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This volume contains indexes to a university library, a monastic
library, two cathedral libraries, a diocesan library and three
record offices. Outstanding among the manuscripts are two
Wycliffite New Testaments and John Mirk's popular sermon collection
'The Festial'.
Handlist to manuscripts in one of Britain's major medieval
repositories. Lambeth Palace Library, which dates from a bequest by
Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, is one of England's major repositories
of medieval manuscripts. More than half of the ninety-six
manuscripts and documents containing items of Middle English prose
were already present when the library was temporarily transferred
to Cambridge in 1647. In the succeeding centuries further
manuscript materials have continually been added, and within the
last few years the library has become home to the older part of
Sion College Library, an event that has added a further seven
manuscripts to the present handlist. The collection at Lambeth is
large enough to be fully representative of the corpus of Middle
English prose: the Brut, the Wycliffite Bible, and Love's Mirror,
for example, are all present, in some cases in multiple copies, as
are writings by Hilton and Rolle. There are sermon cycles
(including an almost complete set of Wycliffite sermons), medical
recipes, historical works, and anthologies of religious treatises.
Altogether the current handlist indexes almost 800 separate items,
ranging from the veterinary to the liturgical. O.S. PICKERINGis
Senior Assistant Librarian and Associate Lecturer in English at the
University of Leeds; V.M. O'MARAis Lecturer in English at the
University of Hull.
The Index of Middle English Prose is an international collaborative
project which will ultimately locate, identify and record all
extant Middle English prose texts composed between c.1200 and
c.1500, in both manuscript andprinted form in medieval and
post-medieval versions. The first step towards this goal has been
this series of Handlists, each recording the holdings of a major
library or group of libraries. Compiled by scholars, Handlists
include detailed descriptions ofeach prose item with
identifications, categorisations and full bibliographical data.
Every Handlist will also contain a series of indexes including
listings of opening and closing lines, authors, titles, subject
matter and rubrics. For students of the middle ages Handlists
provide essential bibliographical tools and shed light on a wide
range of subjects.
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