Mirror of St. Edmund etc.
Middle English translation of Edmund of Abingdon's Speculum ecclesiae or Mirror of the Church (c. 1450-1475)
MS 3597
Acquired with assistance from the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund, 1991.
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Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1234 to 1240 was the last Archbishop to be canonised by the Roman Catholic Church. This manuscript contains a Middle English translation of his most important work, Speculum ecclesiae or Mirror of the Church.
MS 3597 f. 2r
The Mirror is a devotional treatise that instructs the reader in the contemplation of God in four stages: through God’s creatures, through reading the Bible, through Christ, and through the Godhead of the Trinity.
MS 3597 ff. 13v-14r
The work was first written in Latin as Speculum religiosorum but this original text does not survive, and the earliest extant manuscripts are in Anglo-Norman, Mirour de Seinte Eglyse. The Latin version known as Speculum ecclesie, was translated from these early Anglo-Norman texts, with Middle English translations appearing in the late fourteenth century. The Mirror begins on f. 13vb, 'The fyrst chapetre tretith how a man owith to behold his own astate'.
MS 3597 ff. 13v-14r
MS 3597 dates from c. 1450-1475 and was from Coughton Court, the seat of the recusant Throckmorton family. The text of the Mirror is intercalated with the Cleansing of Man's Soul, another Middle English devotional work.
MS 3597 f. 79v
The manuscript contains several other texts, including an English translation of part of the Distichs of Cato by Benedict Burgh, Archdeacon of Colchester, which was printed by Caxton in 1483. This section begins on f. 89vb.
MS 3597 ff. 89v-90r
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