Posted February 27, 2025 by Rose A. McCandless, DS Manuscript Data Curation Graduate Fellow
One of my responsibilities as the Manuscript Data Curation Graduate Fellow at DS is original metadata creation. Member institutions without the staff or expertise to describe their manuscripts can turn to me for metadata creation. With the help of the DS Advisory Council—and, as you’ll see in this story, the broader community of scholars—I work to combine expertise and describe these manuscripts. This often involves more than just describing a manuscript—it means identifying and contextualizing it. Contextualization is especially crucial in the study of medieval fragments, as the context/circumstances of fragmentation can serve as important witnesses to how manuscript culture evolved in later periods. This post follows one such case: the identification of a fragment from a 13th/14th-century manuscript repurposed as a binding fragment in a 15th-century printed book (though I’ll be honest from the outset—it’s a little more complicated than that!). For the past year or so, I’ve been working with Williams College in Williamstown, MA, one of DS’s newest members, describing a variety of codices, excised leaves, and binding fragments within the Williams College Chapin Library collection. The fragment in question today is a pastedown in one of Williams’ incunables, Inc M266 folio, a 1485 edition of Calderini’s commentary on Martial and a 1494 edition of Juvenal’s Satires.
Williams College, Chapin Library, Inc M266 folio (back pastedown).
Immediately upon viewing this binding fragment (which I am describing via digital images, rather than in person, unfortunately!) I noticed that fascinating creature, the ever elusive and enchanting mark of ownership, in the bottom margin of the leaf. My initial transcription was “Iste liber constiti Joh(ann)i amdetti(?) monacho monasterii S(anct)i Petri glo(?)” and, as I simultaneously started searching for monasteries dedicated to St. Peter, I also posted a photo of the fragment on Bluesky with my tentative transcription. And as they do, the medievalists of Bluesky immediately teamed up to identify these marks of ownership and the fragment itself.
First, Dr David Rundle replied with a corrected transcription: “Iste liber constiti Joh(ann)i arndell monaco monasterii S(anct)i Petri glowc,” which points us to St. Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester. Unsurprisingly, the fragment has already been identified by Neil Ker, the scholar behind the immense Medieval Libraries of Great Britain project. As per the usual, Ker and co. beat us all to the punch and had already identified the fragment’s previous institutional ownership and included it in the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain project. Under “Gloucester, Ben. abbey of St. Peter,” Ker lists “Williamstown, Williams Coll., Chapin Libr. Fragm. operis incerti.” Thus Ker et al. left a little breadcrumb for future scholars: the identification of the text!
The script of the fragment, to me, indicates production in England around the thirteenth century or fourteenth century, and the use of rubricated underlining indicated that this is commentary/gloss on some text. My initial hypothesis was that this was a text of canon or civil law, due to the layout and my basic skimmed translation, and most likely a work of canon law because the text is discussing the sacrament of baptism. But before I was able to make the text identification, another fabulous Bluesky colleague, Dr Mark Thakkar, provided it for me! The text of the fragment, and likely the codex from which it was excised, includes glosses on the Decretals of Gregory IX, one of the most important texts of medieval canon law (specifically, D. 4 de cons. c. 26-29, or, as Dr Thakkar humorously put it, “III.4.26–29, as it would be if scholars of canon law behaved like normal people”). Thus we were able to provide another piece of descriptive information to the folks working on updating the digital edition of Medieval Libraries of Great Britain over at the University of Oxford.
Institutional ownership at St. Peter’s Abbey, however, is not the only aspect of this mark of ownership that is interesting. The inscription names John Arndell (or Arundell), who is noted as a donor, fl. 1498 in Oxford, to St. Peter’s Abbey by both Ker et al. and Emden (Ker, 1964, p. 265; Emden, 1957, p. 51). According to the inscription and Ker and Emden’s works, John Arndell was a monk of St. Peter’s Abbey at Gloucester when he gave the book to the monastery as well as a scholar at Oxford. Emden suggests that Arndell was likely a scholar at Gloucester College, Oxford, as the college was affiliated with St. Peter’s Abbey (Emden, 1957, p. 51). There are three medieval book lists from St. Peter’s Abbey published in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues volume 4, English Benedictine Libraries: the shorter catalogues, and one dating from c. 1536-1540 (Oxford, Bodleian, MS Top gen. c. 3 fol. 266). As is the overall theme of this blog post, I was fortunate to receive help from Prof. Tessa Webber, who looked into print-only sources including the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues and Emden for me while I awaited my own copies from InterLibrary Loan. There are no texts recorded in the Bodleian book list that correspond naturally to the inclusion of the Decretals, so this manuscript had most likely already been removed from the library of St. Peter’s Abbey. This was confirmed in the next step of my research: investigating the binding itself.
