2021-06-26

Addenda et Scholia (2)

So, this is probably flogging a horse that's been dead for over a decade, but looking through some stuff on the "Rudd manuscripts" (BL Harley MSS. 6479-6486), noticed an interesting anomaly.

The numbering in the Harleian collection does not reflect the order in which the MSS. were produced; 6482 was apparently the earliest; the frontispiece is signed by Smart and dated 1699, the material extracted from the Janua Magica Reserata dated 1712.

Harley 6483, the "Dr. Rudd" Lemegeton, is internally dated 1712/13 in the colophon, and numbered as being the 36th through 138th "Sheet Dr. Rudd" (the first 35 presumably comprising the "Nine Hyerarchies of Angels" in 6482: McLean's typeset in A Treatise on Angel Magic does not reproduce those notes and I have not seen the MS.).

 The colophon also indicates "The Rosie Crucian Secrets" as being next in the series.

The Rosie Crucian Secrets, Harley 6485 (online here) is dated 1713 in the colophon, its 501 folios said to be copied from the "Sheet[s] [of] Dr. Dee" (numbering of said "sheets" restarts with each major division).  Since it includes material adapted from John Heydon's Elharvarena, an alchemical-Rosicruican work published in 1665, and the English translation (pub. 1656) of Maier's Themis Aurea (first pub. 1618), this is . . . unlikely.

Harley MSS. 6480, 6481 (largely plagiarised from Heydon), 6484 (plagiarised from an English translation of Gaffarel's Curiosites Inouyes) and 6486 (the Chemical Wedding, plagiarised from Foxcroft's translation) are dated 1714.

Anyway, back to 6483.  This is a quarto, meaning each "sheet" is folded twice before being sewn & cut, thus comprising four leaves, 8 pages.  Each "Sheet Dr. Rudd" corresponds exactly to four leaves in Smart's copy -- with one exception.  The "nine and fortieth sheet" begins on fol. 53r; the "fiftieth sheet" on fol. 59r.  While it not a priori outrageous that, depending on the scribe's methods and desire to save paper, there would not be an exact, 1:1 correspondence in pagination between the source text and the copy, it is odd that there is this single discrepancy of two leaves in a manuscript of over four hundred folios, particularly as it comes in the spirit catalogue of the Ars Goëtia, which Smart laid out consistently with the entry for each spirit taking an entire leaf (frequently leaving all or part of the verso blank; owing to the heavy line-work used on the Spirit characters combined with thin paper, there is serious bleed-through).  This strongly suggests that Smart's Lemegeton copy-text was not laid out thus, and the "Sheets Dr. Rudd" were his invention, probably noted down in the MS. book after copying the main text.

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