14 - Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649 (O)

Summary

This remarkable manuscript has received a great deal of attention from historians and literary scholars. According to the typology offered earlier, it is a “mixed”collection, containing a unified collection followed by a miscellaneous one. But the whole is written in a single fifteenth-century hand, which in both parts begins each sermon with a flourished Lombard letter and regularly leaves a blank space of about six or seven lines between sermons. The codex is regularly constructed: eleven quires of twelve leaves each (ff. 1–134) contain the first set (ff. 1–133, 133v and 134 are blank except for a pen trial on 134v); seven more quires contain the second set (ff. 145–228). The volume bears a continuous medieval foliation, possibly entered by the scribe, which jumps from 134 to 145, perhaps leaving space for a quire that was to hold an index. The scribe in all likelihood was one John Swetstock, whose name was once visible and now appears only abbreviated on f. 48.

The first set, O/1 (ff. 1–133), holds twenty-five sermons. The initial thirteen are for the Sundays in Lent and (apparently) Holy Thursday, in correct liturgical order; they are followed by two other Lenten sermons and then further sermons, in no particular order, of which several can, on internal evidence, be assigned to other Sundays, several saints’ feasts, and the funeral of the knight John D.