Conservatism and innovation in Anglo-Saxon scribal practice

The text of the Old English Bede found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 41 (B) is remarkable for its extensively updated language, when compared with other, earlier Bede manuscripts. This paper compares B with other manuscripts of the Bede to uncover some of the scribal decisions which shape the surviving text. B’s text is subject to many alterations, indicating a translator scribe who frequently updated and altered the language of his exemplar (i.e. the manuscript from which he copied to produce the present text). However, the presence of a number of nonsensical readings points to a scribe who sometimes struggled to make sense of the text in front of him and whose abilities did not extend far enough to create a good reading in the face of these difficulties. These scribal decisions allow us to identify factors which influenced the shape of B’s text, such as the interplay between B’s now-lost exemplar and its scribes’ working methods. Careful analysis of some of B’s linguistic features enables us to draw conclusions about the age and status of its exemplar and to recover some part of a lost Bede manuscript.