THE DATE OF LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, HARLEY MS 913 (THE 'KILDARE POEMS')

• Published in: Medium aevum Vol. 79; no. 2; pp. 306 - 310
• Main Author: FLETCHER, ALAN J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature 01.01.2010; Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature
• Subjects: English; Franciscan Order; Irish history; Irish literature; Irish poetry; Poetry; Religious poetry; Scribes
• ISSN: 0025-8385; 2398-1423
• DOI: 10.2307/43632425

The Franciscan auspices of the manuscript admit litde doubt, and that it originated amongst the Franciscans of Waterford also seems highly likely.3 Though some earlier scholars championed the view that a number of scribes were responsible for copying it, the best current scholarly opinion holds, to the contrary, that it may actually be attributable to one principal scribe who over a period of time copied at least five (perhaps more) separate booklets which were later gathered together into a single codex; their having been copied at different periods is one of the factors that helps to account for a certain unevenness in the aspect of the script between different sections of the manuscript.4 A further likely circumstance is that this principal copyist was himself a Franciscan friar who compiled his anthology perhaps in the first instance for personal use, but whose (modest) attention to layout and mise-en-page may also suggest that he had an eye to readers other than himself alone.5 There remains, however, a question to be pursued here about the date at which the booklets that comprise Harley 913 were copied. Angela Lucas, in her edition of the Hiberno-English poems, has proposed c.13 30, or perhaps a litde later.7 This consensus that some time around the end of the first third of the fourteenth century saw the production of Harley 913 could conceivably be correct for certain parts of the codex, but the evidence presented here suggests that the date of at least certain of its folios, and most probably also of at least the larger part of that particular quire in which those foHos occur, should be brought forward by about a decade.