The Romances of British Library, Cotton Vitellius D.III

The Romances of British Library, Cotton Vitellius D.III
Elizabeth Watkins
Although severely damaged in the infamous Cotton Library fire at Ashburnham
House,l Vitellius D.I I l still presents a telling witness to its
compilation and use. On the basis of its twenty-six extant folia and the
catalogues made of Sir Robert Cotton’s collection before the fire, valuable
information may be gleaned about this important thirteenth-century
miscellany and its Latin, French, and English contents. Amongst the over
150 extant manuscripts containing Anglo-Norman and Middle English
romances,2 Cotton Vitellius D.III is the only one known to have contained
an English and a French romance within the same codex, namely the
Middle English Floris and Blancheflour and the Anglo-Norman Amis et
Ami/oun. The occurrence of these two texts in the same manuscript
raises interesting questions about early practices of vernacular manuscript
production and about the degree of interplay between England’s
two vernaculars during this transitional period, but this miscellany is not
all that it seems. I will argue that the contents and arrangement of this
presumed medieval miscellany do adhere to a schema of organization,
but that it is in fact the product of Sir Robert Cotton’s program of purposeful
dismemberment and rearrangement of the manuscripts he
received into his collection. Vitellius D.II l does preserve some elements
of an actual medieval miscellany, but its later history is equally revealing
For an account of the Cotton Library fire, see A Report from the Committee
Appointed to View the Cottonian Library, And Such of the Publiek Records of this
Kingdom as they think proper, and to Report to the Hause the Condition thereof
tagether with what they sha/1 judge fit to be done for the better Reception,
Preservation, and more convenient Use ofthe same (London, 1732).
Ruth ). Dean lists at least fifty manuscripts containing Anglo-Norman romances
in her Anglo-Norman Literature: A Gwde to Texts and Manuscripts (London:
Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999). Gisela Guddat-Figge lists nearly one hundred
manuscripts containing M iddle English romances in her Catalogue of Manuscripts
Containing Middle English Romances (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976).
ROMA:\CES OF COTT0:-1 VJTEUUS D.Jll 257
about post-medieval uses of miscellanies and the problems inherent in
(mis)reading them.
Although several catalogues of the Cottonian collection were made in
the years before the fire, the 1696 print catalogue published by Thomas
Smith, the librarian to Sir john Cotton, grandson of the library’s founder
Sir Robert, provides an especially complete picture of the collection.3 The
entry for Vitellius D.III lists ten items, encompassing a wide variety of
texts.
1 . De fundatione Abbati;:e de Fiscamps in Normannia, h.e., Fiscanensis, de trunco
sanguinis Christi ibidem invento, et de portione ejusdem sanguinis, per
Episcopum Norwicensem advecta. 1r.
2. Liber de via bona; sive de bello sacro cruce signatorum. lnitium: ‚Cum jam
appropinquasset il/e terminus, quem Dominus quotidie suis demanstrat
fide/ibus, atque spiritualiter in Ecclesia dicens, si quis vult venire post me,
abneget semetipsum, et tollat crucem suam, et sequatur me, facta est motio
valida in universis Gal/iarum regionibus, ut,‘ etc. 7v.
3. Versus de historiis sacris veteris et novi Testamenti, veteri lingua Gal/icana. 49r.
4. Versus de amoribus Florisii juvenis et 8/anchef/orce puel/ce, Jingua veteri
Anglicana. 60r.
5. Gesta Amysii et Amylonis, versibus Gallicanis. 78r.
6. Meditationes pice et preces de jesu et Maria; ejus passione, aliisque, versibus
Gallicanis. 85r.
7. Expositio Kalendaril; sive de ratione dierum, mensium, et anni, de festis diebus,
aliisque ad computum Ecclesiasticum spectantibus, per Randulphum de
Lynham, anno 1256, ut patet ex p. 56 b. rhythmis Gallicanis. 90v.4
8. Versus Gal/icani de upupa, pelecano, aliisque. 96v.
9. Expositiones qucedam sive commentaria in Macrobii Satttrnalia. 98r.
10. Liber pentachronon; i.e. quinque temporum futurorum; compilatus de prophetiis
B. Hildegardis Virginis, qu<e cceperunt anno D. 1 100, cum epistola et etiam
prologo Gebenonis, Prioris Cistrensis, ad Reymundum Scho/asticum et
Reynerum, Canonicos S. Stephani in Maguntia de vita et libris il/ius Virginis.
