Gildas’ On the Ruin of Britain: A Scribal Edition Based on the Text Preserved in Cambridge, University Library Ff.I.27

Abstract

This dissertation consists of five parts: in the first, it examines the current state of scholarship concerning the sixth-century Romano-British ecclesiastic, Gildas, and the history, transmission and reception of his only major surviving text known as De excidio Britanniae. In the second part, the focus shifts to single composite manuscript – Cambridge, University Library Ff.I.27 (CUL Ff.I.27) – which preserves a redacted version of the text in the portion of the manuscript that has been dated variously to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This section includes a physical description of CUL Ff.I.27, an enumeration of the scribal conventions and practices of the scribe responsible for copying this text, and a reconsideration of the vexed questions related to origin and provenance of the manuscript. The third part studies the hitherto unstudied glosses that accompany the text of De excidio Britanniae in CUL Ff.I.27. The fourth part surveys the previous editions of De exicido Britanniae and outlines the editorial principles and approach to the translation which were adopted for the edition with facing page translation that comprises the fifth part.