Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, the history of the English, in Latin, in Carolingian minuscule, decorated manuscript on vellum [Germany, c.900]

opening leaf of the text, 305mm. by 207mm., double column, 32 lines in brown ink in a fine Carolingian minuscule, 4 lines of capitals in red, large initial 'B' (opening "Britannia oceani insula ...") in penwork picking out delicate knotwork interlace and foliate sprigs, touched in red, yellow and pale blue/green, small near contemporary corrections, some small holes, scuffs and folds, trimmed at edges (with loss of a few letters from each line on outermost edge), hessian binding

An important witness to the greatest early medieval work of history, adding significantly to our knowledge of the early dissemination of the text

provenance

Quaritch, Bookhands III, cat.1088 (1988), no.3; Schøyen MS 102.

text

"Britannia Oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit, inter septentrionem et occidentem locata est, Germaniae, Galliae, Hispaniae, maximis Europae partibus ..."

(Britain, an island in the ocean, formerly called Albion, is situated between the north and west, facing the coasts of Germany, France, and Spain, which form the greatest part of Europe ...)

With these words the greatest English historian began to fill the gap left in the sources of antiquity regarding post-Roman Britain. It both surveys the early kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England and seeks to put them on the intellectual map by committing their histories to the written word. It is the beginning of all histories of the English, and inspired legions of Continental authors to do the same for their own cultures.

Bede was born in 672/3 and entered the monastery of Wearmouth, where he was educated by Benedict Biscop (founder of Wearmouth-Jarrow and its famous library) and Ceolfrith (who commissioned the Codex Amiatinus). He transferred to the sister house at Jarrow after its foundation and became a prolific writer, composing some sixty texts. This, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, is his greatest work, and was completed in 731 when he was 59 years old. He died in 735.

In the late Middle Ages almost no significant library was without a copy of the work, and some 159 manuscripts and fragments are traced by M.L.W. Laistner, A Handlist of Bede Manuscripts, 1943, pp.93-103 (not including the present leaf). However, due to its great age and importance for the history of the transmission of the text, the present manuscript stands apart from the majority of these. It differs in a number of readings from the two principal eighth-century witnesses: the celebrated Moore Bede (Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 5. 16) and the St. Petersburg Bede (formerly 'the Leningrad Bede', National Library of Russia, lat.Q.v.I.18). Neither is likely to have been the exemplar of the leaves here. Some of its letterforms, however, such as 'l' or 'b', with bulging strokes, suggest that an Insular witness stood behind it, and the textual transmission is most probably that of a German line incorporating Wolfenbüttel, Weissenberg 34 (late eighth-century: Codices Latini Antiquiores IX, no.1385), and Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.f.118 (second third of the ninth century), later corrected against a copy of the tradition found in the Moore Bede.

This leaf is no. 90 in the forthcoming update of Laistner's census by G. H. Brown and J. Westgard.

the decorated initial

The initial 'B' here with its internal panels of knotwork and its central bar terminating in two sprigs of foliage which extend into the enclosed panels bears a striking resemblance to that opening the text in the St. Petersburg manuscript (unlike the simple initials with perimeters of coloured dots in the Moore Bede and the Wolfenbüttel manuscript). As noted above, there is no discernable textual contact between the present leaf and the St. Petersburg manuscript, and so this initial presumably echoes a lost Insular exemplar, most probably made by the same Northumbrian artist who produced the St. Petersburg manuscript.