197r.
Thomas Smith, Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonion Library, 1696
(Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum bibliothecae Cottoniae), ed. Colin G.C. Tite
(Cambridge: Brewer, 1984). This catalogue was supplemented by Smith’s
successor, David Casley, who provided the folia an which the items began for
publication in the 1732 report presented to Parliament about the library fire. I
have given the contents ofVitellius 0.111 as listed in Smith’s catalogue, along with
the folio numbers listed by Casley.
lf Casley’s folia numbers are right, Smith’s Statement about Rauf de Linham being
identified as the author of item 7 and 1256 as the year in which it was written
must be incorrect.
258 ELJZABETH W A TKDIS
The first item presents a Latin account of the foundation of Fecamp Abbey
in Normandy, focusing especially on the origins of a relic of Christ’s
blood at the abbey. Following in a similarly religious strain, the next item
may, on the basis of the provided incipit, be identified as Petrus Tudebodus‘
account of the First Crusade, the Historia de Hierosolymitano
Itinere.s The third item consists of French verse retellings of stories from
the Bible. The fourth and fifth items are, respectively, the romances Floris
and 8/ancheflour in Middle English and Amis et Amifaun i n French.
The sixth item is a collection of French meditations and prayers to jesus
and the Virgin Mary. The seventh item is the French computus text in
verse by Rauf de Linham. This item also provides a terminus post quem
for Vitellius 0.111 since the poem gives its date of composition as 1256.
The eighth item appears to comprise selections from a French verse bestiary,
including entries about the hoopoe and pelican. The ninth item and
the Iongest by far is a Latin commentary on Macrobius‘ Saturnalia. The
final item is Prior Gebeno of Eberbach’s Pentachronon, a work based on
selections from H ildegard von Bingen’s prophetic writings. Of these ten
items, only three items have survived and none in its entirety: (a) five
folia of item 3, the French versified biblical stories; (b) three folia from
item 4, Floris and Blancheflour; and (c) eighteen folia from item 9, the
commentaries on Macrobius‘ Saturnalia.
Aided by Smith’s catalogue and these extant fragrnents, previous
schalarship on Vitellius 0.111 has recognized the rnanuscript as a potential
missing link in our understanding of insular literature, rnultilingualism,
and book production. In his edition of the Middle English Floris and
8/ancheflour, Emil Hausknecht concludes that the manuscript may be
dated to the latter half of the thirteenth century on the basis of available
evidence, which makes it one of the earliest extant manuscripts containing
a Middle English romance.6 Gisela Guddat-Figge fine-tunes this
date further, suggesting 1275 for the manuscript’s composition in her
Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances. She is also
the first to draw attention to the uniqueness of its contents: „tlanked by
Paul Meyer, „Fragments d’une ancienne histoire de Marie et de jesus en Iaisses
monorimes (Musee Brit. Cott. Vit. 0.111),“ Romania 16 (1887): 250.
Emil Hausknecht, ed., Floris and Blauncheflur: Mittelenglisches Gedicht aus dem
13. Jahrhundert nebst litterarischer Untersuchung und einem Abriss über die
Verbreitung der Sage in der europäischen Litteratur (Berlin: Weidmann, 1885),
94-95.
ROMA:-JCES OF COTTON V!TELILS D.III 259
Bible stories and pious meditations appear Floris and Blaunchejlur (in
English) and Amis and Amifaun (French). This is the only case I know of
where a French and an English romance occur in one and the same MS.“7
Drawing upon Guddat-Figge’s research, Andrew Taylor points to this juxtaposition
of a French and an English romance as an indication not only
of the pivotal role the manuscript plays in our knowledge of the linguistic
transition from French to English as the vernacular language of
choice, as evidenced by Floris and Blanchejlour’s near word-for-word
translation of its Anglo-Norman forbear, but also of the „transition from
commercial copying of Anglo-Norman to commercial copying of Middle
English.“8 In terms of its dimensions, he notes, Vitellius 0.111 is larger
than many Anglo-Norman miscellanies and resembles the larger miscellanies
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as the Auehinleck
manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1).
