Every textual family identified in this project has something to tell scholars that we could not learn from the Procter-Wordsworth edition (PW), which was based almost entirely on a single printed edition (the 1531 folio breviary). Even the other early editions are less predictable than the PW editors suggested. The lessons for saints in the portable ones are abridged from sources that often differ significantly from the long lessons in the folio editions. Nor should we assume that either the long printed lessons or the abridged ones represent some official Sarum consensus, much less the best texts in their respective traditions. The manuscripts are full of illuminating surprises – lessons that shed new light on the earlier history of the versions eventually chosen for printing, lessons that clearly stem from other sources entirely, selectively abridged versions that offer implicit critiques of the saints’ legends they are retelling, and so on. Providing an overview of the various textual families, this section of the book will emphasize the disparities among them, give examples of their departures from the printed editions, and suggest some of the possibilities they present for future research.

The early folio editions and their closest manuscript relatives

As explained above in Part One (the Catalogue), the three early folio editions of the Sarum breviary that are complete enough to inventory (the 1518 lectionary and the 1516 and 1531 folio breviaries) give texts for the ten sets of lessons in my sample that are almost but not quite identical, having enough minor variants to suggest the possibility that they were based on slightly different manuscript exemplars. Despite their textual similarities, however, the 1518 Sarum lectionary has important differences in content from the two folio breviaries. Although this lectionary has incorporated most of the fifteenth-century additions to the Sarum calendar, the only new feasts for which its Sanctorale supplies proper lessons are the three recently mandated ones pertaining to the life of Christ – the Visitation and its octave, the Transfiguration, and Holy Name – plus Mary of the Snows, a relatively obscure celebration in honor of the Virgin. For the new Sarum feasts of David, Chad, feast day and Translation of John of Beverley, Translation of Etheldreda, and Frideswide, the 1518 Sarum lectionary has only rubrics, indicating in each case that all the lessons are to come from the Common