An Edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29.

Author/Editor
Gillhammer, Cosima Clara

Title
An Edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29.

Published
Gillhammer, Cosima Clara. An Edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2020. 2 vols.: xi, 335; i, 329; 51 illus. Dissertation Abstracts International C82.02(E). Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Fully accessible via https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c3244a71-a6fa-4646-aeb3-9902e055a290.

Review
Gillhammer opens her two-volume dissertation with clear claims and an ambitious goal: "Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29 (T) contains a unique Old Testament history which has so far only been known to a very small number of experts. T is an unusual and eccentric text; it is a compilation of reworked extracts from a wide range of sources, forming a history of the world beginning with the creation of man and breaking off incompletely at the time of Hannibal . . . . [T]here "has never been a complete description or a comprehensive analysis of this text--a lack which the present thesis and edition seek to remedy" (1). She succeeds in remedying this lack, editing the text itself (without notes) in her second volume (although she calls it an "appendix"). Volume 1 is a comprehensive Introduction, with paleographical and codicological descriptions of the manuscript and analysis of its sources (including Gower's "Confessio Amantis"); discussion of "broader contextual questions such as authorship and authority, intended audience and use, as well as the evidence for a compiler-scribe"; assessment of "T in the context of related medieval genres, such as universal histories, encyclopedias, and florilegia"; and investigation of "the linguistic evidence, and traces the manuscript’s origin based on a dialectal analysis" (3). Gowerians will be particularly interested in Gillhammer's discussion of the use of Gower's "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream" in the manuscript--the only section of CA excerpted in in the manuscript in verse--and more than twenty briefer excerpts from CA given in prose (see especially pp. 43-49 and 154-59 of volume 1). [MA]

Date
2020

Gower Subjects
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Confessio Amantis