The manuscript, as such, provides a unique witness to the production of
multilingual miscellanies during the thirteenth century.
There can be no question about the identification of Vitellius D.III as a
miscellany: its assemblage of diverse texts speaks to that. After all, here
one finds within a single codex: a monastic chronicle, an account of the
First Crusade, vernacular retellings of the Bible, two romances, devotional
prayers, a calendar, selections from a bestiary, commentaries on a
classical text, and a prophetic work concerned with the end of the world.
What is more, the texts do not even share a common language, most of
them being written in either Latin (four texts) or French (five texts) with
the sole exception of the Middle English Floris and Blanchejlour. This mix
is not u n usual, though. England’s unique linguistic patchwork may easily
account for such a linguistically diverse assemblage of texts. This same
linguistic and generic diversity is evident in other multilingual English
Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts, 180. However, this is not to say that it is
the only manuscript that contains a French and an English romance. Bodleian
Library, Bodley 264, for example, contains a copy of the French Roman
d’Aiexandre, an extract from version B of the Middle English Alexander, and
Marco Polo’s Livres du Graunt Caan, but it is a composite manuscript. The Roman
d’Alexandre, was copied and illuminated in Flanders in 1338 and later brought to
England, where the two remaining texts were added around 1400 (Guddat-Figge,
Catalogue of Manuscripts, 252-55). Vitellius D.lll’s distinction lies in the fact that
its romances appear to have been bound together from its inception.
Andrew Taylor, „Manual to Miscellany: Stages in the Commercial Copying of
Vernacular Literature in Eng land,“ Yearbook ofEnglish Studies 33 (2003): 16.
260 ELIZABETH WATKJ:-IS
miscellanies. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 86; Cambridge, Trinity
College B.14.39; and London, British Library, Arundel 292 all contain
Latin, French, and English items and date from around the last quarter of
the thirteenth century, making them contemporaneous with Vitellius
D.IJI.9 When viewed alongside these other late thirteenth-century multilingual
miscellanies, Vitellius D.Ill Iooks very much the part of the
medieval miscellany on the basis of its linguistic and generic make-up.
The unity in variety displayed by the manuscript’s linguistic and generic
contents is also mirrored in its thematic unity, for Vitellius D.III has
an averarehing religious tone both in its individual parts and as a
whole.to Though I would hesitate to argue that the manuscript’s items
follow a narrative flow, there does appear to be some effort to group the
texts according to a chronological framework which echoes the trajectory
of Christian salvation history. The first three items-the story of the
foundation of the abbey at Fecamp, the Crusades narrative, and the
French renderings of stories from the Old and New Testaments-look to
tim es in the past when God’s hand has evidenced itself in human history.
Although it is difficult to know for certain what biblical storics item 3 included,
11 the remaining fragments relate an apocryphal story about the
wood used for Christ’s cross, the Nativity, and prophecies concerning the
Messiah’s advent and the births of St. Anne and the Virgin Mary. The
common thread linking these events is their ultimate fruition in Christ’s
crucifixion. The Fecamp chronicle describes in particular the discovery
of a phial of Christ’s blood, a Norman variation on the legend of the Holy
Grail that developed surrounding joseph of Arimathea and Glastonbury
For a discussion of how language is used to structure these early English
miscellanies, see john Scahill, „Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies:
Languages and Literature,“ Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 18-32.
to On the miscellaneity of English miscellanies, see Ralph R. Hanna, „Miscellaneity
and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England,“
in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen
G. Niehals and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996),
37-51; and Derek Pearsall, „The Whole Book: Late Medieval English Manuscript
Miscellanies and their Modern Interpreters,“ in lmagining the Book, ed. Stephen
Kelly and )ohn j. Thompson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 17-29.
u ln his article, Meyer argues that the Vitellius D. Jli text for item 3 must have been
incomplete since the folia it would have occupied (supplied by Casley) would not
have sufficed for a complete spiritual history drawing upon the Old and New
Testaments. However, it is also possible that the text was much more limited in
scope and only included selections from this material.
