Introduction

Summary

In January 2019, the convenor of a “History of the Book” module on the University of Bristol’s new MA Medieval Studies programme discussed with Bristol’s Special Collections Librarian, Michael Richardson, the provision of medieval manuscripts for teaching timetabled to take place in Special Collections. Reasoning that the programme would be well served by adding unknown manuscript fragments to existing inventories of medieval codices and fragments, Richardson asked Jane Bradley, Local Studies Librarian at Bristol Central Library, the city’s historic municipal library, about the prevalence of manuscript pastedowns in its rare book collection. Richardson arranged to view a selection of the relevant volumes and recruited his wife, Vassiliki Frangeskou, to assist in photographing them for later consultation. Richardson was especially intrigued by two folios bound as flyleaves in the front and rear of the first tome of a four-volume edition of the complete works of the medieval French reformer, Jean Gerson (1363–1429). These were exceptional in being written in French, rather than in Latin, as is more common for manuscript fragments recycled into bindings. His attention was drawn by the emergence of proper names from Arthurian literary texts. He sent some photographs to Leah Tether, a University of Bristol academic working on French Arthuriana, who identified the passage represented in the two fragments as extracts from the continuation of the Estoire de Merlin that forms part of the Vulgate Cycle (more often referred to nowadays as the Lancelot-Grail Cycle).

This continuation is known as the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, usually thought to have been composed ca. 1220–1225, and not to be confused with the Suite du Merlin, which is the continuation of the Merlin story contained in the Post-Vulgate Cycle. Tether confirmed this identification with Laura Chuhan Campbell, a specialist of Old French and Italian Merlin narratives at Durham University. As excitement grew, Tether convened a meeting at the Central Library with Campbell, Richardson, and Benjamin Pohl, a medieval book historian and palaeographer from Bristol’s Department of History. It soon transpired that there were in fact more than just the two fragments originally identified; in both the front and rear of each of the remaining three volumes of Gerson’s Opera was a further folio from the same manuscript bound as a flyleaf (except the fourth tome, where there was no front flyleaf).