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Detailed record for Harley 913
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| Title |
The Kildare Lyrics, including the Land of Cokaygne (ff. 3-6v) |
| Origin |
Ireland, S.E. (probably Waterford) |
| Date |
c. 1330 |
| Language |
Latin, English, French |
| Script |
Gothic cursive |
| Decoration |
Large initials in red with purple pen-flourishing or in blue with red pen-flourishing. Smaller plain initials in red, some in blue. Paraphs in red. Captials marked in red. |
| Dimensions in mm |
140 x 95 (120 x 75) |
| Official foliation |
ff. 64 (+ 1 unfoliated paper flyleaf at the beginning + 3 at the end) |
| Form |
Parchment codex |
| Binding |
BM/BL in-house. |
| Provenance |
Franciscan origin (see Harley Catalogue and Roberts 2005).
George Wyse, mayor of Waterford in 1561: 'Iste liber pertinet ad me Georgii Wyse (f. 2v).
Possible note relating to ownership (f. 29).
The Harley Collection, formed by Robert Harley (b. 1661, d. 1724), 1st earl of Oxford and Mortimer, politician, and Edward Harley (b. 1689, d. 1741), 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, book collector and patron of the arts.
Edward Harley bequeathed the library to his widow, Henrietta Cavendish, née Holles (b. 1694, d. 1755) during her lifetime and thereafter to their daughter, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (b. 1715, d. 1785), duchess of Portland; the manuscripts were sold by the Countess and the Duchess in 1753 to the nation for £10,000 (a fraction of their contemporary value) under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum; the Harley manuscripts form one of the foundation collections of the British Library. |
| Notes |
For a detailed list of the contents, see the Harley catalogue.
The poem, The Land of Cockaygne, survives only in this manuscript. For the full text of the poem and two versions in modern English, see: [http://www.thegoldendream.com/landofcokaygne.htm] [accessed 8 September 2008]. |
| Select bibliography |
A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1808-12), II (1808), no. 913.
Thomas Crofton Croker, The Popular Songs of Ireland (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), pp. 277-304.
Wilhelm Heuser, Die Kildare Gedichte: die ältesten mittelenglischen Denkmäler in anglo-irischer Überlieferung', Bonner Beiträge zur Anglistik 14, (1904) [an edition of Harley 913].
Hans Marcus, Die Schreibung ou in frühmittelenglischen Handscriften (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1917), pp. 30, 88-97.
Rossel Hope Robbins, 'The Earliest English Carols and the Franciscans', Modern Language Notes, 53 (1935), pp. 239-45.
Rossel Hope Robbins, 'The Authors of the Middle English Religious Lyrics', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 39 (1940), pp. 230-38.
Hans Walther, 'Zur lateinische Parodie des Mittelalters', Zeitschrift für Deutches Altertum und Deutsche Literatur, 84 (1952-53), pp. 265-73 (pp. 269-73).
Poems from BL MS Harley 913, ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre, Early English Text Society OS 345 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Rossel Hope Robbins, ‘Middle English Carols as Processional Hymns’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), pp. 559-82 (p. 576, n. 72).
Thomas Jay Garbáty, Studies in the Franciscan 'The Land of Cokaygne' in the Kildare MS., Franziskanische Studien Heft 1-2, (1963), pp. 139-63.
François Avril, La technique de l’enluminure d’apres les texts medievaux: Essai de bibliographie, Reunion du Comite de l’Icom pour les laboratories de musees et du sous-comite de l’Icom pour le traitement de peintures, Bruxelles 1967 (Paris: Bibliotheque nationale Cabinet des manuscrits, n. d.), p. 19.
A. McIntosh and M. L. Samuels, 'Prolegomena to a Study of Medieval Anglo-Irish', Medium Aevum, 37 (1968), pp. 1-11.
Michael Benskin, 'The Style and Autorship of the Kildare Poems, (1) Pers of Bermingham', in In Other Words. Transcultural Studies in Philology, Translation and Lexicography, presented to H. H. Meier on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, ed. by J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Richard Todd (Dordrecht: Foris, 1989), pp. 57-75.
Michael Benskin, 'The Hands of the Kildare Poems Manuscript', Irish University Review, 10 (1990), pp. 163-92.
Angela M. and Peter Lucas, 'Reconstructing a Disarranged Manuscript: the Case of MS Harley 913, a Medieval Hiberno-English Miscellany', Scriptorium: Revue internationale des études relatives aux manuscrits, 44 (1990), 286-99.
Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 170 n. 51.
Deborah Hatfield-Moore, Paying the Minstrel: A Cultural Study of B.L. MS Harley 913, Ph.D. Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2001 [with further bibliography].
Neil Cartlidge, 'Festivity, Order, and Community in Fourteenth-century Ireland: The Composition and Contexts of BL MS Harley 913.' Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 33-52.
Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500 (London: British Library, 2005), p. 169.
Anglo-Irish Poems of the Middle Ages: The Kildare Poems, Corpus of Electronic Texts [http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/E300000-001/header.html] [accessed 8 September 2008] [with further bibliography].
Wessex Parallel Texts Project, [http://www.soton.ac.uk/[accessed 8 September 2008]. |
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