London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4: An Edition of the Westminster Compilation

The present edition has as its main aim to make accessible the full contents of London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4 (W), a late fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century manuscript that contains a compilation in Middle English of fragments from four texts: an exposition of Psalm 90 (Qui habitat), an exposition of Psalm 91 (Bonum est), Walter Hilton's The Scale of Perfection, and Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Divine Love. Apart from being translated twice—by Betty Foucard in 1956 and Eric Colledge and James Walsh in 1961—the compilation has primarily been studied for the fragments from Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Divine Love contained in it, more specifically because the fragments constitute the only fifteenth-century witness to this version of her text.¹ Three editions of the so-called Westminster Revelation precede the inclusion of the fragments in the present one. The first is by Hugh Kempster, "Julian of Norwich: The Westminster Text of A Revelation of Love," published in Mystics Quarterly in 1997. This edition served as the basis for the text included (with partly modernized spelling) in the appendices of The Writings of Julian of Norwich: "A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman" and "A Revelation of Love," Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins's 2006 edition of Julian of Norwich's short and long text. In addition, the Westminster fragments have been edited (and given pride of place at the beginning of the volume) in Anna Maria Reynolds and Julia Bolton Holloway's Julian of Norwich: Showing of Love, published in 2001.² Though there is obviously no need for yet another edition of the Westminster Julian fragments, I believe that it is crucial for this textual witness to be read in the context of the full Westminster compilation, that is, with the preceding fragments from the Qui habitat and Bonum est commentaries (attributed to Hilton) and from Hilton's Scale, and that the compilation is a fascinating record of one reader's reception of the four source texts.³

As such, this edition is the logical—if somewhat belated—consequence of two articles I published on the Westminster compilation, "Authority and the Compiler in Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4: Writing a Text in Someone Else's Words," in Authority and Community in the Middle Ages, a collection of essays edited by Donald Mowbray, Rhiannon Purdie, and Ian P. Wei in 1999; and "'This Blessed Beholdyng': Reading the Fragments from Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Divine Love in London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4," published in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy in 2008.⁴ These articles started from my 1997 University of Glasgow M.Phil. thesis, which is contemporary with but independent of Hugh Kempster's work on the Julian fragments in the Westminster compilation.⁵ In all of these publications, I read the fragments included in this manuscript volume as forming a coherent compilation written by a compiler whose authorial principles can to a certain extent be recovered from an analysis of the text. Thus, it seems clear to me that in the compilation, the fragments selected from the Qui habitat psalm exposition set the themes for the whole of the compilation and the subsequent fragments from Bonum est, Hilton's Scale, and Julian of Norwich's A Revelation have been carefully chosen to revisit and expand on these themes.

As I understand the compilation as having been "authored" by a compiler, I do not share Julia Holloway's understanding of the Westminster Julian fragments as central to the manuscript and thus more important than the psalm commentary and Scale selections, and I doubt her hypothesis that the fragments from A Revelation constitute a reconstruction of a pre-vision text written by Julian in 1368, the date written in a late hand—contemporary with one of the annotators—in the bottom margin of f. 1^r and repeated on the spine of the binding. Holloway argues that the inscription of the date in W shows that the later readers of the Westminster compilation must...