MS 61

Summary

Described Thomas James 17; Stanley B. 5; Walter W. Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Edited from Numerous Manuscripts, vol. 2, Boethius and Troilus (Oxford, 1894), p. lxix and plate facing title page (of f. 101^v); James, Corpus 61; R.K. Root, The Manuscripts of Chaucer's Troilus with Collotype Facsimiles of the Various Handwritings, Chaucer Society, First Series 98 (London, 1914), p. 7 and plate iv (of f. 102^v); Robert Kilburn Root, The Textual Tradition of Chaucer's Troilus, Chaucer Society, First Series 99 (London, 1916), pp. 5–6; Robert Kilburn Root, The Book of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer (Princeton, 1926), p. liii; Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 61, with introductions by M.B. Parkes and Elizabeth Salter (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 1–23; B.A.Windeatt, Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’ (London, 1984), p. 69; M.C. Seymour, ‘The Manuscripts of Chaucer's Troilus’, Scriptorium 46 (1992), pp. 108, 111–112; Illuminations 130 (incl. plate of f. 1); Index of Images 24.

[1]

f. 101^v

Neu[er] foryeteth anne neuill

Note made with plummet in s. xv hand. James (Corpus, Corrigenda, p. 557), notes Skeat's view that the reference is to Anne Neville (d. 1480), grand-daughter of John of Gaunt and wife of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The possible identity of Anne is discussed by Parkes (p. 12) and by Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 41, 109–110, one candidate being Anne Beauchamp (1426–1492), Countess of Warwick and wife of Richard Neville. This Anne is endorsed by Martha Driver in ‘Inventing Visual History: Re-Presenting the Legends of Warwickshire’ in Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century, ed. Wendy Scase (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 181–182. See also Scott, Caxton Master, pp. 61–63. Christopher de Hamel (Illuminations, p. 276) suggests that it is more likely to have been her daughter Anne Neville, who was Richard III's queen (1456–1485), and that she did not own the MS, but visited someone who did.