Page:Old English Gospel of Nicodemus - Hulme 1904.djvu/3

Rh of date and authorship, it will be well to give a brief history of the manuscript.

MS Cotton Vespasian D 14 is a small quarto on vellum and contains 169 leaves (i.e., 338 pages), which measure 5x7½ inches. The MS of our piece is written in a bold, clear hand which offers little difficulty to the reader. Capitals are indicated by a red stroke or flourish on the front of the letter, and they are employed with considerable care. The scribe was also fond of paragraphing, paragraphs being indicated by the setting in of lines. There are numerous corrections and insertions of minor importance throughout the MS, which have generally been indicated in the footnotes of the text here printed. These corrections are in a later hand, which is probably also responsible for the large number of underscored words and phrases, sprinkled apparently at random through the piece. In the very scanty account of the MS in the British Museum Catalogue of Manuscript it is assigned to the late eleventh or the twelfth century. The hand of the Nicodemus text seems to justify this rather indefinite dating. The earliest account of the manuscript with which I am acquainted is that of Wanley, who says: "Vespasianus D 14, Cod. Membr. in Octavo partim Lat. partim Saxon, diversis temporibus scriptus." Wanley gives a list of the contents of the MS, in which the version of the Gospel of Nicodemus is numbered XXXIII, and he says of it : "De Resurrectione Dn̄i. .... Tractatus hic, est Abbreviatio Pseudo-Evangelii Nicodemo adscripti." Skeat is evidently following Wanley when he says: "There is also an abbreviated copy of the same story [i.e., the Gospel of Nicodemus] in MS Cott. Vespasian D. XIV. hom. XXXIII.;" and, as we shall see, Wanley and Skeat are, generally speaking, correct.

Wanley evidently thought that different parts of the MS were written at different times, but he does not assign a specific date to any part. J. Nehab, who, it appears, had not seen the MS, thinks that it belongs to the end of the twelfth century; and