Gregory the Great, Cura pastoralis

Title

Gregory the Great, Cura pastoralis

Shelfmark

St John's College MS 28

Place of origin

English, Canterbury, St Augustine's

Date

s. x2 and x/xi

Language

Latin

English

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Vellum.

Physical extent

i + 77 + vi (numbered 78–81, ii–iii)

Hands

Written in insular square minuscule with both long and 8-shaped caroline s alternating with the insular form. Punctuation by double point, punctus versus, punctus elevatus, and occasional point and medial point. As one expects in this script at this date, the book was produced in the insular manner, and it is difficult to be certain which side of the skin appears on the outside of the quires.

The added materials written in caroline. Punctuation as in the main portion of the MS, but lacking the medial point.

Decoration

Red headings in rustic capitals at chapter divisions.

At the heads of chapters, 4- and 6-line green extended rustic capitals; enlarged capitals in text ink to divide sentences.

Exceptionally, two chapters have branch and interlace initials with animal forms, on fol. 8 four lines high with a marginal extender in ink with red highlights; on fol. 27 a 6-line A in green.

On fol. 2 (plate III), a full-page drawing of Christ in red with a book and cross; on fol. 81v, a blank page, three sketches of figures (one an angel) and two sketches of interlace patterns. The illustration of Christ was drawn before the text was written (the scribe carefully tried to avoid the figure, but in three minor instances wrote over the paint).

For discussion of the drawings, major pieces of mid to late tenth-century illumination, see most recently Temple, no. 13 (42), heavily dependant upon Francis Wormald, English Drawings of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1952), esp. 25, 63, and 74. Wormald draws attention to the similarity of the figure to that of the slightly earlier ‘Dunstan miniature’ in BodL, MS Auct. F.4.32 and further notes connections with the drawing of Boethius’s Philosophy in Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.3.7 and of the Trinity in Paris, BN, MS lat. 943 (the Sherborne Pontifical, probably a direct copy). Temple identifies the initials with Wormald’s ‘Type II (b)’. Further discussions appear in Barbara Raw, ‘The drawing of an angel in MS. 28, St John’s College, Oxford’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 18 (1955) 318–19; and Robert Deshman, ‘The Leofric Missal and Tenth-Century English Art’, Anglo-Saxon England 6 (1977), 145–73; and a cautionary note, Richard Gameson, ‘La Bible de Saint-Vaast d’Arras et un manuscrit anglo-saxon de Boéce’, Scriptorium 52 (1998), 316–21 at 318 n. 15.

Illuminations and decoration of our MS are frequently discussed and reproduced, e.g., Temple figs. 42 (fol. 2), 43 (fol. 81v); Bishop 3 and the accompanying plate 5 (fol. 6v); Wormald, no. 51 (77) and plate 2 (fol. 2); ASIllum 7–8,9 and plates 7, 8, 14a and b (fols. 2, 81v, 26, 27); J. J. G. Alexander and C. M. Kauffmann, English illuminated Manuscripts 700–1500 (Brussels: Bibliotheque royale, 1973), no. 3 (22–3); 0. Pächt, Hunt Exhib, xvii.1 (73); Janet Backhouse et al., The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art 966–1066 (London, 1984), no. 32 (55) and fig. 32 (54). See also AT nos. 2 and 4 (3) and plate i (fol. 2). Alexander and Temple are certainly wrong to separate fols. 1–4 categorically from the remainder (and appear to have thoroughly missed the text run-over on fol. 7); on this basis, the drawing may have been part of the original Gregorian programme, protected, just like the contents table (and the head of Cura pastoralis, if fol. 7 is integral) by blank leaves. Thus, the drawing might be dissociated from those on fol. 81v, on leaves supplied when the MS was expanded to include the two saints’ lives.

Binding

A modern replacement, probably s. xvii. Sewn on five thongs. At the front, one modern paper flyleaf; at the rear, two modern paper flyleaves (ii–iii), following the added eleventh-century materials.

Acquisition

'Iohannes White de Suthwyke in Comitatu Suth’ armiger dedit hunc librum Thome Whitede london’ militi ad vsum colegij per ipsum de nouo erecti in Oxon’ Anno 1553' (fol. 1 upper margin); at the foot of the page, '76', perhaps an old shelfmark.

Provenance

Although not listed in Ker, MLGB, both script and decoration point to production at St Augustine’s, Canterbury(OSB). Bishop (3) finds the scribe again in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 389, certainly a St Augustine’s book (Ker, Cat no.66 [113], MLGB 41). Our MS appears as no. 25 in Bishop’s listing of twenty-eight books produced at St Augustine’s, s.x med.–ex., Aethici Istrici Cosmographia..., Umbrae codicum occidentalium 10 (Amsterdam, 1966), pp. xix–xx. And Wormald makes the same identifications on the basis of the style of the initials.

'Sed meritis pauli capiamus dona salutis | Hec davno uerbum sed scriptum metrice uersum', not in Walther (fol. 81rb, lower margin; in the glossing hand). Below this, another glossing hand has added 'Sancti vincentii meritis capiamus dona salutis', which Wormald suggests (77) would point to ownership at Abingdon (OSB) , where, at least after the Conquest, there was a cult of St Vincent.