Manuscripts and catalogues

To a large extent the study of manuscript service books utilizes the same resources, as it requires the same techniques, as for other medieval manuscripts of the “library” type (or, as it is sometimes put, “book hand” type, as distinct from archive or “court hand”). Fundamental to this study are catalogues of the manuscripts in the great public collections. These catalogues have been compiled over many decades and to widely different standards of detail and excellence, and it is not possible to enter onto a history of that subject here. It is necessary only to make a few general remarks about the catalogues of the collections in the three great centers where these MSS are most heavily concentrated, and then to comment on a handful of enterprises of the past half-century

The three main places where liturgical manuscripts relating to England are concentrated are of course Cambridge, Oxford, and London. Chief among resources for studying manuscripts at Cambridge are M. R. James's catalogues of those at the Fitzwilliam Museum and (nearly) all the then extant colleges, published between 1895 and 1913. For all their deficiencies and their outdatedness, they remain as a whole one of the most amazing feats in the history of the study of medieval manuscripts. Even older, and much less adequate, are the descriptions published in the Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge in six volumes between 1856 and 1867.