Gray’s Inn Library holds a collection of 24 medieval manuscripts, dating from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Largely theological in subject matter, these academic texts reflect the centrality of religion to the scholarship of the period.
MS. 21 is marked as a donation by John Godebold in 1635, a member who went on to be a Reader of the Inn, as well as a judge and an MP. The other manuscripts are known to have been at the Inn since at least 1697, as they are listed in a catalogue published in that year, but scholars believe they were acquired in the first half of the seventeenth century, having belonged to a religious house in Chester.
The manuscripts are written on parchment or vellum apart from MS. 17, which is on paper. Several are composite volumes, meaning different works bound together.
In addition to religious texts, the collection includes MS. 10, the Roman de la Rose, a fourteenth-century French poem influential on Chaucer, and MS. 21, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae by Henry Bracton, from the late thirteenth-century, and one of the earliest treatises on English law.
Johannis Cassianus De Institutis Egiptiorum Coenobiorum
Super Prophetas
Passionale
Florarium Bartholomei
Beda Super Canticum Canticorum
Robert Cowtone Super Quatuor Libros Sententiarum
Petri Blesensis Epistolae
L'horloge de Sapience
Peculum Humane Salvacionis
Roman de la Rose and Testament de Jean de Meun
Speculum Religiosorum
Latin Sermons and ars Predicandi
Grostete de Homine Errato
Isidore Bishop of Seville
Staunthone De Decem Preceptis
Monaldi Justinopolitani Summa Juris Canonici
De Sacre Scripture Profundis Misteriis, authore Rogero Bacone
Sermones Dominicales Per Totem Annum
Diadema Monachorum
Omelie Totius Anni. Homilies for all the Sundays in the Year
Bracton (Henricus De). Liber De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliæ
St Gregorys Homilies
Robert Grostete
Biblia Latina Old and New Testaments
