Among her many important contributions, our honorand has recently reminded us of the cultural importance of Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487. Although its texts have been available since the early years of the Early English Text Society (see n. 5), this volume, mainly composed of homilies, has been long neglected. Here, I want to extend Bella Millett’s findings and to argue that, beyond its innovative homiletic techniques, the book offers some broader purchase on the circulation of English texts in the earlier thirteenth century.

Although the shape and contents of the Lambeth manuscript should be well known, I will begin with a description. Although generally accurate, the great M. R. James’s Lambeth catalogue did not examine or report the volume with the care customary in many of his descriptions. As my discussion will show, he was particularly inattentive to the contents, most especially those in Old English, and to the collation (as will emerge below, an important feature in assessing the volume). While many of these deficiencies have been remedied in Jonathan Wilcox’s recent description, Wilcox is dedicated to explaining Old English items and scants the Middle English. There is a need both to consolidate and to dynamize the production information to be derived from the manuscript.

Lambeth 487 is on vellum, the manuscript proper 68 folios (numbered fols. 1-67, but fol. 1 followed by fol. 1a). It is, like many of its contemporaries, a small book, overall 180 mm x 120 mm, the current pages now c. l30 mm wide but virtually all with modern vellum repair strips pasted to the original edges. Some prickings survive, under the vellum repairs, and all pages are bounded and ruled, generally all the way across the sheet, in brown crayon. The writing area, always above top-line, varies; it is usually a narrow single column, 145 or 155 mm x 80 mm, in 27 to 29 lines to the page.

The original manuscript is written in very early textura; the hand responsible for items 1-18 is fairly similar to that of the later added text 19, although that is smaller and more tightly spaced. A loose note in the back of the book, signed ‘J. P. G[ilson]’ and dated 1923, says only a broad dating 1185-1225 is possible.