The twelfth-century rubrication of Anglo-Saxon legal texts in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 383
Thomas Gobbitt
In: Historical Research, Volume 86, Issue 233, pages 394–407, August 2013
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12028
University of Cambridge
ABSTRACT:
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 383 is an English collection of Anglo-Saxon legal texts produced in the late eleventh century or early years of the twelfth century, possibly at or for St. Paul’s cathedral, London. This article focuses in particular on the scribal strategies and mise-en-page of the rubrics and emendations made to the manuscript by a scribal hand of the first half of the twelfth century. Developments in the concept and technology of the book were used by the scribes, who emended and updated the manuscript to facilitate and direct (potential and actual) readers’ interactions with the legal texts and allow intellectual interests in the continued role of Anglo-Saxon law into the twelfth century to be discerned. “Updating, adaption, appropriation and re-contextualizing of Anglo-saxon Law” continued throughout the 12th century, witnessing to a continued intellectual interest, Thomas Gobbitt argues.
The article is part of a collection of papers presented at a conference in Copenhagen in 2011 organised in collaboration between three digitisation projects: “Early English Law“, “Nordic Medieval Laws” and “Relmin”.
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Read also about the context of the article in “Medieval Law” in Medieval Historiesh
