Marginale

All these, as I have before said, have one and the same immediate origin, the inserted marginale. But that marginale itself may be due to three sources; first, a mere editor’s quotation for reference; secondly, a various reading; and thirdly, a double text which, as I hold, in most cases has grown out of the various readings of antiquity systematised by rival schools. It is these last two classes of marginalia which naturally and necessarily occur most frequently when the text is originally in a corrupt state, and by their subsequent inclusion in the text render the confusion worse confounded.

As the surrounding marginalia are all in violet and are from mh 10, it is reasonable to see in this an indication of the equivalence of th C to mh 10.[…]The marginale is opposite lines 1 and 2 in the right-hand margin.

The Pendocks occur in the marginalia even more frequently than the Underhills; did the manuscript belong to them as well? It is harder to say. The marginale on ff. 39ᵛ, 40, in hand h, probably represents the authentic will of Robert, son of Robert de Pendock, who might well ordian to be buried at Redmarley d’Abitot, near Pendock; unfortunately, however, the entry, like all others which refer to the Pendock family, is in an Underhill hand.

Insertion into the text of the marginale at line 20 (see app. crit.) would fit the first passage from Aeneas Silvius extremely well. There is, however, no way of ascertaining the exact relationship between marginalia, poet and copyist.

The second marginale next to Walker’s entry (l.11m) must have been written after 8 November, the date of his last recorded court appearance (see p 58, ll.23–32).[…]In this section Lawrence occasionally uses an italic script for marginalia and other notes.

In the case of some marginalia written by A2 we find two rapidly drawn commas, one beneath the other, and both beneath the omitted word, being used as a hiatus mark. This mark is found in the first marginale on fol. 79v (l. 831 uidelicet), the marginale on fol. 81V (l. 1178 animalia), and the second marginale on fol. 83r (l. 1422 tamen).

This means that most corrections in punctuation, vertical spacing, lettering and marginalia as contained in the octavo 1589 version are lost again from the 1590 edition onwards.[…]The quarto of 1589 and the edition 1590 both have the wrong reference in the marginale to iv.9.7 (end) Gravi et ad severitatem …, namely Aristot. V. Polit cap. instead of cap. xi; the octavo of 1589 (and the editions from 1596 onwards, in this case) have the correct reference.

I propose to examine the maxims in Aldred’s marginalia firstly on the Beatitudes and then on the role of the bishop to see what they tell us about the situations Aldred was addressing. For each Beatitude passage, I give first the Latin text, then the gloss followed by my translation of the Old English, then the marginale read from the high-definition manuscript photographs, with Boyd’s (1975a) translation of the marginal Old English. /[…]/ The most obvious thing about this marginale is that it realigns the textual gloss by omitting spiritu.