Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Saturday 3 December 2022

Marginalia from an Anglo Saxon nun


I do not make notes or underlinings in books, and deplore those who do today, yet like any historian I am immensely grateful to those who did so in the past. Marginalia are part of any historian’s stock in trade - for contemporary evens as much as for those of the more distant past.

An important instance of this is revealed in an article on the website of Artnet News which concerns an eighth century copy of the Acts of the Apostles now in the Selden MSS in the Bodleian. In this particular case the marginalia have been missed hitherto because they are in drypoint rather than ink. They are the work of a nun, the Abbess Eadburg.




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