The next step in the research process focusing on this fragment was finding more information about the circumstances in which the two incunable texts included in this volume, the 1485 Martial and 1494 Juvenal, were bound together in their current binding (which includes our fragment, upside down, as the back pastedown). Because we know that John Arndell’s donation of books to St. Peter’s Abbey occurred in 1498, the rebinding of the two texts, and use of the fragment in question in the binding of the now-Inc M266 folio, must have occurred after 1498. A pencil inscription on the flyleaf of the incunable, dated December 1908, identifies the binding with one type described by Gibson (1903) as number 32, whose binding type is based on Oxford, Merton College, MS 175. Following a review of Merton, MS 175’s binding, I do agree with this attribution, indicating that (as with Merton MS 175) Williams College, Inc M266 folio was bound in Oxford ca. 1500. So one of my questions now is: How did this manuscript, which was in the possession of St. Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester in 1498, come to be used in an Oxford binding around 1500?
Williams College, Inc M266 folio (front board)
Williams College, Chapin Library, Inc M266 folio (front flyleaf).
As discussed by Molinari et al. (and many other sources!), in situ binding fragments and their host volumes had to be at the same place at the same time. Insight into the rebinding circumstances of the host volume can thus in turn provide valuable insight into perceptions of the manuscript’s place in society at the time of binding. Why was this copy of Glossed Decretals no longer useful as a manuscript volume? Was it perhaps replaced by a printed edition, or a more updated/recent manuscript version? Was it replaced by a copy written in a more legible script? Were Gregory IX’s Decretals no longer in fashion?
There are so many questions still to be asked and new avenues of research one might pursue regarding the binding fragments in Inc M266 folio, which will soon be discoverable in the DS Catalog. Some of these include:
- Who are the catalogers behind the pencil notes on the book’s front flyleaf? (The initials included appear to be S.X.P. and G.D., dated December 1908.)
- The fragment discussed above, the incunables’ back pastedown, contains a second ownership inscription that was identified by Dr Peter Kidd, located in the bottom margin just below the inscription from St. Peter’s. It reads “Iste liber constat’ Wilh’mo France(?).” The script, which is significantly faded, appears to me to date loosely from around the fourteenth century in England.
- The second front flyleaf of the book includes a list of contents and yet another inscription: “Liber Ricardi Colyon” followed by “Puer(um?)” and several abbreviations and symbols that I have yet to identify. Our friend Richard Colyon also included his name a few times on the front pastedown in the binding (below), accompanied by several doodles of birds.
- The front pastedown is a fragment of Justinian’s Digest, a key work of Roman law, dating from ca. thirteenth-fourteenth-century Italy. Is there significance to the reuse of two manuscripts of law (albeit different types of law) in the same binding? We may ask the same questions of the front pastedown as our pastedown discussed above; why was it no longer useful as a manuscript book?
Williams College, Chapin Library (flyleaf ii)
Williams College, Chapin Library, Inc M266 folio (front pastedown)
The process of identifying this fragment has been a testament to the collaborative nature of fragmentology and manuscript studies overall. As an early career cataloger, I’m grateful to have this group of colleagues who are so knowledgeable and willing to share their knowledge to contribute to our collective understanding of manuscripts and their contexts; indeed, the community of knowledge and knowledge sharing is what Digital Scriptorium is all about! Maneuvering access to source material that often only exists in print and asking questions of colleagues who have greater expertise than myself are only being facilitated with greater ease by social media platforms like Bluesky and linked open data platforms like DS and Wikidata. And together, we were able to provide so much more information about this fragment and its fascinating history than would have been possible on my own.
References
Emden, Alfred Brotherston. A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A. D. 1500. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.
English Benedictine libraries: the shorter catalogues. Richard Sharpe, ed. Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues volume 4. London: The British Library in association with the British Academy, 1996.
Gibson, Strickland. Early Oxford Bindings. Oxford: Bibliographical Society at the Oxford University, 1903.
Ker, Neil Ripley. Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books. 2nd ed. London: The Royal historical society, 1964.
Molinari, Alessandra, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, Katrin Janz-Wenig, Elisabeth Meyer, Andrea Alessandro Gasparini, and Federico Aurora. “The Multi- and Interdisciplinary Relevance of Fragment Studies: Two Cases from a State Archive in Italy.” Digital Philology 13, no. 1 (2024): 102–23. doi:10.1353/dph.2024.a926888.