“Scripsi librum in anno et iii mensibus” (I wrote the book in a year and three months). So reads the note at the foot of the verso side of one of the final leaves (f. 205v) in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86. Those fifteen months likely passed within the three-year time frame of 1281–1283, and the “I” who penned the note, usually referred to as “the Digby scribe” or “the scribe,” was probably one Richard de Grimhill II, a resident of southwest Worcestershire, who from the evidence of this book was a practiced scribe and amateur bookmaker. Digby 86, a result of that amateur labor, is a “trilingual marvel”: a household book containing works in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, including, as editor Susanna Fein enumerates them, “medical recipes, charms, prayers, prognostications, magic tricks, pious doctrine, a liturgical calendar, religious songs, lively debates, poetry on love and...
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Book Review|
October 01 2022
Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-century Worcestershire
Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-century Worcestershire
. Edited by Susanna Fein. York
: York Medieval Press
, 2019
. Pp. xx + 310. $99.00 (cloth) or $24.99 (ebook).The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2022) 121 (4): 543–546.
Citation
Martha Rust; Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-century Worcestershire. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1 October 2022; 121 (4): 543–546. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662X.121.4.09
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