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Lansdowne MS 699
- Record Id:
- 040-002076953
- Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:
- 040-002076953
- MDARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100000001257.0x0002f4
- LARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100193736270.0x000001
- SLARK:
- Format:
- ISAD(G)
- Reference (shelfmark):
- Lansdowne MS 699
- Title:
- Collection of poems by John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer
- Scope & Content:
-
Contents:
f. 2r-v: John Lydgate, 'Life of St Giles', written in Middle English verse, imperfect comprising only the final six stanzas; the text beginning, '…Bi a spiryt oonly of prophecie...' (DIMEV 4129).
ff. 3r-18r: John Lydgate, Fabula duorum mercatorum, written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'In Egipt whilom as I rede and fynde...' (DIMEV 2490).
ff. 18v-27v: John Lydgate, Guy of Warwick, written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'Fro cristes birth compleet nyne hundred yeer...' (DIMEV 1464).
ff. 28r-34v: John Lydgate, 'The Chorle and the Birde', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'Problemys liknessis & ffigures...' (DIMEV 4420).
ff. 35r-41r: John Lydgate, 'Legend of St. Austin at Compton', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'Lyk as the bible makith mencion...' (DIMEV 3085).
ff. 41v-50v: John Lydgate, 'Dance of Macabre', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'O Creatures that been resonable...' (DIMEV 4105).
ff. 51r-66v: John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, extracts concerning King Arthur and Constantine, written in Middle English verse, the text beginning, 'Was evir prince myht hym silff assure...' (DIMEV 1904).
ff. 67r-78v: John Lydgate, 'Hors, Goose and Shepe', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'Controuersies pleys & discordis...' (DIMEV 1075).
ff. 79r-80v: John Lydgate, 'Verses on the Kings of England (to Henry VI)', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'This myhti William duke of Normandie...' (DIMEV 5731).
ff. 81r-82v: Geoffrey Chaucer, 'Balade of Fortune', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'The wrechid werldis transmutacion...' (DIMEV 5803).
ff. 82v-83r: Geoffrey Chaucer, 'Truth', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'Flee from the press & dwell with sothfastnesse...' (DIMEV 1326).
ff. 83v-85r: John Lydgate, Stans Puer ad Mensam, written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'My dere childe first thi silf enable...' (DIMEV 3588).
f. 85v: John Lydgate, ‘A Doctryne for Pestilence’, written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'Whoo will been holle & kepe hym from sekenesse...' (DIMEV 6586).
ff. 85v-88r: John Lydgate, 'Dietary', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'ffor helthe of body keep fro cold thyn hed...' (DIMEV 1356).
ff. 88v-89v: John Lydgate, ‘A Satyrical Ballad against Jack Hare’, written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'A ffroward knave pleynly to descrybe...' (DIMEV 45).
ff. 90r-91r: John Lydgate, 'Letter to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, asking for money', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'Riht myhti prynce and it be your wille...' (DIMEV 4500).
ff. 91v-94v: John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, an extract concerning the 'Golden World', written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'The [olde world] whan Saturn was first kyng...' (DIMEV 1904).
ff. 96r-176v: John Lydgate, Life of St. Alban and St. Amphibal, written in Middle English verse, beginning, 'To calle Clio my dulnesse to redresse...' (DIMEV 5966).
The manuscript contains a number of later additions:
f. 1r: An added list of the manuscript's contents by Edward Umfreville (b. 1702, d. 1786), collector of legal manuscripts.
f. 95r-v: The opening lines of William Browne's Brittania's Pastorals, written in English, beginning , 'I that whilere near Tau's straggling spring', together with Browne's signature, and other inscribed English verses.
Decoration:
19 small initials in blue with red pen-flourishing at the beginning of each text (ff. 3r, 18v, 28r, 35r, 41v, 51r, 61v, 67r, 79r, 81r, 83v, 85v, 88v, 90r, 91v, 96r, 97v, 112v, 113v).
Highlighting of initials in red at the beginning of each verse line.
Paraph marks in plain red or blue. Underlinings in red.
- Collection Area:
- Western Manuscripts
- Project / Collection:
- Lansdowne Collection
- Hierarchy Tree:
- [{ "id" : "040-002076953", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Lansdowne MS 699: Collection of poems by John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]
- Hierarchy Record Ids:
- 032-002060013
040-002076953 - Is part of:
- Lansdowne MS 1-1245 : Lansdowne Manuscripts
Lansdowne MS 699 : Collection of poems by John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer - Hierarchy:
- 032-002060013[0544]/040-002076953
- Container:
- View / search within Archive / Collection: Lansdowne MS 1-1245
- Record Type (Level):
- File
- Extent:
-
1 volume
- Digitised Content:
- http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100193736270.0x000001 (digital images currently unavailable)
- Thumbnail:
-
- Languages:
- English, Middle
Latin - Scripts:
- Latin
- Start Date:
- 1450
- End Date:
- 1499
- Date Range:
- 2nd half of the 15th century
- Era:
- CE
- Access:
-
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- User Conditions:
- Physical Characteristics:
-
Material: Parchment and paper.
