An edition of 'Contemplations of the dread and love of God'
Abstract
This thesis presents an edition of Contemplations of the Dread and
Love of God, a late Middle English devotional prose text for which
no critical edition is currently available. I have transcribed
and collated the text from all sixteen extant manuscripts and the
1506 printed edition. An investigation of the errors and variants
according to the classical method of textual criticism has yielded
little in the way of conclusive results, and it has therefore not
proved possible to construct a stemma of manuscripts from the
corpus of evidence as it now exists. My edition therefore uses
one manuscript (Maidstone MS Museum 6) as a base; I emend the text
of Maidstone where necessary, and cite variants from all the other
witnesses to show all differences of substance. A full critical
apparatus is provided, comprising: the text with variants, textual
notes and glossary. The introduction includes a full description
of all the manuscripts and the two early printed editions, an
outline of the methods of textual criticism applied and their
results, and an explanation of the choice of base manuscript;
information about the language of the Maidstone manuscript and the
date of the text are also provided, as is an outline of my
editorial principles. The thesis also contains two appendices.
The first of these deals briefly with the twenty-two instances
where individual chapters of Contemplations appear in other
manuscript compilations; the second discusses the English and
Latin prayers which follow the full text in some manuscripts.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
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