The Cottonian library was bequeathed to the British nation and eventually moved to Ashburnham House at Westminster, where, on October 23, 1731, a devastating fire broke out, damaging hundreds of invaluable manuscripts completely destroying thirteen. To this day, this is the official designation of the manuscript – Cotton Vitellius A. The Beowulf manuscript was the fifteenth volume on shelf A of the bookcase under the bust of emperor Vitellius. The manuscripts were bound in leather and placed in fourteen bookcases, each watched over by the bust of a Roman emperor or empress. Even today, the manuscript bears his signature on its first page and is bound in the so-called Nowell Codex.Īntiquarian Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) acquired the manuscript for his Cottonian library, the richest private collection of manuscripts ever amassed. 1571), an early Anglo-Saxon scholar, and author of the very first Old English dictionary, Vocabularium Saxonicum. The manuscript came into the possession of Laurence Nowell, Dean of Lichfield (c. It is not known whether the Beowulf manuscript was in fact held by a monastery, though it seems quite likely, and how it may have survived the dissolution. Thousands were irretrievably lost – the library of Augustine Friars Abbey at York contained 646 volumes, all but three of which were destroyed Worcester Priory had 600 books at the time of the dissolution, only six of which survived to the present day. The related destruction of the monastic libraries was an unspeakable catastrophe for the conservation of Old English manuscripts. King Henry VIII (1491-1547) dissolved a large number of monasteries in order to replenish his chronically empty treasury.
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