Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in English
First Advisor
Mary Hayes
Second Advisor
Brad Cook
Third Advisor
Jason Solinger
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
The scribal activity in the margins of the eleventh-century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41 has long been acknowledged and studied, but rarely have scholars examined the relationship between the manuscript’s marginalia and its body text, an Old English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. As such, this thesis attempts to address this critical scholarly gap by evaluating key marginal texts of MS 41 in their original physical contexts. In the introduction and first chapter, a brief overview of the manuscript history of MS 41 and its five extant analogues is given. The second chapter focuses on the textual transmission, content, and unique location within the body text of a document preserved by Bede, Pope Gregory I’s Libellus Responsionum. In the following two chapters, marginalia written near or within the bounds of the Libellus, namely the fragmentary Solomon and Saturn and three cattle charms, are parsed and analyzed with respect to their structural and thematic similarities to the body matter. In the final chapter, the language and themes of three major Old English texts in the margins of MS 41, the Bee Charm, the Journey Charm, and the Harrowing of Hell homily, are compared to the events depicted in their Christian hagiographic manuscript contexts. The thesis concludes with the hope that scholars will reevaluate the worth of MS 41 and take further advantage of digital humanities resources to reveal new knowledge on this topic and other matters of Anglo-Saxon material and literary culture. Additionally, in the four appendices, I provide image scans of relevant pages of the manuscript; my own transcription of the Harrowing of Hell homily; a list of critical editions referenced in this thesis; and a series of tables cross-referencing the various classification systems employed in different scholars’ critical editions of the marginalia of MS 41.
Recommended Citation
Sumrall, James Nicholas, "Demarginalizing Bede's Margins: A Digital Codicological Reassessment of the Relationship Between Marginalia and Body Matter in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2881.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2881