ROMA‘-:CES OF COTIO’I VJTELIUS D.HT 261
Abbey. For its part, Petrus Tudebodus‘ Historia describes the First
Crusade in which Jerusalem was captured, supplying not only a martial
victory for the Crusaders, but also a spiritual one in which thc city, a relic
in its own right as the site of the events which allowed for the
redemption ofhumanity, was regained.
The pious thread binding the codex tagether continues with items 4
through 9, but the temporal focus shifts from the historical past and centers
instead upon the present, a time for instructing the Jaity with models
of exemplary behavior and other didactic texts. The no-longer extant
meditations and prayers about Mary and Jesus urge on the daily devotion
of the faithful. They stand out as the most explicitly religious of
these items, but even the romances included in this volume possess a pious
cast. Floris and Blancheflour teils the story of a pagan prince and a
Christian girl who fall in Iove with one another, while the testing of male
friendship in Amis et A m ifaun comes to a crux with the murder of Amis‘
children to eure Amiloun’s Jeprosy, a story of sacrifice reminiscent of
Abraham and Jsaac. lt is unclear whether the selections from the bestiary
noted by Smith in his catalogue come from any of the cxtant French bestiaries,
like that of Philippe de Thaün, but the nature of the bestiary format
entails that the behaviors of the hoopoe and the pelican, mentioned
explicitly by Smith, present exempla for instruction and moralization. In
the bestiary tradition, the hoopoe’s concern for its parents offers a model
for the care of the elderly, while the sacrifice of the pelican for its young
recalls jesus‘ crucifixion and his redemption of humanity’s sins. Rauf de
Linham’s Kalender, item 7, joins it.<;elf to the pious thread as an instructional
text for determining the date of Easter, a means of dividing sacred
and profane time. The commentaries on Macrobius‘ Saturnalia also
speak to this section’s didactic purpose since Macrobius was often cited
during the Middle Ages as an auetoritos and his Saturnalia may be seen
as an encyclopedia of knowledge about ancient Roman culture.12
The last item, the Liber Pentachronon, forms the final section of the
manuscript. In its prophecies about the end times, it Iooks ahead to the
future and adds an eschatological element to the codex. Hildegard von
Bingen’s prophccies about the Antichrist, filtered through the compiler
Prior Gebeno, complement the manuscript’s first item, the story of
Fecamp and the discovery of a phial of Christ’s blood there. The manu-
1 2 Douglas Kelly, The Conspiracy of Al/usion: Oescription, Rewritin9, and Authorship
from Macrobius to Medieval Romance (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 13-15.
262 ELIZABETH W „. TKI:-IS
script juxtaposes the shedding of Christ’s blood on the cross, through
which humanity was redeemed, with the advent of the Antichrist, whose
arrival will signal the Apocalypse and the final chapter in salvation history.
The placement of these items, in effect, codicologically pits Jesus
against his final adversary and emphasizes the salvific trajectory of the
manuscript as a whole. Despite their diverse subjects and genres, each
text can be linked tagether in a chain which ultimately finds its beginning
in Christ.
lt is tempting to read Vitellius D . l l l in this way, to see its contents as
interconnected, organized, and linked by a common narrative that
speaks to its identification as a unified thirteenth-century miscellany.
