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88 results

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New Medieval Literatures

New Medieval Literatures 23

New Medieval Literatures 22

  • 10 - John Benet, Scribe and Compiler, and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516

  • Edited by Margaret Connolly, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Holly James-Maddocks, University of York, Derek Pearsall, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    07 October 2022
    Print publication:
    25 February 2022, pp 241-258

  • Summary

    Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516 (E. 5. 10), hereafter TCD 516, is an important fifteenth-century manuscript codex that contains prophetic, historical, political and other texts in Latin and Middle English. Among its items of particular interest are a unique Chronicle of English History from Adam to 1462, the only witness to The Five Dogs of London (DIMEV 6370, a mid fifteenth-century set of libels against the Duke of York), and an unusual glossed text of Ever is Six the Best Chance of the Dice (DIMEV 1215), a fifteenth-century prophetic poem. An ownership note and anathema on fol. 2v establish that the volume belonged to one John Benet. Benet was vicar of Harlington, 1443–71, a living in the gift of the prior and convent of Dunstable. In 1471 he became rector of Broughton, Newport Pagnell, whose patron was John Broughton. He had died by November 1474 when the next incumbent took up the rectory. There is no definite evidence for his having attended Oxford or Cambridge. The hand of the ownership note also signs the manuscript several times, confirming beyond reasonable doubt that it is that of John Benet. Benet was responsible for copying many of the texts and for annotations to the texts. There is some possibility that Benet himself was author of the portion of the Chronicle of English History for the period 1399–1462 (fols. 154v–88r).

    Although some of the poems in TCD 516 have been edited from the manuscript and the Chronicle of English History has been edited and recently translated, Benet's practice as a scribe-compiler and the copying culture to which the volume may belong have been neglected. Most commentary has focused on the Chronicle and on whether Benet is its author. As a manuscript that includes many prophecies, TCD 516 appears in Lesley Coote's Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England as a volume that gives an idea of just how many prophecies were circulating around the time of the deposition of Henry VI. Coote suggests that Benet's manuscript ‘demonstrates its owner's passion for history’ but it is not partisan. John Scattergood has recently surveyed some of the contents in an attempt to fathom Benet's ‘personal concerns’, describing the manuscript as a ‘clerical historian's personal miscellany’.

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