Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 197B: The Northumbrian Gospels

purl.stanford.edu/qw038wz9710

Title:

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 197B: The Northumbrian Gospels

Alternate Title:

Fragments of Gospels

Language:

Latin

Extent:

ff. 36

Approximate Date:

[ca. 700 A.D. - 799 A.D.]

Table of contents:

The Northumbrian Gospels

Description:

This manuscript constitutes the surviving portion of the 'Cotton-Corpus' Gospels; the larger part, now London, BL MS Cotton Otho C. V, was badly damaged in the Cottonian fire of 1731 and only burnt fragments remain. A bifolium of canon tables, probably also from this manuscript, survives as London, BL MS Royal 7. C. XII, ff. 2-3. The original manuscript was a lavish Insular Gospel Book with elaborate decoration; in the Corpus part the eagle symbol of St John the evangelist still survives, and elaborate decorative initials incorporating a range of interlace and other ornament. It belongs in a group with the Durham Gospels, the Echternach Gospels, and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Both Parker and Cotton recorded on their respective parts of the original book that it was believed to have been owned by St Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury, who was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to England in 597. The date of the manuscript rules this out: it seems to be from late seventh- or early eighth-century Northumbria. However it is possible that this tradition arose in the Middle Ages, as one of the volumes which Thomas Elmham (d. c. 1427) recorded among those revered as sent from Gregory to Augustine was probably an early Insular Gospel-book of this type. The same provenance was attributed anachronistically to other early Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at St Augustine's, Canterbury.