But for all of the unity this narrative brings to the diverse linguistic and
generic elements of this manuscript and its potential significance, the
object physically binding these items does not ultimately support such a
claim, as closer inspection of the manuscript itself makes clear. Other
scholars working on this manuscript have hinted at the possibility that
its contents may not have always been bound together. Paul Meyer concludes
„certainement“ that Vitellius D.lll had consisted of formerly independent
items that were later bound together.B Disagreeing with an
earlier editor’s suggestion that the French biblical verses and Floris and
Blancheflour are written in the same hand,l4 Meyer contends that the
three extant items are actually written in three distinct hands datable to
three different periods. In this same vein, Guddat-Figge proposes that
Vitellius D . l l l is the only manuscript in which a French and an English
romance occur tagether „with due caution“ and raises the possibility that
„various MSS. may have been bound together.“1S Meyer and GuddatFigge
are right to suggest that Vitellius D . I I I may be a composite manuscript,
a possibility that must always already be considered when discussing
medieval miscellanies. The miscellany is an ever-mutable
object-made up ofbooklets sewn together, other booklets may easily be
added to it or removed from it.l6 This possibility of growth and change is
part of what makes miscellanies so miscellaneous and why we must be
B Meyer, „Fragments,“ 251.
1 4 G.H. McKnight, ed., King Horn, Floriz and 8/aunchejlur, The Assumption of Our
Lady, Early English Text Society o.s. 14 (London: Paul, Trench, and Trübner,
1901), xliii.
1s Guddat-Figge, Catalogue oJManuscripts, 180. 16 Booklets may be added or removed as long as the manuscript has been
softbound or its binding has been removed and rebound.
ROMA ‚\CES OF COTTO’\ VJTEliUS D.IH 263
all the more careful about misreading them by failing to be alert to evidence
of change. Confirming the doubts raised by Meyer and GuddatFigge,
my reexamination of the extant codicological and paleographical
evidence brings to light the guiding hand of Cotton Vitellius D.III’s early
modern compiler: Sir Robert Cotton.
Admittedly, the evidence the fire left behind is not much to go on. The
smoke blackened the pages and the heat of the fire caused the vellum to
contract and the fat within the pages to bubble out, thereby rendering
the leaves which remained from Vitellius 0.111 distorted and very difficult
to readY Any binding that survived the fire would have been removed
when the manuscript’s Jeaves were individually mounted in the paper
frames they are in today. As noted above, remnants of three items (3, 4,
and 9) have survived. Given the effects of the fire, it is difficult to determine
how !arge the manuscript’s pages may have once been or even the
original size of the script In their present shrunken state, most of the
leaves are hardly !arger than one’s hand. The biblical verses and Floris
and Blancheflour maintain a common two-column Iayout, with the first
Ietter of each line separated by a small space from the rest of the line and
touched with red ink for added emphasis, while the prose commentaries
on the Saturnalia are written in a single column, with some glossing in
the margins. Red two-line initials can be found throughout all three
items. As noted by Meyer, each of the preserved texts also has a different
scribe. The French biblical verses are copied in a Jate thirteenth-century
Gothic (rotunda) hand with Anglicana features.1s The script used to copy
Floris and Blancheflour is thinner than that used in the biblical text, but
maintains many of the same blended Gothic and Anglicana features.19
While the hands of the two previous scribes possess transitional
features, the hand of the third scribe may be more correctly identified as
early fourteenth century Anglicana.20
17 Andrew Prescott, ‚“Their present miserable state of cremation‘: The Restoration
of the Cotton Library,“ in Sir Robert Cotton as Col/ector: Essays an an Early Stuart
Courtier and his Legacy, ed. C. j. Wright (London: British Library, 1997), 391-454.
18 lts features include the two-compartment a whose upper bowl extends above
most of the other letters and the two-compartment, 8-shaped g. 19 The Gothic features ofthis hand are the short-stemmed r, andfand long s do not
descend below the baseline. lts Anglicana features are the two-compartment a
and g.
2o The features of this hand are the two-compartment a, uncial d with looped
ascender, long-stemmed r, and sigma-shaped s.
