The Contexts of the Crusading Romances in the London Thornton Manuscript

Abstract

The London Thornton manuscript (British Library Additional MS 31042) is uniformly described as a ‘religious’ compilation, and is a companion miscellany to the Lincoln Thornton manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91), both ascribed to Robert Thornton as compiler and scribe. Modern bibliographers have suggested that both compilations exhibit signs of significant design, specifically because of their grouping of works in genre sections. The Lincoln Thornton’s placing of its collection of romances has, for example, been shown to be far from random. This study suggests that the bibliographical/codicological descriptions of the five distinct genre sections of the London Thornton manuscript, while accurate as a record of the physical nature of the compilation, is limited in its perception of the overall literary/intellectual design. The first section, based on the Cursor Mundi and the Northern Passion, is the conceptual reference point for the subsequent genre groupings. In effect, the other genre sections are literary expressions of the operation of the Christian faith, in particular the Passion, in various aspects of life: the national, historical life; the individual spiritual life; social morality in vita activa. As Murray Evans pointed out in 1995, the composite shape and contexts of the manuscript within which a work is contained can shape the reader’s perception of it, as well as identify the compiler’s view of its kind. The main body of my study comments on the relationship of its four crusading romances to the keynote first section, the central event of Christian history and individual faith, and analyses the individual qualities of each both in relation to the crusading theme and as independent literary artefacts. It also relates them as a group to another significant context, the historical events of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. 1. THE LONDON THORNTON MANUSCRIPT IN ITS WIDER CONTEXT Apart from a few early works, such as Robert of Sicily and The King of Tars, produced in monastic scriptoria, most extant Middle English romances are preserved either in the products of secular bookshops, such as the Auchinleck manuscript, or more commonly in miscellanies of material recorded for private libraries and households, either by members of the family or by frequently indifferent scribes to the order of an employer, e.g. the Findern manuscript (Cambridge University Library Ff. 2.38) or Gonville and Caius College Cambridge MS 175. Of the 99 or so manuscripts preserving romances, only 10 contain more than one romance or work categorized by early bibliographers as such. The best known manuDOI 10.1515/ang-2012-0059 1 For the most comprehensive and thought-provoking survey of romances in their manuscripts, see Gisela Guddat-Figge, A Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (München: Fink, 1976), Introduction; and the seminal scripts, containing the largest number and greatest variety of romances, are: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.21 (Auchinleck); London, British Library, Caligula A. II; Cambridge, University Library Ff. 2.38; Lincoln, Cathedral Library 91 (Lincoln Thornton); and London, British Library Additional 31042 (London Thornton). These last two are unique in that both mention Robert Thornton as the scribe of certain works within the respective miscellanies, from which it is traditionally assumed that Robert Thornton was the scribe/compiler of both manuscripts. Both manuscripts, because of this unique connection and also because the Lincoln Thornton contains one of the largest and most varied collections of romances, have in the last thirty years been the focus of codicological studies, concentrating mainly on book production elements, such as physical assembly, transmission, provenance, and also of social and biographical speculation. Both works, in different ways, provide grounds for considering that, rather than being random collections like most miscellanies, they are the product of some degree of design in a) the nature of the materials grouped together in their final binding as a compilation, and b) the placing of different kinds of material in the chronology of the final arrangement. The possibility of design or dedicated selection by Thornton has been adverted to occasionally, but not developed in any detail. The Lincoln Thornton, for example, is composed of a number of separate sections which a) show physical signs of having existed separately for some time before being bound together, and b) more significantly, separate material in genre or subject matter groupings. The London Thornton is, at first glance, less neatly subdivided according to genre or subject matter, but in fact it too has significant groupings of works and, on closer inspection, it would seem that the final arrangement is not simply the result of random acquisition and casual compiling. The arrangement in the bound miscellany might be seen simply as a sensible collection of like materials into separate sections, which had initially been kept as distinct ‘booklets’, and their final spatial disposition in the bound volume as largely accidental. However, in the Lincoln Thornton, which is dominated by its romance collection, it has been proposed observations on romance contexts in Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) 2–13, and Appendix. 2 See the most comprehensive, indispensable study by John J. Thompson, Robert Thornton and the London Thornton Manuscript (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987); also Karen Stern, “The London ‘Thornton’ Miscellany”, Scriptorium 30 (1976): 26– 37, 201–18. 3 George R. Keiser, “Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91: The Life and Milieu of the Scribe”, Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 158–79, and “More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton”, Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983): 111–19. 4 Keiser 1979, 177; Ralph Hanna III, “The Growth of Robert Thornton’s Books”, Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987): 59–60. THE CONTEXTS OF THE CRUSADING ROMANCES 241