TCD MS 319: A Source for Osbern Bokenham’s St Dorothy

By Larissa Tracy

TCD MS 139 is a badly battered book containing two separate fragments, one of which may be part of, or a source of, Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen and the other which is part of the Gilte Legende. It has been written in two or three different hands with a multitude of marginal annotations. The end of the MS is badly damaged and blackened; it is almost illegible. Both sections were written in the early to mid 15th century and were most likely bound together because of the similarity of their subject matter, or because both were deemed to be the work of Osbern Bokenham. The folios are misbound and many are missing. This MS contains one of the few surviving versions of the Life of Saint Dorothy and a version of Katherine which is not in the original Legenda Aurea.

According to Richard Hamer, the GiL section of TCD MS 319, excluding Dorothy and Katherine, was most likely copied from Harley MS 630, however the spelling is inconsistent, sometimes copying the Harley spelling and sometimes “substituting others presumably from his [the scribe’s] own dialect”1. He draws the conclusion that the forms sylfe and sy in conjunction with hundreth “fit only North Bucks or the Suffolk-Essex border”2. However, in his description of TCD MS 319, Hamer says the manuscript “contains nineteen lives, consisting of a Catherine of the version found in GiL, a Dorothy which is not the ALL, and seventeen GiL lives”3 .

But he gives further evidence of the uniqueness of Katherine in TCD MS 319 in his discussion of the affiliations of the GiL MSS: “Of the half dozen or so agreements of H1T (Harley MS 630 and TCD MS 319) in Catherine, all are trivial except 571 ful of envie to H1T for ful enmy to, and even this could easily have happened twice independently. There is no reason to think that b or b1 on Kurvinen’s stemma was a GiL, and the most likely explanation is that the compiler of T copied Catherine and Dorothy first from another source and then turned to H1 for the rest of his selection.”4

Textual, linguistic, and codicological evidence indicates that the fragment of TCD MS 319 containing Dorothy and Catherine may have originally been circulated on its own andused by Osbern Bokenham as the prose exemplar, or a copy of the same source, for his version of Dorothy in the Legendys of Hooly Wummen.

  1. Richard Hamer, Three Lives from the Gilte Legende: edited from MS B.L. Egerton 876 (Heidelberg: UniversitaÄtsverlag Carl Winter, 1978).
  2. Richard Hamer, Three Lives from the Gilte Legende: edited from MS B.L. Egerton 876 (Heidelberg: UniversitaÄtsverlag Carl Winter, 1978).
  3. Richard Hamer, Three Lives from the Gilte Legende: edited from MS B.L. Egerton 876 (Heidelberg: UniversitaÄtsverlag Carl Winter, 1978) p. 33.
  4. Richard Hamer, Three Lives from the Gilte Legende: edited from MS B.L. Egerton 876 (Heidelberg: UniversitaÄtsverlag Carl Winter, 1978) p. 47.