264 EUZABETH W A TKJ:“‚S
The remnants of Vitellius D.III present us with three different texts,
in three different languages, and in three distinct hands, at least one of
which may be dated, o n the basis of paleographical evidence, to a Jater
period. The presence of a later item need not rule out the possibility that
the items were intended to be joined together. The very nature of the
medieval miscellany as a process of compilation and as the end-product
of such a process of compilation provides for the occurrence of things
which we, Jooking back at these manuscripts hundreds of years later,
might perceive as aberrations from an expected form. Vitellius 0.111 is
clearly a product of accretion, but it is hard to say whether its constituent
pieces were specifically copied into a manuscript over the course of
time to create a single whole or the individual items were all brought
tagether randomly at a later date. The evidence that the bindings and
quires might have provided-such as whether multiple items were copied
in a single quire, how they were arranged, or what scripts the manuscript’s
other items were written in-all of which would give some
indication of how the manuscript came together, has been lost to the fire.
In the absence of such information, Vitellius D.III does nevertheless
retain clear indications of its status as a non-medieval miscellany compiled
by Sir Robert Cotton, the seventeenth-century statesman and book
collector who will always remain notorious in the opinion of some scholars
for his dismemberment of the medieval manuscripts that entered his
collection.Z1 He, or persans working under his orders, often removed
their bindings, dispersed their contents, and created new manuscripts
organized according to frameworks altogether different from the ones
that had earlier housed them.22 Close inspection of Vitellius D.III’s
remaining leaves reveals a series of majuscule letters which point to
Cotton’s handiwork. At the bottom of folia 9r, 1 5 r, and 26r, the letters Q,
R, and W, respectively, may be found. The Jetters are in a decidedly nonmedieval
hand, and the R, in its rightwards-slant; the extension of the
stem above the rest of the Ietter; the hooked extension of the top of the
21 james P. Carley and Colin G. C. Tite, „Sir Robert Cotton as Collector of Manuscripts
and the Question of Dismemberment: British Library MSS Royal 13 0.1
and Cotton Otho D.VIIL“ The Library 14, no. 2 (1992): 94-99.
22 For a discussion of how Cotton reordered the manuscripts that entered his
collection, see Co !in G. C. Tite, The Manuscript Library of Sir Robert Cotton (London:
British Library, 1994), 45-47, and Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586-
1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 68-70.
ROMA).ICES OF COTTO:\ VJTELIGS DJH 265
upper bowl beyond the stem; and the addition of a foot at the bottom of
the stem, bears an incredible likeness to Robert Cotton’s own hand.23
Letters like these have been found in other manuscripts in Cotton’s collection-
he added them to the first leaf of each quire as an aid to his
binders so that they could assemble the folia in the proper order.24 The
presence of these letters in Vitellius D.III Jends credence to prior misgivings
about its possibly composite nature: Cotton has undeniably had a
hand in compiling this manuscript.
But this need not mean that it has been cobbled tagether haphazardly;
if anything the presence of Cotton’s own handwriting in this manuscript
suggests the great care he took in assembling it. l t has been
estimated that „barely half‘ of the books in Cotton’s library remained i n
the states in which they h a d entered his collection, a fact which speaks to
the extent of his efforts as a compiler.2s Although there does not always
appear to be a clear rhyme or reason governing these re-fashioned compilations,
Jennifer Summit has shown how Cotton appropriated the compilatio
techniques used in the manuscnpts of medieval chronicles and
saints‘ Jives in his collection to create codices which situated the material
from these Catholic texts within a narrative history of the Protestant
Reformation and Britain.26 She points in particular to his use of chronology
as the primary means by which he organized these manuscripts.27
Although Summit speaks here especially with regard to Cotton’s use of
historical and semi-historical chronicles and hagiographies, these same
means of imposing order upon diverse material s may be seen at work in
Vitellius D.ll l . The miscellany Cotton has crafted follows a roughly
chronological framework, its selection of texts codicologically mapping
out the history of salvation I charted in the first half of this paper. Cotton
uses these medieval, Catholic, and insular texts to narrate a British story
of Christian salvation which is acutely aware of the French, English, and
Latin stories that have contributed to its telling. Moreover, the contents
ofVitellius 0.111 and their arrangement also illustrate Cotton’s knowledge
of an insular codicological institution: the multilingual miscellany. He
23 For examples of Sir Robert Cotton’s signature, see Tite, Manuscript Library, 8-9.
24 lbid., 46. See figure 1 5 (ibid.) for an example of one of Cotton’s binding letters in
Caligula A.VIJ.