Dimensions: 190 x 135 mm (written space: 150 x 85 mm).
Foliation: ff. 176 (+ 4 paper flyleaves at the beginning, and 3 at the end).
Script: Gothic cursive.
Binding: British Museum in-house. Blue leather binding, tooled in gold, with the Lansdowne arms gold-stamped on the upper and lower covers; marbled endpapers.
- Custodial History:
-
Origin:
England.
Provenance:
Inscription, 15th-century, signed by 'George …(?)' (f. 27v).
Inscriptions, 16th-century, in a number of different hands (ff. 61r, 72r, 81r, 89v, 95r, 95v, 98v, 99r, 106r, 117v, 161v).
Inscribed, 17th-century(?), 'Hern Glastonburg 307' (f. 41v).
William Browne (b. c. 1590, d. c. 1645), English pastoral poet: inscribed, 'W Browne 1615' (f. 2r), and 'Wm Browne', together with the opening lines of his poem Britannia's Pastorals (f. 95r).
Edward Umfreville (b. 1702, d. 1786), collector of legal manuscripts: his note on the manuscript's contents, bearing his signature (f. 1r).
William Petty (formerly Fitzmaurice) (b. 1737, d. 1805), 2nd earl of Shelburne and 1st marquess of Lansdowne, prime minister: his book-plate (f. [iv] verso); purchased by the British Museum together with 1244 other Lansdowne manuscripts in 1807.
- Publications:
-
Henry Ellis and Francis Douce, A Catalogue of the Lansdowne Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1819). no. 699.
Thomas D. Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue of Materials Relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, to the End of the Reign of Henry VII, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, 26 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862-1871), I, p. 23.
H. L. D. Ward and J. A. Herbert, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols (London: British Museum, 1883-1910), I, pp. 496-97.
The Dance of Death, edited from MSS. Ellesmere 26/A.13 and B.M. Lansdowne 699, collated with the other extant MSS, ed. by Beatrice White (London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1931) [edition].
Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographic Manual (New York: Peter Smith, 1933), pp. 331-32.
Curt F. Buhler, 'Lydgate's Rules of Health in Lansdowne 699', Medium Aevum, 3 (1934), 51-56.
The Life of Saint Alban and Saint Amphibal, ed. by J. E. van der Westhuizen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974) [edition].
The Benedictines in Britain, British Library Series, 3 (London: British Library, 1980), no. 93 [exhibition catalogue].
Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson, 'Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts', in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475, ed by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 279-315 (p. 303).
Julia Boffey, 'Short Texts in Manuscript Anthologies: The Minor Poems of John Lydgate in Two Fifteenth-Century Collections', in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 69-82 (p. 72).
Claire Sponsler, 'Eating Lessons: Lydgate's "Dietary" and Consumer Conduct', in Medieval Conduct, ed. by Kathleen M. Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 1-22 (pp. 5, 6, 11-12, 20 n. 15).
John Withrington, 'The Arthurian Epitaph in Malory's Morte Darthur', in Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, ed. by James P. Carley (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 211-32 (pp. 231, 232).
Julia Boffey, 'Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts', in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. by Thomas Gibson Duncan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 1-18 (p. 4).
Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate's Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 234-43.
A. S. G. Edwards, 'The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate's Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition', in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 81-93 (pp. 89, 90).
Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 90, 91.
Claire Sponsler, The Queen's Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 78-79.
Jake Walsh Morrissey, ''To Al Indifferent: The Virtues of Lydgate's 'Dietary'', Medium Ævum, 84 (2015), 258-78 (pp. 170, 275 n. 22).
John Lydgate,The Dance of Death, and its model, the French Danse Macabre, ed. by Clifford Davidson and Sophie Oosterwijk (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 66-67, 68, 100-17, 134-43, 165-70.
Ewa Ciszek-Kiliszewska, 'The Middle English Preposition and Adverb Atwen', in Studies in Linguistic Variation and Change: From Old to Middle English, ed. by Brian Lowrey and Fabienne Toupin (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), pp. 41-63 (pp. 48, 49, 55).
Thomas Willard, 'Images of Mortality in Early English Drama', in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death (Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 411-32 (p. 413).
Seeta Chaganti, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 159-60, 162, 166-70.
Kara A. Doyle, The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400-1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts (London: Plumbago, 2021), p. 226 n. 29.
- Material Type:
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Legal Status:
- Not Public Record(s)