Saint's Lives: Manuscripts

Guided Questions:

Imagine each individual object by itself. Does having all of these objects together change your thinking or enhance your knowledge about the overall object? Do you develop a new meaning about the object when they are placed in one room? 

The above manuscripts were all originally part of a single volume. The Life of St. Catherine of Alexandria from the Houghton library at Harvard University is the first section of this collection of books. Over time, individuals dispersed the others to Cambridge and San Marino. However, the same scribe wrote all 4 of these manuscripts in identical formats and are currently found in 4 different places. However, it may seem more comprehensive to have presented these four texts together so that the context can be understood and offer a more concrete historical context when compared and analyzed together. Claire Water, an English professor at UC Davis, presents these texts together in her analysis of the connections between these books. In fact, by analyzing all of them together, she is able to speak about the Birgittine community and the neighboring Carthusian monastery that are both founded by King Henry V in 1415 (Reames 2008).

The Life of St. Catherine of Alexandria has 30 chapters and short prayers and is written in England. She even states that “they can offer us far more information about everything from language to audience to sources when taken as a group” (Waters 2008, 56) and they were initially sold as a single pack in 1774, intended to be read as a single unit. In fact, these are from England and were bound together in one volume since they shared the same dimensions (Hungtington Library 1989).

This page contains 2 of the 4 manuscript texts. This shows how bringing together these separate objects through a digital collection like this one can enhance meaning.