The Kassel Fragment from an Early South English Legendary

A print of Siliceus’s Arithmetica (Paris 1526), once preserved in the Landesbibliothek in Kassel, but now lost, contained a fragment of one parchment leaf until it was removed in 1904. The text, vaguely identified by Wiedemann (1994) as a “Vita Thomae Beket”, is here more precisely identified as part of the “Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury” from an early South English Legendary . I describe fragment and text in detail, and the text is analysed with respect to dialect and to its position in the transmission history. A diplomatic edition of the text preserved in this fragment makes this early witness of an important Middle English legendary available for the first time.