A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of Peterhouse, Cambridge by R. M. Thomson (review)

The latest in the sequence of Rod Thomson’s catalogues of English libraries (they extend back to his description of Lincoln Cathedral manuscripts in 1989) describes the books of Peterhouse, Cambridge. As the fine historical introduction lays out, this is a truly unique collection, a substantial portion of the small College’s medieval collection surviving more or less intact—with considerable sixteenth-century depradation of illumination—and displaying a house particularly given to theological study, and heavy on University staples. And unlike most College libraries, Peterhouse’s has been little augmented since the Reformation.

The volume shows Thomson’s customary strengths. Texts are meticulously presented (down to individual sermons in collected volumes) and carefully identified. The historical discussion includes extensive materials outlining not simply library development and an exceptionally detailed account of donors but a search for the remains of the medieval library within the curtilage. The text is accompanied by opulent coloured illustration, in 113 numbered plates. Nearly half of these offer images of constat-inscriptions, rather than text-hands; one is particularly grateful for plates 57–62, images of early pastedowns from printed-book bindings, and for plate 65, a previously unidentified intrusion of the Worcester ‘tremulous hand’. Most of this extensive illustrative material appears to be full-sized, but plate 94 at least is reduced with no provided ratio.

Although tastes plainly differ, just as with Thomson’s other catalogues, while grateful for information provided, I often find his presentation a bit minimalist. For example, the introduction offers a discussion of Thomas Arundel’s donation of MS 90 (p. xx). But Thomson never mentions ways in which this donation should be surprising only in its uniqueness: Arundel had been bishop of Ely (and thus once presumably the College’s Visitor), and his former Ely colleague and his vicar-general at York was the College’s head of house and major donor John Newton (pp. xxvi–xxvii). Or again, Thomson rigorously avoids offering detail about his texts that seems to me easy enough for a cataloguer to know and to communicate. For example, with MS 224, item 2 (which, incidentally, has escaped Thomson’s indexing), almost any reader might be aided by, and it would not stretch the research responsibilities of a cataloguer unduly to add, an explicit reference to Richard W. Clement, ‘A Handlist of Manuscripts containing Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis’, Manuscripta, 28 (1984), 33–44.

Since this is a bibliographical journal, we should note that while Thomson’s fine historical account and display of authors and titles has an excellence that, like M. R. James’s, modernizes Victorian presentations, there are—as there always have been lurking at the edge of his catalogues—difficulties in producing a definitive bibliographical account of the books. Materials of this sort frequently seem to me to be subject to bibliographical confusions, and occasionally misrepresentations.

Thomson has a strong propensity to report as ‘books’ what he has found on the shelves, and he does not readily attend to bibliographical evidence of the modes by which the volumes have been produced. This has been an ongoing difficulty in his past cataloguing: for example, with Worcester Cathedral MS F.154, his failure to note that ‘the book’ actually groups eight separate acts of production; or with Merton College MS 249, where he attempts to identify such separate portions, but gets it wrong (there six separate bits, not the five reported).

Both versions of the problem are on offer here. For example, Thomson’s descriptions fail to notice that MS 269 includes three separate acts of production (the first two ending at fols. 21 and 106); or MS 196 again three separate acts (the first two ending at fols. 26 and 104). In the latter case, the comment ‘written in anglicana by several scribes’ really isn’t quite enough...