Chapter 3 - ‘Witnesses Preordained by God’: The Reception of Middle English Religious Prose

Summary

Towards the end of the fourteenth century, someone, somewhere (probably) in the English West Midlands, decided to make a substantial investment: the production of a vast manuscript miscellany of religious texts in the vernacular. This book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. A.1, is better known nowadays as the Vernon manuscript, after Edward Vernon, its seventeenth-century owner who gifted it to the Bodleian in 1677. Such miscellanies seem to have been fashionable at the time of its making; for instance, John Northwood’s collection in London, British Library, MS Additional 37787, associated with Bordesley Abbey in North Worcestershire, where Northwood entered as a novice in 1386, contains some twenty English works of vernacular devotion, several in common with Vernon.