An edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29

Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29 is a late 15th-century manuscript which contains a large number of excerpts from diverse religious and secular medieval texts like the Vulgate, Caxton’s print of the Polychronicon, de Worde’s print Information for pilgrims unto the Holy Land, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Peter of Poitiers’s Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a Holy Cross legend, Jacques Legrand’s Book of Good Manners, and Mandeville’s Travels. These texts are compiled in an idiosyncratic manner, forming a seamless prose history of the world, which starts with the creation of the world and ends incompletely with a description of Hannibal’s exploits. Written by a single compiler-scribe, the manuscript offers fascinating insights into methods of compilation employed by medieval historiographers at the close of the Middle Ages. Two other manuscripts in the same hand are extant – San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 144 and London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 84 – which show similarities in design and compilatory technique. To date, MS 29 has received only little critical attention. This thesis presents for the first time a full edition and comprehensive study of the text. The thesis consists of two volumes, the first of which contains an analysis of the edited text, including a complete description, investigation of sources, linguistic analysis, discussion of genre, context, and audience, as well as a commentary. The second volume contains the edited text as an appendix (excluded from the word count, according to the regulations for DPhil theses). The way in which the compiler of MS 29 interacts with and selects from his source texts provides a better understanding of medieval habits of reading and writing and of the cultural climate predominant at the time of the manuscript’s production. This extensive analysis thus serves as a detailed case study, which is relevant to a wide range of late medieval texts.