VIII - Update to the List of Manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae

Summary

Since the publication of Julia Crick's Summary Catalogue and her latest update in this journal, several new manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (HRB) have been located. Michael Reeve uncovered two copies in the course of his editorial work on Vegetius's Epitoma rei militaris and reported them in his edition of Geoffrey's HRB. These are Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Min. 74, and Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek 3518 (Haenel 8). During my doctoral research, completed in 2013, I located three further manuscripts (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 946; Rome, Biblioteca Corsiniana e Accademia dei Lincei, MS 1775; Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, MS 142), and two fragments (Copenhagen, Rigsarkivet, Aftagne fragmenter 9.443; Lawrence, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, MS 9/1:A22), both apparently remnants of once complete copies.

The Montpellier manuscript was earlier listed as a copy of the Prophecies of Merlin and it is described as such in the catalogue of the library. It does, however, contain ninety chapters of the HRB, as I observed when I examined the manuscript in 2009. The Vatican manuscript came to my attention from the catalogue of the relevant part of the Palatine collec tion by Dorothea Walz, published in 1999. The copy at Biblioteca Corsiniana I located almost by chance, checking the hand-written catalogue by Armando Petrucci held at the library; I have not found reference to it in secondary literature. The Copenhagen fragment has been known to Danish scholarship for quite some time; I am indebted to Lars B. Mortensen for information about it, and to Michael Gelting and Christian Troelsgård for their help with locating it. I owe my knowledge of the Kansas fragment to Michael Gullick; it can now be found online at Berkeley's Digital Scriptorium (http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/digital scriptorium).

Since Reeve's edition of the HRB does not provide information on the Leipzig and Schaffhausen manuscripts, apart from their textual filiation, they too are covered in the following. After the descriptions, I append some preliminary observations on the textual filiation of all the manuscripts, drawing largely on Michael Reeve's work and generosity.

In the descriptions, I have kept to the conventions of Crick's Summary Catalogue. Manuscripts examined at first hand have an asterisk preceding the shelfmark.