‘Antiquities of the Jews’ (Antiquitates Iudaicae) is an account of the history of Jewish people in twenty books, originally written in Greek by Flavius Josephus (37–c. 100 AD) around 93 AD. It is a vital source of information for Jewish history from Adam and Eve to just before the outbreak of the revolt against Rome of AD 66–70. Josephus wrote about the rebellion in a separate text, ‘The Jewish War’ (Bellum Judaicum). The Latin translation of the Jewish Antiquities, produced in the 6^th century, was one of the most copied historical works of the Middle Ages.

This manuscript is a near complete copy of the Antiquitates, finishing near the end of book twenty. Before the start of book one (fol. 1r) is a biography of Josephus from De Viris Illustribus (‘On Illustrious Men’), a collection of 135 short biographies written in the 4^th century by the Church Father Jerome (c. 347–420). The beginning of each book is marked with large and ornate initials in blue, red, green, and yellow. Most of the leaves have been damaged and mended. In the margins are some early English words, including ‘loke’ and ‘rede’, in a 15^th-century hand.

 

Literature: Edward Bernard, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1697), p. 31, no. 1348; Franz Blatt (ed.), The Latin Josephus, Vol. 1: Introduction and texts: ‘The Antiquities’, Books I–V (Copenhagen, 1958), pp. 92, 110; Neil R. Ker and Alan J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, Volume IV: Paisley–York (Oxford, 1969), p. 606; Paul Yeats-Edwards, Winchester College (Warden and Fellows’ Library) Medieval Manuscript Collection: Brief History and Catalogue (London, 1978), p. 3; Karen M. Kletter, The uses of Josephus: Jewish history in medieval Christian tradition (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005), p. 134; James M. W. Willoughby, The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, Vol. 2 (London, 2013), pp. 608, 833, 843; David B. Levenson and Thomas R. Martin, ‘The Ancient Latin Translations of Josephus’, in Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers (eds), A Companion to Josephus (Chichester, 2016), Figure 21.4; David B. Levenson and Thomas R. Martin, ‘The Place of the Early Printed Editions of Josephus’s Antiquities and War (1470–1534) in the Latin Textual Tradition’, in Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls, vol. 2 (Leiden, 2017), pp. 765–825, 786; David B. Levenson and Thomas R. Martin, ‘A Revised Classification of Manuscript Groups for the Early Books of the Latin Translation of Josephus’s Antiquities Based on Textual Variants in AJ 6.356–360 and 6.362b’, in Reinhold F. Glei, Maik Goth and Christoph Schülke (eds), Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 46: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture: New Series (Maryland, 2021), pp. 71–148, 108, 109.

Provenance: An inscription on fols 2v–3r (‘Liber sancta marie M[e]re Wallis’) indicates that it was formerly owned by the Cistercian abbey of Merevale in Warwickshire; the manuscript was at Winchester College by 1609.

Location: Fellows’ Library