The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts by M.R. James

Passing over the painful subject of the wholesale destruction of MSS. which must have followed the Dissolution, I will give a few lines to an interesting question little mooted as yet. Is there evidence that England possessed many ancient writings which have since disappeared, or which have survived only in a few copies in other parts of Europe? Take the classics first. Poggio, as I have said, writes in a disappointed tone of his researches here, but these were neither long nor exhaustive. We have better testimony from John of Salisbury, who in the twelfth century quotes parts of the _Saturnalia_ of Macrobius which have dropped out of all the MSS. we now have. He also read a tract attributed to Plutarch, called the _Instruction of Trajan_; it was probably not by Plutarch, but it was an ancient work, and is now lost. Petronius Arbiter was known to him, even that longest and most interesting piece of Petronius called the _Supper of Trimalchio_, for which our only authority is the late paper MS. at Paris that was found in Dalmatia in the seventeenth century. But no medieval English scholar can be shown to have read Tacitus, or the lost parts of Livy, or Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, or others of the rarer Latin authors. Next for Christian antiquity. The Vercelli MS. gives a poetical version in Anglo-Saxon of the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which have ceased to exist in Latin (so, too, AElfric knew, and rejected, a poem on the adventures of St. Thomas in India). In one of its Homilies the same Vercelli MS. presents us with a translation of the Apocalypse of St. Thomas, a book of which until recently only the name was known. Two early MSS. contain short quotations in Latin from Cosmas Indicopleustes, a traveller of Justinian's time whose work remains only in a few copies, and is in Greek. Another has a fragment of the lost _Book of Jannes and Jambres_; another a chapter of the _Book of Enoch_, valuable as one of our few indications that a Latin version of it was current.

John of Salisbury quotes a story about St. Paul which seems to come from the ancient apocryphal Acts of that Apostle. First on the list (twelfth century) of the library of Lincoln Minster (but lined through as if subsequently lost) is a title _Proverbia Grecorum_. What this book was is obscure; probably it was a translation from Greek by an Irish scholar. It is quoted extensively by Sedulius, the Irishman, and also in a collection of treatises by an unknown York writer (the Germans call him the _Yorker anonymus_) of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The work of Irenaeus _Against Heresies_ (we only have it complete in Latin) was always rare, but there were at least two copies of it in England, one in the Carmelites' Library at Oxford, the other given by Archbishop Mepham to Christchurch, Canterbury. The latter, I believe, we still have in the Arundel collection in the British Museum. The MS. of Tertullian which Gelenius got from England is gone, and our knowledge of the treatise _On Baptism_ which it contained depends wholly on his printed text.