Ongoing Projects:
Manuscripts from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and Priory

by William Rogers

The foundations of the early English canon are increasingly the focus of a certain kind of scholarly attention, as late medievalists work to locate the spaces for scribal activities, identify the scribes copying the works of medieval authors, and complicate the boundaries among author, compiler, and scribe.

Of course, London of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has proven essential to these scholarly endeavors, and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and Priory looms large in these narratives of scribal work and canon creation. John Shirley retired there, rented rooms, and copied manuscripts containing what we might call the greatest hits of Chaucer and John Lydgate. In his Survey of London, John Stow recalls St. Bartholomew’s again and again, describing Shirley’s tomb. Further, Stow owned several copies of manuscripts that were copied or held in the monastic library. And the sixteenth century sees an explosion of printing in and around St. Bartholomew’s, further cementing it as a place of great importance to the rise of the early English canon.

Currently, as a 2015-2016 Freedman Fellow, and with financial assistance from the Baker-Nord Center, I am exploring the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts and scribes associated with this monastic foundation. The project consists of both a digital archive—created through Omeka—and a GIS map that will allow users to pinpoint and visualize the origins, journeys, and destinations of manuscripts copied and held at St. Bartholomew’s, along with information about dialect and scribe. The digital archive will present images of various documents and objects, including the twelfth-century seal certifying the foundation of St. Bartholomew’s, and facsimiles and transcriptions, which I will complete, of documents and manuscripts in Middle English and Latin.

Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59, for example, demonstrates the kind of connections one might draw from texts in their manuscript contexts. Copied by John Shirley at St. Bartholomew’s, MS Ashmole 59 contains one of two extant versions of Henry Scogan’s Moral Ballad, a text supposedly written for Henry IV’s sons; a copy of John Lydgate’s “The Kings of England”; and a Middle English copy of the widely popular Secretum Secretorum. By describing and mapping these manuscripts, this project sheds light not only on what manuscripts were produced at St. Bartholomew’s, but also what copy texts would have been available to scribes working there.

These kinds of digital projects advance aims that are central and have been central to medieval studies and the humanities in a larger sense for centuries. As humanists, we should value access, and seek to make available knowledge that, for a number of reasons, is not open to the public. Digitization offers new avenues of access for materials that are often only available in research libraries, which necessitates a certain amount of money (traveling to England, Los Angeles, or Paris), privilege (letters of introduction from manuscript studies scholars), and a willingness to battle reluctant curators and archivists for access to manuscripts. By making more widely available these materials, I hope to show to my colleagues in and out of the field, and a public interested in Tolkien and Game of Thrones, another version of medieval England and its literary and documentary culture.

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