The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 by Karen Louise Jolly (review)

Visually humble and weathered from extensive use, Durham Cathedral Library, MS A.IV.19 is the oldest extant English collectar (sets of prayers and readings for the eight services of the Divine Office). Written somewhere in southern England c. 900, it had by the third quarter of the tenth century passed into the possession of the Community of St. Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street (Co. Durham), where it was augmented by at least six scribes. The original Latin text was supplied with a word-for-word gloss in Old English, and extensive supplements (further hymns, psalms, and collects, along with various lists and notes) were copied onto new quires. A colophon associated with four of the added collects reveals that this particular page was written on August 10, 970, by Aldred, the community’s provost—an individual best known for glossing the Lindisfarne Gospels and supplying them with the colophon that is the key document for their localization.

Given that the text of DCL A.IV.19 was fully published in 1927, that the manuscript was reproduced in complete facsimile (with a detailed introduction) in 1969, and that a new edition of its collectar section was produced in 1992, one might perhaps wonder whether the volume merited further monographic treatment. Yet the present study shows how much more of value can be elicited by a holistic interrogation of the substantial Northumbrian additions. After a general introduction to the history, nature, and setting of the community at Chester-le-Street (chapter 1), Jolly provides a detailed reassessment of Aldred and his two colophons (chapter 2) and then a thorough examination of all the later scribes represented in A.IV.19 and their interrelationships (chapter 3). The implications of the nature of the scribal work and of the textual content for both the devotional (chapter 4) and the intellectual (chapter 5) life of the community at Chester-le-Street are then explored. Finally, chapter 6 teases out the inferences that may be drawn from this material about the community’s pedagogy, learning, and spirituality more generally. Appended to and underpinning the analysis are detailed tables of the structure and content of the manuscript, plus editions of the material in the quires that were added at Chester-le-Street (pp. 217–359).

Jolly’s investigation of the codicology is meticulous, her analysis of the texts sensitive, and her assessment of the quality and purpose of the work sympathetic: she reasonably takes a very favorable view of Aldred’s abilities and contributions in particular. If her discussion of the physical structure of the additions is occasionally difficult to follow (even for a reader who knows the manuscript fairly well), her analysis of the gloss is pellucid (a welcome contrast to the dense articles by A. S. C. Ross that have until recently dominated the bibliography on the subject). Equally, even if more could perhaps have been made of the other manuscripts that are known to have been at Chester-le-Street in the tenth century, the decision to focus on the additions to this one book is wholly defensible, not least in view of their status as uniquely important witnesses to Northumbrian culture from a period that is otherwise dominated by manuscripts produced in southern England. Balancing rigorous analysis of the evidence of the additions with a realistic attempt to empathize with the aims and assumptions of those who produced them, Jolly’s insightful study shows how part of a single key manuscript can indeed be a window through which to perceive the beliefs, culture, and observances of a distant community and its relationship to a wider world.