25 lbid., 45.
26 jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008}, 136-96.
27 lbid., 148.
266 ELIZABETH WATK!c-JS
brought tagether these disparate texts, crafting from them a trilingual
miscellany that, for all intents and purposes, resembled actual trilingual
miscellanies, in language distribution and contents, produced in England
during the latter half of the thirteenth century. To turn a phrase, it is the
very model of a medieval insular miscellany. But we need not think of
Robert Cotton as an early modern Dr. Frankenstein, destroying medieval
manuscripts and stitching them tagether in a haphazard manner to create
abominations against bibliographical norms. Though we may balk at
his method, he, like ourselves, is a post-medieval reader of these texts,
and the arrangement and contents of Vitellius D.lll stand as testaments
to how he read these items, to the value he placed in them, and to his
own interpretation of the medieval miscellany as a way of organizing
information.
We may lament the loss of the thirteenth-centmy miscellany that
might have been, but all is not lost when it comes to Vitellius D.Ill’s juxtaposition
of an English and a French romance. It does preserve some
elements of a real medieval miscellany. From extant catalogues and records
of acquisitions for Cotton’s collection, we can determine that items
4, 5, and 6-that is, Floris and 8/anchejlour, Amis et Amiloun, and the
French prayers and meditations to Jesus and the Virgin Mary-were
formerly bound together and in the same order, no less, in a manuscript
belanging to Henry Savile of Banke, a Yorkshire manuscript collector
(1568-1617).28 Cotton purchased this manuscript, along with about
eighty or so others, from Savile’s estate sametime after Savile’s death
and before 1 6 2 1, since it appears in an early catalogue of Cotton’s collection
compiled in that year.29
The manuscript (number 1 1 8 in the catalogue of Savile’s collection
preserved in British Library, Additional 3 5 2 13), like Vitellius D.III, was a
trilingual miscellany and contained items of a religious disposition.3o The
texts bound in Vitellius D.IIl formed the last three items of Savile’s manuscript.
The first three items were: a religious text, in Latin, concerning
28 See Colin G. C. Tite, The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Formation,
Cataloguing, Use (London: British Library, 2003), 165 and the entry for Manuscript
1 18 in Andrew G. Watson, The Manuscripts of Henry Savi/e of Banke (London:
Bibliographical Society, 1 969), 41-42.
29 London, British Library, Harley 6018, fol. 56.
3° Watson estimates that the Additional catalogue dates from before 1612
(Manuscripts, 13).
ROMA’iCES Of COTTOS V!TELIL:S D.III 267
the accusation made before Pilate against Jesus;31 Pseudo-Methodius‘
apocalyptically-minded history of the world, also in Latin; and a French
verse version of the Letter o[ Prester john.32 An earlier catalogue of
Savile’s collection (London, British Library, Harley 1879, fol. lr-lüv)
lists as its first item „Galfredus Monumentis,“ ostensibly referring to an
unnamed work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, suggesting the possibility that
Savile, like Cotton, may have tried his hand at rearranging the manuscripts
in his collection.33 This, however, could be a mistake34 and the
practice of dismembering manuscripts has never been connected with
Savile, about whom very little is known.3; At the very least, regardless of
what the First item in Savile’s Manuscript 1 18 may have been, it still preserves
the unique pairing of an English and a French romance, as weil as
the French prayers and meditations. Though Cotton and Savile, if he also
rearranged his manuscripts, as avid collectors may have recognized the
uniqueness of this juxtaposition and actively made an effort to preserve
it, it is also possible and seems more likely that these three items survived
one or possibly two re-compilations because they formed a booklet
unit. Unfortunately, the current state of Vitellius 0.111 prevents the
verification of this, but it would account for the continued concurrence of
these three items during three centuries‘ of reassembling and rebinding.
Through all of these tumults, the juxtaposition of an English and a
French romance remains to problematize our understanding of the
genre of romance and the audience(s) of these texts. The ward romance
began as a term denoting difference-something written „en romanz“
JI I have not been able to identify this more precisely. lt could be a mystery play.
