out at the beginning of every Lent so that the brothers might pray for the benefactors.74 At Oseney donations to the abbey were sometimes even noted in its chronicle or in its cartulary, and presumably the books were supposed to be inscribed at the same time, but one simply has to compare the chronicle to the Ker’s list of surviving books from the abbey to see that the record keeping was not perfect.75 If the owner of the Digby Timaeus was this Henry Langley, he was a lucky man. The prebends of Bridgnorth were worth in the neighborhood of twelve pounds a year and were often used for rewarding valued royal servants such as the king’s physician or the clerks of the Wardrobe, who held at least five of them during the mid-thirteenth century. This attractive sinecure was one that Henry would have acquired through the influence of his father, Geoffrey.76
While Henry remains largely a cipher, his father was notorious. Geoffrey Langley was chief justice of the King’s Forest, one of the king’s most trusted counsellors, an infamous purchaser of land, and at one point possibly the most hated man in England. According to Matthew Paris, he was stingy and “lessened as far as possible the bounty and accustomed generosity (dapsilitatem et consuetam curialitatem) of the royal table.”77 Geoffrey fought in the campaign in Gascony in 1242–43 and was promoted on his return, rising to chief justice of the forest in the year 1250. In this position he enforced the harsh forest laws with unusual vigor78 In 1254, as a senior member of the king’s council, he was put in charge of the English and Welsh lands of Prince Edward. His high-handed treatment of the Welsh has often been cited as one of the causes of the rebellion of 1256.79 It would have been Geoffrey’s influence that would have won his son the lucrative prebendary.
There is no direct connection between Geoffrey Langley and the Digby manuscript (and even his son probably owned only the Timaeus), but Geoffrey is an interesting figure in his own right, in part because he stands in such stark contrast to the recurring image of the medieval baron as a semiliterate noble savage. Geoffrey was skilled not just in political and legal machinations but also in the business of land speculation in an inflationary economy. He was one of those larger landholders who made a fortune by lending money to lesser knights who were living off fixed rents and then acquiring their lands through foreclosure, a practice that led to increased social tensions culminating in the Barons’ Revolt of 1263, when Langley’s lands were among the first to be pillaged.80 The money generated by this aggressive speculation was presumably part of what supported his son in his comfortable prebendary at Bridgnorth, where he could read of the celestial harmonies described in the Timaeus.
What do we know about the first half of this manuscript, Digby 23(1)? The first question to consider is where it came from. One might suppose, as J. H. Waszink did, that a text that at one point belonged to an Oxford scholar had originally been copied there, but O. Pacht and J. J. G. Alexander listed Digby 23(1) among French manuscripts on the basis of its decoration. Their account, however, is summary (“Good initials, diagrams”), and in their introduction they draw attention to the difficulty of distinguishing Norman from Anglo-Norman manuscripts.81 It would seem, then, that the manuscript could have been copied on either side of the Channel. More important is the intellectual milieu in which Digby 23(1) was first copied and read, particularly its relation to the School of Chartres. It is possible that some of the glossators had actually studied there, taking lessons from the great Bernard of Chartres himself (probably d. 1124) or from masters such as Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154) or Ivo of Chartres (d. 1165), although they might also have been from some other center, such as Orléans, or from one of the schools in Paris, which by the end of the century were beginning to coalesce into the university.82 At least one of the glossators draws heavily on the work of William of Conches (d. ca. 1154), who studied at Chartres and taught at Paris.83 Oxford, too, was flourishing as a university by the 1180s, and the manuscript could conceivably have been copied there or brought back to Oxford by a wandering scholar soon after it was copied.84
Pächt and Alexander date the core text to the first half of the twelfth century, an opinion seconded by Malcolm Parkes, but this may be a little early.85 The script resembles that found in some English documents from about 1140 to 1160, while Paul Dutton has suggested that it might date from the third quarter of the century.86 The entire text has been carefully glossed over many years. A full account of these glosses would be of great value to literary scholars, who regularly invoke “glossing” as a theoretical model but have had relatively few opportunities to observe the practice up close and in the flesh of the medieval page.87 We need a better sense of how glossing worked, not just as an intellectual tradition but as a material practice, and of what we might call the time of the manuscript, that is, the rhythms of its commentary. It would require a better knowledge of medieval philosophy and twelfth-century paleography than mine, however, to offer a proper account. The glosses do not yield easily to the casual passerby. The modern scholars who have transcribed them, Tullio Gregory, Edouard Jeauneau, and Paul Dutton, are steeped in Chartrian commentary. What I hope to offer is a point of interdisciplinary contact to the labor of scholars who have made the Digby glosses the subject of years of careful study.
Unlike the Roland, which attracted only a few brief jottings, many of them no more than pen tests, Digby 23(1) was glossed carefully and extensively, especially during the first two or three generations of its copying. At least four principal hands contribute numerous glosses, both interlinear and marginal, many of them of considerable length. Some of the glosses are early, and one of them has been identified by Dutton as the work of the main scribe.88 Others, on both paleographical grounds and because of their more elaborate content, would seem to date from later in the twelfth century or even from early in the thirteenth century, and there are other glosses that are later still. The glosses range in complexity. Many are brief and relatively straightforward, but others take advantage of the space in the margins and explore at considerable length crucial interpretive issues of the period, such as Plato’s use of myth. The early marginal glosses are written as well-spaced text blocks and are what we would now call left and right justified, with regular margins on both sides. The later ones are longer and more cramped and zigzag in and out as they follow the edge of the text. The growth of commentary is straining the limits of the page, but the overall appearance of the pages is still quite elegant. These are not just hasty notes. It would seem, at first glance, that Digby 23(1) was not just a scholar’s book but a master’s book, or at the very least the book of a student who aspired to be master, and that it was passed from one serious commentator to another, who might have used it for the duration of his teaching career.89
In reconciling the elaborate cosmology and mythology of the Timaeus, “the most important philosophical text of the early twelfth century,” with Christianity the glossators confronted a formidable intellectual task.90 The central points of the text, as understood in the twelfth century, are well summarized by M. D. Chenu:
The world was order and beauty; in all its multiplicity and for all successive generations, it constituted a whole.… The world was necessarily patterned upon a model, a changeless and eternal exemplar, a self-subsistent Living Being, comprehending in itself the natures of all things.… The world’s construction (its creation, as Christian commentators called it) was the work of an Artisan, Efficient Cause, or Demiurge, who acted out of self-diffusing goodness.… The world had a soul, the ordered principle of its movements and cause of life. Underlying the organization of the world was matter (itself also created, said Christian commentators). Man, center of this universe, reflected in himself all its elements and was a “microcosm” in order that he might dominate it all by his intelligence Finally the Timaeus furnished twelfth-century authors with assorted elements of physics—the heavenly spheres, the elements, the concept of space—which provided competition for the Ptolemaic ideas that translators had been bringing into circulation since the beginning of the century.91
But this cosmic vision had been given the most perplexing form. As Winthrop Wetherbee notes, to “read the Timaeus as philosophy or science requires that one should come to terms with its surface of literary myth.”92 Unless one did so, it could easily seem a tissue of lies. For the twelfth century, the mythical surface of the Timaeus was an incentive to glossing perhaps second only to the erotic surface of the Song of Songs, and glossing the Timaeus