Devotion on the Margins: The Late Medieval Readers of Gotha I. 81

Erfurt, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Memb. I. 81 is a fourteenth-century compilation of the Lives of saints born, buried or active in England. Compiled in the West Country in the second half of the fourteenth century, it quickly travelled north and east to Norfolk, where it remained until at least 1479. During its time in the West Country and in Norfolk it had several readers, a number of whom left traces of their presence – and their purpose – in the form of extensive marginalia. This paper examines the different activities of these marginal hands, using them as a case study for the different non-liturgical uses to which a hagiographical manuscript could be put, and the different lenses through which it could be read. No two marginal commenters seem to have thought alike. Those who left marginalia were drawn to different groups of saints – some to kings of Northumbria, others to West Country confessors, still others to female saints; and they mined the manuscript for different things – exempla, references to historical events, and difficult Latin words among them. The Gotha manuscript serves as a powerful demonstration of the different ways people read saintly narratives, and the different uses of sanctity to the reader.