Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliothek, GKS 1588

fire beast Though imperfectly preserved, this manuscript is a useful example of a hagiographical libellus, that is, of a booklet which brings together texts of various types all concerned with the same saint. This instance combines a copy (one of the earliest now extant) of Abbo of Fleury’s Passio S. Eadmundi (fols. 2r–28r) with liturgical texts and notation for the office of St Edmund on the day of his passion (fols. 28r–32v). Written in late Anglo-Caroline script, it was produced at Bury St Edmund’s Abbey in the late eleventh century. The first leaf was orginally left blank, and two sequences (hymns) in honour of St Nicholas, were added later, probably in the twelfth century. The hand certainly looks English.

The manuscript had found its way to the Abbey of Saint-Denis in Paris by the late thirteenth-century when a library signature was added to fol. 2r; another shelf mark of the same abbey was written on fol. 1r in the 15th century. Later the manuscript belonged to the library of Gottorp Castle in Schleswig. Gottorp’s manuscripts were transferred to Copenhagen in 1735. The Passio S. Eadmundi was composed between 985 (when Abbo of Fleury arrived in England) and 988 (when Archbishop Dunstan, to whom it is addressed, died). Abbo returned to France in 987.

Facsimile: Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliothek, GKS 1588.

Principal Text: Passio S. Eadmundi, regis et martyris (BHL 2392), ed. M. Winterbottom, Three Lives of English Saints, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts (Toronto, 1972), pp. 67–87 [XJQHC].

Translation: F. Hervey, Corolla Sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund King and Martyr (London, 1907), pp. 6–59.

Commentary. On the Manuscript, see Winterbottom, Three Lives, pp. 8–9; A. Gransden, ‘Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi’, Revue Bénédictine, 105 (1995), 20–78, at pp. 64–65; R. Gameson, ‘Book Culture in Northern Europe during the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’, in E. Petersen (ed.), Living Words and Luminous Pictures: Medieval Book Culture in Denmark, Essays (Copenhagen 1999), pp. 20–51, at 38 (suggests that the book was made for as well as at St Edmund’s, only for it to be superceded within a generation by a more elaborate libellus, that found in London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.II).

The purpose of Abbo’s Passio has been the subject of some discussion: e.g. A. Gransden, ‘Abbo’s Passio Eadmundi’, esp. pp. 40–56 (written out of genuine gratitude to Dunstan and in order to promote the cult), arguing against D. N. Dumville, English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism, A. D. 950–1030, Studies in Anglo-Saxon History 6 (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 77–78 (written to validate a putative Benedictine reform of St. Edmund’s in the 980s), and M. Mostert, The Political Theology of Abbo of Fleury, Middeleeuse Studies en Bronnen 2 (Hilversum, 1987), pp. 44–45 (written and conceived after Abbo’s return to France in the autumn of 987 as a princes’ mirror for Hugh Capet).

For the liturgical items, see D. Hiley, ‘The Music of Prose Offices in Honour of English Saints’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 10 (2001), 23–37 (brief references) [Cambridge Journals]; A. Hughes, ‘British Rhymed Offices: A Catalogue and Commentary’, in S. Rankin and D. Hiley (eds), Music in the Medieval English Liturgy: Plainsong and Mediæval Music Society Centennial Essays (Oxford, 1993), pp. 239–84, at 260–1 [VWVOA], and R. M. Thomson, ‘The Music for the Office of St Edmund, King and Martyr’, Music and Letters, 65 (1984), 189–93 [JSTOR].

