Indigenising the Medieval; or How Did Māori and Awabakal Become Inscribed in Medieval Manuscripts?

This article examines two moments in the history of two manuscripts now held in collections in Auckland, New Zealand. The first moment is the flyleaf inscription recording the gift of an early sixteenth-century Book of Hours from one settler to another in the Wellington colony in 1842, while the second is the addition of a faux-medieval decorative scheme to the Awabakal Gospel of St Luke under the orders of Sir George Grey in the early 1860s. Analysis of these two moments of manuscript re-inscription are revealing of the way in which nineteenth-century medievalism was deployed in the service of British imperial ideology.