“Est quodam prodire tenus si non datur ultra”
Sed semen illud cadit in terram quia ex fragili et terreno corpore gravatur.116
We read in fables that Vulcan wished to mate with Pallas. And when she refused, his semen fell to the ground from which Ericthonius was born, with serpentine feet. So, to hide the shame of his feet, he invented the chariot.… This is the truth of this integumentum. Fire is sometimes called Vulcan, in which case it is called “vulcan” as if it were “vol-can,” that is, flying whiteness, since it flies high and is white like glowing ashes.… Vulcan wishes to unite with Pallas when anyone, moved by his own fervor, aspires to perfect wisdom. But Pallas resists since no one in this life can attain perfect wisdom. But although Pallas does not retain the semen, she does draw it out because even if one cannot acquire perfect wisdom, one can acquire some, for
“It is something to go as far as one can, even if one cannot go any further.”
But that semen fell to the ground because it was weighed down by the fragile, earthly body.
Several of the Digby glossators tackle this passage, one that also attracted the attention of Bernard Silvestris.117 One of the earlier ones fills the left-hand column of folio 13 verso with shorter points that give the gist of what is going on, beginning “Hic ostendit ciuitatem atenien/sium ciuitatem egypcioruum esse priorem et hoc numero annonrum et quan/titate temporis” (Here he shows the city of Athens to be older than that of the Egyptians, and this by the number of years and length of time). Once again the pothook glossator goes much further, raising the same points made by William of Conches, often with similar phrasing. He notes the story of Erectheus and his dragon’s feet and the crucial allegorical point that perfect wisdom cannot be attained “quia in hacuita nulla est perfecta sapientia.”
After this, the glosses become less frequent for a while, and many pages are almost untouched, although there are a few doodles and nota bene hands. Once we come to the discussion of the composition of the world soul at folio 25V, however, the glosses resume in force, and they are often accompanied by diagrams. A very large part of the glossing, including the work of the pothook glossator, was completed within roughly half a century of the original copying, but the manuscript continued to attract some glosses for years to come, probably well into the fourteenth century. On folio 55V there are a series of notes in a thirteenth-century hand on Timaeus 35B to 36B, the discussion of the mathematical divisions that form the world soul.
While some of the glosses in Digby 23(1) may date from the fourteenth century, the bulk of them, and many of the most substantial ones, were completed within the first few generations. This pattern echoes that of other manuscripts of the Timaeus, where the glosses bridge the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the status of the Timaeus in the schools at large, where it certainly declines from the position it held in the twelfth century but does not completely disappear.118 In Paris the Timaeus appears to have been part of the arts curriculum until about 1255, but no student work on the Timaeus has yet been identified nor have any student notes. Dutton concludes that the students of Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century were probably required to know the text only second hand, or in a cursory fashion, and were not forced “to engage with the Timaeus, explore its difficult design, unravel its account of early Greek history, or probe its deeper metaphysics.”119 Nor would the doctors of theology and philosophy have spent much time on a text that played little role in late scholastic debates (although Thomas Aquinas cited it on a few occasions and touched on some of its themes).120 The situation at Oxford is less well documented but was probably somewhat similar. There are a number of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century copies of the Timaeus of English provenance, such as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 217, a late thirteenth-century copy that contains glosses that also draw heavily on William of Conches, and one manuscript was copied in Oxford in 1423.121 It seems that at both Paris and Oxford the Timaeus continued to be read but increasingly was relegated to the status of a familiar classic.122
The preceding rough-and-ready account may provide some sense of the riches in the first half of this famous manuscript. But apart from being brought together as one book, how much do the two parts really have to do with each other?
It is not clear quite when the two parts of the manuscript were joined. Henry’s name appears only on the opening folios of the Timaeus, but this inscription appears on paleographical grounds to be much later than the word “Chalcidius” or the verses of Juvenal. This indicates his name was added after the two parts are thought to have been brought together but also some time after Henry’s death, leaving his ownership of the Roland moot. For what it is worth, Samaran dates the word “Chalcidius” and the verses from Juvenal to the thirteenth century, but with such short examples it is hard to be sure.123 The joint manuscript might just possibly have belonged to Henry Langley, last heard of in 1263, but it could equally well have belonged to one of the Augustinian canons, possibly a friend of Henry’s, in which case the canons had kept Henry in remembrance for at least a few generations when they finally entered his name.
Later additions, doodles and pen tests, and the material copied into the opening leaves suggest that the book was still being consulted in the fourteenth century. The opening bifolium of Digby 23(1) includes an unidentified sermon on the Virgin that contains an echo of a sermon by Thomas de Cobham.124 On the last page, folio 55V, the page with the thirteenth-century glosses on the proportions of the world soul, there is a memorandum in a fourteenth-century hand of a request for materials for illuminations: “mitte mihi per iohanem fratrem tuum dimidium centum/ de partie Gold videlicet quinquaginta folia/ Item dimidiam libram de vermelon Item dimidiam/ unciam de bona azura” (Send me by your Brother John a half hundred of Gold, that is, fifty sheets. Item a half pound of vermilion. Item a half ounce of good azure). These are most likely materials for illuminating manuscripts, although they could also serve for panel paintings. Ian Short argues that, since the middle of a bound volume would scarcely be a convenient place for such an order, the two parts must still have been separate at this point, but how then can we account for the appearance of the word “Chalcidius” in part two?125 Turning to the second section, in addition to the verses from Juvenal and the reference to Chalcidius on the flyleaves, there are a variety of pen tests, usually confined to individual letters but once an entire phrase, “Domine, Dominus noster qui ad,” which runs across the top of folio 45V. In addition, on folio [73r] there are Middle English verses that have faded very badly and might date from the fourteenth or even fifteenth century. Samaran examined them under ultraviolet light, and transcribed them as follows:
… men among … he dos to wi ………
grene and gray … as sinful men w ……..
mykil wrong … mani …. at was ……
at maked his song of so ………..
all his ban …… say reant oym. W.….
him …. niht …. long for g …. was ….
allaye (?) to hurten we ……………..
long …………….. was ……..
…………. n…..es ful a songe ……
wryte…… s………………
Whenever it came to be bound with the Timaeus, it would seem that the Roland was still being read in the fourteenth century and read by clerics who also composed, or appreciated, lyrics in Middle English.
At first it might appear that the two halves of the manuscript have little in common and that their juxtaposition is of interest only as a reflection of the possibly idiosyncratic taste of an early reader. Indeed, some scholars have been at pains to disassociate the two even further, suggesting that the conjunction is largely accidental and that the canons kept the Roland out of respect for a donor or simply to add weight to