Osborn fa26

          Aelfric, Catholic Homilies, two adjacent strips from a homily for
     Palm Sunday. England; eleventh century, first quarter.

     recto: ...st we wyllath nu fon on ... Swa eac tha heafodm

     verso: forthrihte hlaford ... him sylfum licath ac sythan

     Parchment; 255 x 42 mm; 258 x 43 mm.; 1 column; originally 32 lines, 27
     remaining. Dry-point ruling on the hair side.

          Anglo-Saxon minuscule.

          The fragments were found by Dr. James Molloy attached to a binding
     board in a lumber room containing part of the old presbytery library at
     Winchester. They were sold at Sotheby's, July 29, 1965 (lot 576).
     Bequest of James M. Osborn, 1976.

          Comments: These two strips were once used in the binding of a copy
     of the sermons of St. Augustine, Bodleian Vet.E.1 b.10. The strips
     overlapped by about 160 mm. so that they could extend to the 360 mm.
     height of the Augustine manuscript, and the sewing holes in the strips
     align to show this. The strips were cut from adjacent portions of text
     from the inner margin of a folio in a manuscript which originally
     contained Aelfric's Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints (fragments
     from different parts of the same manuscript exist in the Bodleian
     Library, Queen's College Library, Cambridge, and the Lilly Library of
     Indiana University). The manuscript is from the "middle period" of
     Aelfric's productions of these texts, which lasted for about ten years
     after 992.

     Bibliography:

     Collins, Rowland L. and Peter Clemoes. "The Common Origin of the
     Aelfric fragments at New Haven, Oxford, Cambridge, and Bloomington" in
     Old English Studies in Honour of John Collins Pope, 1974.



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