MS. Bodl. 698

Provenance and Acquisition

Salisbury, Wiltshire, Cathedral church of St Mary the Virgin: (MLGB3); see medieval manuscripts removed from Sherborne in 1078(?)

Teresa Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral c. 1075-c. 1125 (1992), argues that the Salisbury collection represents the earliest English attempt to adopt the recommendations of Cassiodorus in the Institutiones and Augustine in the Retractiones, and that MS Bodl. 698 was written at Salisbury as part of that initiative (p. 36 and fns 19 and 20). Webber states (p. 43) that the Salisbury canons possessed the earliest extant English copies of over fifteen Augustine or Pseudo-Augustinian texts, amongst them 'De beata vita' (fol. 40v) in MS. Bodl. 698. Webber (p. 58) extends this to texts by Ambrose also, noting that 'Salisbury produced the earliest or one of the earliest extant English copies of [...] several opuscula of Ambrose (Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MSS Bodley 698, 768 and 835)'

'Liber bibliothecae Sarisburiensis 3' (s. xvii): No. 3 in a set of 7 numbered manuscripts from Salisbury (no. 1 has not been identified). The other 6 manuscripts are: No. 2: MS. Bodl. 756, No. 4: MS. Bodl. 765 , No. 5: MS. Bodl. 768, No. 6: MS. Bodl. 516,

Salisbury Cathedral library was raided in the English Civil War, and this manuscript was probably given (as part of the set of 7 manuscripts) to the Bodleian during or soon after the war, but it is not found in Bodleian lists until about 1655