32 Martin Gosman, ed., La Lettre du Pretre ]ean: Les versions en ancient [ran9ais et en
ancient Occitan (Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1982). There are two extant
copies of the Letter of Prester john in French verse, but the great majority of its
French versions are in prose, of which there are twenty-three copies.
33 Watson estimates that the Harley catalogue was compiled before 1607
(Manuscripts, 14). The Iist, compiled by Savile, feil into the hands of Cotton who
seems to have used it as a wish Iist, putting marks next to the texts he wanted to
acquire.
H In his edition of the Additional catalogue, j.P. Gilson notes the „imperfect
descriptions“ of the two Savile catalogues: „The Library of Henry Savile, of
Banke,“ Transactions ofthe Bibliographica/ Society (1906-08): 132.
35 Watson writes: „[S]o little is known about Henry Savile that he remains hardly
more than a name whereby to distinguish his collection from that of other men“
(Manuscripts, 1). Those of Savile’s manuscripts which have been tracked down
show little evidence of having been used by him (lbid., 9).
268 ELIZABETH W A TKJCIS
was written i n the vernacular, specifically i n French, not in Latin. This
connotation of Jinguistic difference necessarily carried with it a sense of
social difference, initially distinguishing the learned clergy from the laity,
and later becoming associated with France and courtly culture. Romance
was also a term used to express generic difference: a romance was a
poem in the vernacular enjoyed by the laity, filled with courageaus
knights, lascivious ladies, and daring deeds.36 But the miscellany setting
of these romances challenges the inherent alterity of romance, stressing
instead the sameness between seemingly disparate categories. Placed
amongst religious works, the pious elements of Floris and Blanchejlour
and Amis et Amifaun shine forth more brightly and highlight the ambiguous
genre tendencies of both texts. Their miscellany setting also suggests
that the people who read these poems in this context were not two distinct
audiences, but one audience, reflecting the ability amongst some
segments of the population to fluidly alternate between the vernaculars
spoken and read in England during this period.37 At the same time, we
must be cautious about what generat conclusions we draw from this juxtaposition-
Savile’s Manuscript 1 1 8/Cotton’s Vitellius 0.111 is the only
medieval insular manuscript that contained romances in England’s two
primary vernaculars. Although we cannot account for the other manuscripts
like it that may have been lost, it is also among the very few insular
French and English miscellany manuscripts containing romances
which include items in the other vernacular, which is to say that there
are not many French romance manuscripts that contain English items,
nor many English romance manuscripts that contain French items.3B
The insights these romances provide into genre categorization and
insular multilingualism are only part of the story Vitellius D.III can tell
us. Although I have shown that this manuscript is not the thirteenth-
36 On the range of meanings associated with the word romance, see N.E. Griffin,
„The Definition of Romance,“ Publications of the Modern Language Association 38
(1923): 55-56; and Paul Strohm, „The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Ro·
maunce,“ Genre 10, no. 1 (1977): 1-7.
37 On multilingualism in medieval England, see, for example, lan Short, „On
Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England,“ Romance Phi/ology 33, no. 4 (1980):
467-79.
3B Other romance manuscripts containing French and English materials include:
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 264; London, British Library, Harley 2253;
London, British Library, Royal 12 C. XII; and Longleat House, 55 („The Red Book
of Bath“).
ROMA’lCES OF COTTO:-; VITELIUS D.Tll 269
century miscellany previous scholars have presumed it to be, it is no less
valuable for this revelation. The part Sir Robert Cotton had in arranging
the contents of Vitellius D.IIl, the possible role that Henry Savile may
have played in manipulating his Manuscript 1 18, and the post-medieval
fates of Floris and Blancheflour, Amis et Amiloun, and the French versified
biblical stories present us with a cautionary tale and alert us to the many
critical problems which must be dealt with when studying medieval miscellanies
and their miscellaneity. What so often begins as the study of
one miscellany is very likely to become that of multiple miscellanies.