This chapter introduces the scholarly conflict over the origin of the Nag Hammadi codices and problematises them from the various perspectives. It argues that there are strong scholarly trends in both camps that have influenced the study and understanding of the texts and, further, that the codices’ material features have been understudied in previous analyses of their provenance. The chapter goes on to provide an overview of previous research and concludes with an outline of the content of the book. It maintains that the texts’ palaeographical, visual and editorial features may offer ways through the polarised scholarly debates concerning the background of the texts. It also suggests that by learning more about this significant, early Christian manuscript find we stand to gain important new insights about a formative period of early Christian history when the boundaries of orthodoxy and heresy were beginning to take shape.

This chapter introduces the scholarly conflict over the origin of the Nag Hammadi codices and problematises them from the various perspectives. It argues that there are strong scholarly trends in both camps that have influenced the study and understanding of the texts and, further, that the codices’ material features have been understudied in previous analyses of their provenance. The chapter goes on to provide an overview of previous research and concludes with an outline of the content of the book. It maintains that the texts’ palaeographical, visual and editorial features may offer ways through the polarised scholarly debates concerning the background of the texts. It also suggests that by learning more about this significant, early Christian manuscript find we stand to gain important new insights about a formative period of early Christian history when the boundaries of orthodoxy and heresy were beginning to take shape.

The most widely copied plague treatise in medieval England was the one attributed to John of Burgundy. Despite such widespread dissemination, its main period of production in the British Isles seems to have been limited to the Middle Ages, as it never appeared as an English early modern printed edition, being superseded by different plague tracts. Nevertheless, despite the lack of a printed edition, handwritten copies of John of Burgundy do survive after 1500. They are hitherto neglected witnesses to a treatise that formed the foundation of medical response to the bubonic plague in the British Isles for 200 years and whose cultural reach and influence were much greater than is often acknowledged. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the manuscript context of these late survivals of the John of Burgundy tract and examine their contents, noting any evidence of continued use of the treatise and developments in medical or religious discourse.

This chapter focuses on unedited and largely unstudied Middle English commentaries on Matthew. In all of these texts, vernacular exegetes turned to Matthew primarily for the book’s moral teaching, and, in line with the arguments advanced in Chapter 1, they favored moralizing glosses without concern for how these interpretations fit into the different senses of Scripture. This chapter begins with consideration of a vernacular commentary likely produced in Durham Priory in the second half of the fourteenth century, almost certainly inspired by the precedent of Rolle. It then takes up the most ambitious work (or collection of works) of English vernacular exegesis, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, tracing their compilers’ changing ways of handling the various components of the vernacular exegetical form – close translation, gloss, and citation. The long and short recensions of their commentary on Matthew are compared at length, and the chapter concludes with a new discussion of Wycliffite interpretive theory in light of these unfortunately neglected texts.

This fourth chapter provides an extended discussion of the promulgation and surviving manuscript copies of the 1179 conciliar canons. It begins with an analysis of the methods by which the canons of papal councils were promulgated and transmitted between ca. 1050 and 1215, before briefly detailing the events of the 1179 Lateran Council as far as they can be reconstructed from surviving narrative accounts. The majority of the chapter, however, focusses on the dissemination and movement of the 1179 conciliar decrees, and what that can tell us about contemporary perceptions of papal conciliar canons. A key issue is the extent to which the decrees were transmitted as a coherent whole, and therefore viewed as a set of texts that had to be kept together without alteration. Overall, the chapter suggests that the 1179 canons initially existed in more than one recension but, more importantly, demonstrates that the versions that were received in different areas of Christendom were not necessarily the same. It therefore illustrates how uncertain the transmission of papal ‘legislation’ remained, late into the twelfth century.

The purpose of Chapter 2 is to make my philological discoveries accessible to a non-specialist audience. The chapter begins with the textual history of the Rus Primary Chronicle. It outlines the annalistic format and historical contents of this notoriously difficult text, whilst also providing details about the extant manuscripts and the nature of their compilation. Next, the chapter offers the first ever anglophone history of chronicle studies in Russia and the West. It does so by focusing on the careers of two main figures: the eighteenth-century apostle of German philology in Russia, August Ludwig von Schlözer, and the great early twentieth-century giant of Russian chronicle studies, Aleksei Shakhmatov. It is a strategy which requires my review of the remaining literature to be selective in the extreme. Yet this too has its benefits, since my aim is to solve but a single problem. Why were two extraordinarily gifted philologists, and generations of their successors, never able to identify the liturgical sources of the Rus Primary Chronicle? I ultimately conclude that the traditions of modern philology trained these thinkers to analyse the historiographical past, but in so doing it blinded them to the existence of the liturgical past.