The Interaction of Manuscript and Print in British Library MS Lansdowne 379

Excluding the Oratio D. Johannis Damasceni (ff. 3r-8r, excluding the versos) in a seventeenth-century hand, the first half of Lansdowne 379 contains Middle English sermons (ff. 9r-22v), two of which are actually abbreviated versions of the All Saints and All Souls chapters from William Caxton's Golden Legend (ff. 18r-22v), an English copy of part of Archbishop Pecham's pastoral syllabus formulated in 1281, the Exoneratorium curatorum, in print and in manuscript (ff. 23r-37v) and a few carols (f. 38r) and recipes (ff. 37v and 39v), which are all written in the same hand. The second half of the manuscript contains The Revelation of the Hundred Pater Nosters (ff. 41r-54r), taken from the Seven Sheddings, followed by prayers in Latin, for example, on the Five Sorrows (ff. 54v-56v) and the Crucifix (ff. 56v-58r), the first ten petitions of the Jesus Psalter (ff. 64v-74r) in English, and various other prayers in English and Latin. Taken as a whole, the manuscript is an absolutely fascinating amalgam of manuscript and print, at one point literally so because the Exoneratorium curatorum begins in is printed format and is then copied by hand. It contains texts that are abbreviated from print, the Golden Legend texts, when the writer could just as easily have obtained virtually the same material from Mirk's Festial; texts that are dependent on printed texts but re-fashioned to suit a different context, the Revelation of the Hundred Pater Nosters from the printed Seven Sheddings; texts where the relationship between the manuscript and the print are not entirely clear, the Jesus Psalter; texts where the relationship has not yet been explored: the prayers from the Manual; and hints of a far more complicated history (the contents page lists a printed text no longer extant that was printed in Antwerp in 1486). The study aims to examine these various aspects of the manuscript as a way of explaining what is really a perfect example of the muddled nature of manuscript and print in the Middle Ages. By working through these different aspects, light will also be cast on the date of the manuscript and the connection between the first and second half.