Auxerre, Bibliothèque municipale, 123 (ancien 165)
fol. 44v-45r
General Information
A Latin Life of St Edmund of Abingdon, archbishop of Canterbury (1234-40) includes his deathbed words in English, in the same hand and Gothic script as the surrounding Latin text. The words occur in paragraph 64 of the published edition.
The 158-folio manuscript, which is mid-thirteenth-century, contains the Pontigny version of the Life of St Edmund (Liber Sancti Edmundi), fols. 1r-56v, as well as a sermon on the translation of Edmund (fols. 57-58) and materials concerned with his miracles, canonization, and the rights of the church of Pontigny, where St Edmund died and was buried.
Copies of the Life in manuscripts of English provenance are in Oxford, Balliol College, 226; London, Lambeth Palace Library, 135; and Cambridge, University Library, Mm. 4.6, all thirteenth-century.
Digital Surrogate:
Item: fols. 44v-45r
Title: St Edmund of Canterbury's deathbed words
Text: Men soth \seuth/ game gab \godh/ on wombe At ich segge | nou game gat on horte.
[NOTE: strike-through stands in for dotted underlining in the manuscript, which the scribe used to indicate deletion. Correct words were addded interlinearly.]
Date: s. xiii
Bibliography:
Laing 1993, p. 20
Object Description
Codex
Parchment
318 x 237 mm
Foliated.
2 column layout
Hand Description
Colored initial letters
Additional Information
Digital surrogate available at http://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/sommaire/sommaire.php?reproductionId=17526 (accessed 26 July 2018)
History
Davis, H.W.C., 'An unpublished life of Edmund Rich', English Historical Review 22 (1907), 84-92
Laing, Margaret, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), p. 20
Lawrence, C.H., St Edmund of Abingdon: A Study in Hagiography and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)
Martène, E. and U. Durand, Thesaurus Novus Anecdotorum 3 (Paris, 1717), cols. 1775-1826
Wilson, Louise Elizabeth, 'Miracle and medicine: conceptions of medical knowledge and practice in thirteenth-century miracle accounts', in Wounds in the Middle Ages, ed. Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 63-86
Georgia Henley