English owners, 15th-16th century: inscribed f. 7r: ‘Com let us humble our selves and fall downe before the lorde’; and f. 98r: ‘O dames remorse’.

Lord William Howard (b. 1563, d. 1640), antiquary and landowner, of Naworth Castle, Cumberland, the younger son of Thomas Howard (b. 1538, d. 1572), 4th duke of Norfolk: recorded as being at Naworth in 1697 (see Bernard 1697), inscribed in his hand on f. 8r: ‘Jhon Gower’; and a poem on f. 215v: ‘Chaucer by writinge purchas’d fame / And Gower gattt a worthy name / Sweet Surrey suck’t Pernassus springs / And wiatt wrote of woundrous things’ (see Wright, Fontes Harleiani (1972), pp. 198-200).

‘W. Horner’, 17th-18th century [? William Horner (b. 1746/7, d. 1826), preacher, father of Willliam Horner (b. 1786, d. 1837), mathematician]: inscribed his name ('W. Horner') on f. 215v (see Wright, Fontes Harleiani (1972), p. 197).

John Warburton (b. 1682, d. 1759), of Bury, county Lancashire, antiquary and herald, Somerset Herald in 1720: acquired by Harley in 1720 (see Wright, Fontes Harleiani (1972), pp. 346-47).

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, inscribed as usual by their librarian, Humfrey Wanley ‘16 Julij, 1720’ (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:

Edward Bernard, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, 3 vols (Oxford: Sheldonian, 1697), II, no. 611.

A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1808-12), III (1808), no. 3490.

A. I. Doyle, ‘English books in and out of court from Edward III to Henry VII’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 163-82 (p. 176 n. 36).

John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. by Elisabeth Dutton, with John Hines and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010), pp. 18-19.

Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum Religiosorum and Speculum Ecclesie, ed. by Helen P. Forshaw, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi III (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 4.

[George Ornsby], Selections from the Household Books of the Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle, Surtees Society, 68 (1878, for 1877), p. 469.

Derek Pearsall, ‘The literary milieu of Charles of Orléans and the Duke of Suffolk, and the authorship of the Fairfax sequence’, in Charles d’Orléans in England (1415-1440), ed. by Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 145-56 (p. 149 n. 14).

Derek Pearsall, ‘The Mmnuscripts and illustrations of Gower’s works’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. by Sian Echard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 73-97 (pp. 74, 82, 84, 90, 91, 95).

Derek Pearsall, ‘The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490’, in The English Medieval Book. Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 87-99.

C. H. Talbot, ‘A list of Cistercian manuscripts in Great Britain’, Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought and Religion, 8 (1952), 402-18 (p. 409).

The Diary of Humfrey Wanley 1715-1726, ed. by Cyril Ernest Wright and Ruth C. Wright, 2 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1966), I: 1715-1723, p. 58 n. 5.

Cyril Ernest Wright, Fontes Harleiani: A Study of the Sources of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1972), pp. 197, 198-99, 346.

Material Type:

Archives and Manuscripts

Legal Status:

Not Public Record(s)

Names:

Edmund Rich, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, c 1174-1240,
see also http://isni.org/isni/0000000080047634
Gower, John, poet, d 1408,
see also http://isni.org/isni/0000000109397129

Places:

England