If you follow the #PolonskyGerman hashtag on Twitter, you may have read some of our threads about particularly interesting Polonsky manuscripts. “Particularly interesting” is subjective, of course; every manuscript is interesting if you look at it for long enough. From the perspective of a non-manuscript-scholar, here are some of the interesting things about MS. Laud Misc. 158, a compilation of texts by Augustine and Pseudo-Augustine that was produced in the second half of the 12th century and held at the Cistercian monastery of Eberbach until it came to Oxford with Archbishop William Laud.
- The binding. MS. Laud Misc. 158 is still in its 17th-century Laudian binding, but it has been rebacked. Compare its spine with the more well-worn spine and genuine sewing supports of MS. Laud Misc. 163.
- The pastedowns. The inside of each board is covered with a sheet of printing waste from a 17th-century concordance to the Bible. It’s not uncommon for printing waste and manuscript waste to be used as binding materials; the manuscript fragment database Fragmentarium allows you to search specifically for manuscripts used as pastedowns. It’s the first bit of printing waste I’ve encountered in a Polonsky manuscript, however. A sheet like this makes you realize how big the manuscript itself is, however–a whole printed bifolium is needed to cover one board.
Printing waste pastedown, inside upper board
- The initials. We have been discussing how to more usefully distinguish between different types of decoration on this website. Currently, we classify all the digitized manuscripts as “decorated”, because they all contain some decoration, whether rubrication, pen-flourishing, historiated initials, or full-page miniatures. One proposed strategy is to distinguish between single-colour and multi-colour decoration, in which case MS. Laud Misc. 158’s spare but lovely red initials wouldn’t make the cut.
- The repairs. While this manuscript is in excellent condition for its 850 years, the original parchment was relatively low-quality, containing a number of holes and irregularities. Some of these were neatly stitched up during parchment-making; others were not.
- The corrections. MS. Laud Misc. 158 was annotated in a hand almost indistinguishable–to the unskilled eye, at least–from the original scribe’s. These marginal corrections, which appear to be rephrasings of or additions to the original text, are contained in neat boxes.
On fol. 4r, an addition of three sentences is written at the bottom of the page, with an in-line symbol indicating where in the text it should go.
- The highlighting. In a handful of the manuscripts digitized so far (for example, MS. Laud Misc. 144), a very pale wash of gold paint is used to highlight section headings. The paint is used especially liberally in this manuscript, not just for main headings but for individual lines of text.
It’s not clear to me whether the gold highlighting was added when the manuscript was made or by a later user; the fact that the highlighting occurs in two 12th-century manuscripts and one 9th-century one (MS. Laud Misc. 134) seems to suggest the latter. In any case, the resemblance to 21st-century highlighter pen brings home this manuscript’s historical importance as a teaching and study tool as well as an art object.
Emma Stanford is the Bodleian’s Digital Curator and the project manager for Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands.