Tracing John of Burgundy: manuscript descriptions

Abstract

The dataset consists of manuscript descriptions carried out by Dr Alpo Honkapohja during library work undertaken as a part of a project funded from the Neil Ker Memorial Fund.

The project focuses on the most popular plague treatise in medieval England, attributed to John of Burgundy. The treatise survives in more than one hundred manuscripts, whose transmission and relations are so far only incompletely understood. Despite its ubiquity the treatise is often treated by cataloguers in haphazard fashion, because the JB treatise was frequently copied in manuscripts later than the main text where space permitted or was part of an independent booklet that was bound together with earlier or later texts. The descriptions identify and describe codicological units containing a copy of the Middle English or Latin short version of the JB treatise.