Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

contains a number of shorter pieces. The first of these, the Passio septem dormientem,
actually starts on the final leaf of the second Caesarian quire. It seems possible that the
Passio text was begun on the final leaf of a text that had already been copied (the Life of
Mary of Egypt). On this folio, the scribe has continued the mise-en-page of the scribe of
the Caesarius section, in that long lines are used, as they have been for the entirety of this
section. By contrast, as soon as a new quire is started, the scribe changes to copying the
same text in two columns, suggesting a desire to keep the same style throughout one
quire but changing to his own ‘house style’ at the first opportunity. This may actually
suggest Hanna’s third ‘most useful’ feature, the existence of a blank page at the end of
the quire. Instead of being cut away, as he notes is often the case, the subsequent scribe
has chosen to make use of the spare parchment.
Robinson’s original criteria for defining a booklet form a model which the
Caesarian material of Toulouse, Bibl. Munic., ms. 162 fits much more closely. The first
criterion that she notes is variation in the size of leaves in the manuscript. Although they
are now all the same size, the fact that much of the marginalia in the Caesarius section
have been cut shows that its leaves were originally somewhat larger. This trimming
extends up to f.71 and rarely thereafter (there is only one subsequent clear example of
marginalia being cut, at f. 127). The extent of marginal notation that had evidently been
cut in the Caesarius texts suggests that these quires did form a separate, larger, section
previously. Having noted that, there are some examples of trimmed marginalia earlier in
the manuscript, at ff. 50 (the top of the leaf), 25v and 45r (at the sides). F. 39, in the
middle of the Jerome texts, also has cut marginalia. The possibility that several sections
(or indeed the entire manuscript) were written on larger folios cannot therefore be
dismissed. Hanna’s doubt over the usefulness of this criterion may have some basis. In
any case, however, it is apparent that the individual texts did not originate in the same
manuscript.
Perhaps the most revealing criteria of Robinson are those of variation in hand or
mise-en-page, variation in the decoration and illumination, and the soiling of the outer
leaves of the suspected booklet. As noted previously, one immediately apparent
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