ARC HIVES Vol. XIII No. 58 Autumn 1977 MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT FRAGMENTS* BY ROWAN WATSON University of London Library What place has a discussion of problems relating to medieval manuscripts in a journal devoted to'promoting the preservation... of public, semi-public and private'archives? The problems of dealing with more modern manuscript material, which remains almost unusable without proper arrangement and effective finding aids, are obviously the major commitment of those responsible for collections of manuscripts and archives. Outside national repositories the cataloguing and study of medieval manuscripts is possibly best left to the specialist. However, few people working with manuscripts fail to come across fragments of medieval manuscripts, usually in bindings of books and archives dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is worth bearing in mind their value and potential as an historical source. A few such fragments have passed through the Records Preservation Section of the British Records Association in recent years. This article aims to provide bibliographical references to works on fragments that may prove useful to those who find themselves responsible for them and to provide some justification for spending some time on them. The identification of works contained on manuscript fragments is a very time-consuming activity. Success depends as much on the amount of time which can be spared to work on them as on the cataloguer's acquaintance with medieval manuscripts. The lists of incipits of theological, biblical, literary, legal and scientific works which are among the fundamental aids to cataloguers of complete medieval books are rarely of help where fragments are concerned.'Works with extensive indices are much more useful. Future generations of* The author wishes to thank Joan Gibbs, David Hiley and Jayne Cook for help and advice.'See A. Pelzer, Re'pertoires d'Incipit pour la Littdrature Latine Philosophique et Theologique du Moyen Age, Edition Augmentee (Rome, I95 I) for a list of such works, and the bibliographies in NR Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, I, London (Oxford, I969)[hereafter cited as MMBL, 1], pp. xxxv-xxxviii, and II, Abbotsford-Keele (Oxford, 1977)[hereafter cited as MMBL, II], pp. xxxvii-xliii. One of the most extensive works of this kind has recently been published: JB Haureau, Initia Operum Scriptorum Latinorum, 8 vols.(Tum-hout, 1974). cataloguers will be rather better off in this respect than those of today. Once the eight volumes of Stegmiiller's Repertorium Biblicuwn (Madrid, 1950-76) have been indexed, its value for the identification of fragments containing works relating to the Bible will be incomparable, since even small fragments are liable to contain initia at present buried in the volumes of the work. The index in volumes 2I8 to 22I of JP Migne's Patrologia Latina, a series which set out to publish all works of a religious nature written before 1200, is notoriously difficult to use. The Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout, 1956-), which is to replace and supplement Migne's work, has excellent indices for the volumes produced so far, including indices to literature cited in the works of any particular author, so that once a quotation from the Bible or a classical author has been recognized, a road to identification may have been found. Modern editions of medieval works on philosophy or theology usually have key-word-in-context indices, admirably suited to identifying even the smallest fragment. Of such indices, the most extensive is that devoted chiefly to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and his followers: once completed, it will cover 179 works dating from …