Cambridge. Cambridge University Library, MS Ll.5.18
- Source
- Cambridge Digital Library
- Library
- Cambridge. Cambridge University Library
- Shelfmark
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- MS Ll.5.18
- Biblissima authority file
- Date
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- Fifteenth century. This is ratified by the dateable texts contained in MS Ll.5.18, which accommodate production from quite early in the first half of the century. The Life of Saint Margaret, commissioned by Edmund Mortimer, was composed by John Lydgate between 1415-26 and the version of the Life of Saint Dorothy contained in MS Ll.5.18 has been identified by Manfred Görlach to be one of a group of the tale that dates from the early fifteenth century.
- Language
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- English
- Title
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- The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, etc.
- Description
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Cambridge University Library MS Ll.5.18 is a small fifteenth-century miscellany, consisting of a selection of devotional vernacular texts: the final portion of the treatise The Direccion of a Mannys Lyfe, The Life and The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, the Life of Saint Dorothy, a translated excerpt from Saint Augustine’s De contemptu mundi and John Lydgate’s Life of Saint Margaret. As such, it can offer us a valuable insight into personal spiritual practices in the late medieval period.
Currently, the provenance of the manuscript remains a matter of supposition. That said, it can be firmly situated among a well-documented manuscript tradition from the period in which miscellanies present female saints’ vitae and/or Marian material along with the Abbey and Charter. British Library MS Harley 5272, for example, bears close textual parallels to MS Ll.5.18, containing both the Abbey and Charter in addition to a verse life of Saint Dorothy and Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. Drawing upon this, a number of scholars have proposed that these compilations were prepared with a female reader in mind; if this proves true for MS Ll.5.18, it becomes an all the more focused lens into fifteenth-century religious habitudes.
Katherine Dixon
English Faculty
University of Cambridge
- Rights
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- Provided by Cambridge University Library. Zooming image © Cambridge University Library, All rights reserved. Images made available for download are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0) This metadata is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
- Digitisation
- Manifest URL
