This two-volume edition and commentary from Veronica O’Mara and Virginia Blanton brings a little-known manuscript, Cambridge, CUL Additional MS 2604, to a wider audience. It demonstrates how much there is to gain from intensive study of manuscripts that may appear, at a cursory glance, to be relatively unexceptional. The manuscript first entered the Cambridge University Library’s collection in 1887, but remained uncatalogued until 2009, when it was brought to the attention of the editors of the current study. In its current state it contains twenty-two lives of saints (eleven universal and eleven insular) in Middle English translations, with a preponderance of lives of female saints and abbesses. On linguistic and palaeographical grounds the editors date the manuscript to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century (c.1480–c.1510). It is written in a single hand, in a standardised form of English but with orthographical and dialectal features which point towards its production by a scribe who originated in eastern England, most likely either Suffolk or Middlesex. There is some limited decoration, especially of the items towards the end of the collection, but nothing especially lavish: in short, it was a good-quality, professional production, but not necessarily the sort of manuscript to pique the interest of a collector or cataloguer on first glance.
Katharine Sykes (Tue,) studied this question.