On the cult of St Edmund, see also

Abou-El-Haj, Barbara, ‘Bury St Edmunds Abbey between 1070 and 1124: A History of Property, Privilege and Monastic Art Production’, Art History, 6 (1983), 1–29.
Bale, A. (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (Woodbridge, 2009). Collected essays, mostly about the later cult. PN.DM.E2.
Blackburn, Mark Alistair Sinclair, and Hugh Pagan, ‘The St Edmund Coinage in the Light of a Parcel from a Hoard of St Edmund Pennies’, British Numismatic Journal, 72 (2002), 1–14.
Blunt, C. E., ‘The St Edmund Memorial Coinage’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology for 1969: Saint Edmund Commemorative Issue, 31 (1970), 234–55.
Cavill, P., ‘Analogy and Genre in the Legend of St Edmund’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 47 (2003), 21–45.
Cavill, P., ‘Fun and Games: Viking Atrocity in the Passio sancti Eadmundi’, Notes and Queries, 52:3 (2005), 284–6. Available online at Oxford Journals.
Chapman, A., ‘King Alfred and the Cult of St Edmund’, History Today, 53:7 (2003), 37–43. Available at Academic Search Premier.
Christie, E., ‘Self-Mastery and Submission: Masculinity and Holiness in the Lives of Anglo-Saxon Martyr-Kings’, in P. H. Cullum and K. J. Lewis (eds), Holiness and Masculinity in Medieval Europe, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff, 2004), pp. 143–57.
Cownie, E., ‘The Cult of St Edmund in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Language and Communication of a Medieval Saint’s Cult’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 99 (1998), 177–97. Journals 7X6.

Antiquaries Journal

Gransden, A., ‘The Legends and Traditions Concerning the Origins of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review, 100 (1985), 1–24. Available online at JSTOR. Rpt. in eadem, Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England (London, 1992), pp. 81–104. MVB.I.
Grierson, Philip, and M. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, vol. 1, The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 319–20 and 610–3 and pl. 60 (for the St Edmund Memorial Coinage).
Hahn, C., ‘Peregrinatio et Natio: The Morgan Life of Edmund, King and Martyr’, Gesta, 30 (1991), 119–39. About an illustrated MS of the Life which was made in the mid 1120s. Mostly relevant to the post-Conquest history of the cult. Available online at JSTOR.
Hayward, P. A., ‘Geoffrey of Wells’ Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi and the “Anarchy” of King Stephen’s Reign’, in A. Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Images of a Medieval Saint (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 63–86. PN.DM.E2.
Herman the Archdeacon and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Miracles of St Edmund, ed. and trs. Tom Licence with the assistance of Lynda Lockyer, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 2014). PN.DM.E2.
Licence, T. (ed.), Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, 2014). Available from EBSCO E-Books.
Loomis, C. G., ‘The Growth of the St Edmund Legend’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 14 (1932), 83–113.
McDougall, I., ‘Serious Entertainments: An Examination of a Peculiar Type of Viking Atrocity’, Anglo-Saxon England, 22 (1993), 201–25. Available online at Cambridge Journals.
Mostert, M., ‘Le séjour d’Abbon de Fleury à Ramsey’, Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartes, 144 (1986), 199–208. Available online at Persee.
Stanton, R., ‘National Martyrs and Willing Heroes: Piety and Patriotism in Two English Saints’ Lives’, in M. Gosman, A. J. Vanderjagt, J. R. Veenstra (eds), Propagation of Power in the Medieval West: Selected Proceedings of the International Conference, Groningen 20–23 November 1996, Mediaevalia Groningana 23 (Groningen, 1997), pp. 191–204.
Whitelock, D., ‘Fact and Fiction in the Legend of St Edmund’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology for 1969: Saint Edmund Commemorative Issue, 31 (1970), 217–33.

Material for Comparison: GKS 1588 may be compared with London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.II, the twelfth-century Bury manuscript which was produced, Gameson thinks, to replace GKS 1588. It dates from soon after 1100 and combines Abbo’s Passio S. Eadmundi and with the miracle-collection attributed to ‘Hermann of Bury’. A full facsimile is available at the British Library Website. Five images from this manuscript may also be consulted at the British Library’s Online Gallery: (1) fol. 2r, the opening page of the dedicatory letter to St Dunstan; (2) fol. 25v, the first of the miracles added by ‘Hermann of Bury’; (3) fol. 27r, another miracle story; (4) fol. 76v, another miracle story; (5) fol. 86r, a page from the Ely register with which the former manuscript was bound. The significance of fol. 86r lies in the inscription at its foot which shows that it belonged to Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631).