8 - Oxford, Bodleian, Canonici Miscellaneous 74

Summary

The canonici manuscript provides an interesting comparison to the Campsey manuscript in a number of ways. In physical terms, the Canonici collection is substantially smaller than the Campsey codex, suggesting that it may have been read either individually or in small groups. Though the absence of illumination sometimes makes it difficult to navigate between different texts, the Canonici collection was clearly intended for use rather than show. In its current form, the codex contains a decasyllabic version of the Vie de Saint Alexis which, as Meyer indicated some time ago, is executed in an original fashion from the Latin Vita and is therefore entirely independent of earlier twelfth-century versions of the poem. The second item in the collection is a lacunary copy of the Poème moral (a non-contemporary title given to the medieval work by Meyer), which relates – among other things – the Lives of Moses the Black and Thaïs. La Vie Sainte Juliane and Eufroysine follow this poem. The fifth text in the collection – the Life of Mary the Egyptian – is probably the oldest extant copy of the T version of this enormously popular vernacular story, although the text is some 200 lines shorter than the version in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français 23112. The last two texts in the collection are La Vie Saint Andrier l'apostle and Li Ver del juïse – a sermon on the theme of the Last Judgment. Many of these texts are of northern provenance; the manuscript itself is most probably of Walloon extraction.