Codex Ashmole 61 : A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse

Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance.

Among the surviving Middle English manuscripts produced in the fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 stands out from a body of literary production otherwise dominated by professional scribes in London and other urban centers. The work of a lone scribe drawing on regional networks of literary circulation in the northern Midlands and Yorkshire, Codex Ashmole 61 belongs to a rising trend of “amateur productions” by individuals and families among the gentry and urban merchant classes in this period. Although this manuscript’s contents have been previously published in scattered and hard-to-find collections, the present edition by George Shuffelton collects these texts and extensive notes in one comprehensive volume. Gathering together a wide range of material including popular romances, saints’ lives, moral exempla, comic tales, and religious literature, Codex Ashmole 61 offers rare and valuable insights into the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England.