WHEN one consults either the digital or the print facsimile of the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS, MS Advocates 19. 2. 1), one of the codicological notes encountered most frequently is ‘Ends imperfect’. This statement is true, first, of the whole manuscript. The last item in the codex as it exists today, The Simonie, itself ends imperfect, and, as David Burnley and Alison Wiggins note, ‘has the original item number lx (60)’, a designation which indicates further ‘imperfection’ in the completeness of the reading experience one can have with the manuscript today. Since only forty-three manuscript items survive, the numbering here indicates that at least seventeen items have been lost and we cannot know, because The Simonie ends imperfect, whether more items originally followed that poem and have also been lost. While the manuscript itself ‘ends imperfect’, so do a number of its extant texts. Burnley and Wiggins note that ‘Frequently, the first leaf of a new text (where the miniature was positioned) has been cut out or, in some cases, just the miniature itself has been excised, … resulting in a series of lacunae throughout the manuscript’. The excision of one text's beginning often means the loss of the previous text's ending, as happens, for example, with Seynt Katerine. This saint's life immediately precedes St Patrick's Purgatory, and that text's imperfect beginning is attributed by I. C. Cunningham to ‘a desire for the miniature’ and the excision of a folio containing it which would also have contained the terminal lines of Seynt Katerine. In other places, entire gatherings that would have included a text's ending have been lost, as is the case for King Richard. For twenty-five items, however, we do have what one might call ‘perfect’ endings, namely original terminations preserved in the manuscript as it exists today.

Caroline Walker Bynum argues in Christian Materiality that the period between 1100 and 1550 is marked by a ‘prominence of holy matter’ in western Christian devotion. ‘Issues of how matter behaved, both ordinarily and miraculously, when in contact with an infinitely powerful and ultimately unknowable God were key to devotion and theology’, she states, and these issues frequently manifested themselves as debates surrounding devotional objects. In late-medieval England, one of the cultural debates that erupted most violently was that surrounding images and relics. Firmly enshrined in orthodox theology and ritual, these devotional objects came under attack from Wycliffite writers who railed against ‘veyn pilgrimagis and offryngis to dede stones and rotun stokkis’. In her study of these debates in Middle English texts, Sarah Stanbury suggests that

This essay considers the ‘physical spaces’ and ‘cultural performances’ surrounding devotional objects in two Middle English Matter of France romances from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Specifically, it examines what happens when Christian devotional objects undergo translation into Saracen space. In The Sege of Melayne (London, BL Additional MS 31042, dated between 1430 and 1450), Saracen conquest of parts of Italy leads to the attempted destruction of Christian devotional images. In Sir Ferumbras (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 33, dated to the late fourteenth century, after 1377), the eponymous Saracen hero carries off the Crown of Thorns and the Crucifixion nails from Rome and entrusts them to his sister's keeping. In both cases, movement into Saracen space becomes an occasion for reflection on the material nature of the Christian object, on the manner in which it should be treated and understood, and on the ways in which this object can influence the Saracen and Christian communities with which it interacts.