JOHN PECHAM ON THE FORM OF LAMENTATIONS J. Cornelia Linde In late medieval Latin Bibles, the visual make-up of the Book of Lamentations catches the reader’s eye: the text consists of five distinct short chapters and each verse of the first four chapters is preceded by the name of a Hebrew letter, in alphabetic order, usually written in red ink. This inclusion of the Hebrew letters is a common feature in manuscripts of the Late Medieval Bible. The place of Lamentations within the biblical canon is stable: it is placed after the Book of Jeremiah, to whom it was attributed, and the transition between the two books is usually bridged by a short preface derived from the Septuagint tradition: Et factum est postquam in captivitatem reductus est Israel et Hierusalem deserta est sedit Hieremias flens et planxit lamentationem hanc in Hierusalem et dixit.1 In contrast to other prefaces to biblical books, this brief passage was not usually labelled. Instead, it was incorporated into the text. Judging from a survey of a small number of manuscripts, the positioning of this preface at the start of Lamentations right after the incipit seems to have been more common in thirteenth-century Bibles than the position at the end of the Book of Jeremiah.2 In some instances, the connecting preface was inserted at the end of the Book of Jeremiah without a following 1 “And it came to pass after Israel had been led into captivity and Jerusalem had been deserted that Jeremiah sat weeping and cried this lament in Jerusalem and said”; see Biblia sacra iuxta latinam vulgatam versionem ad codicum fidem, cura et studio monachorum Abbatiae pontificiae Sancti Hieronymi in Urbe O. S. B. edita, ed. H. Quentin et al., vol. 14, Liber Hieremiae, Lamentationes, Liber Baruch (Rome, 1972), 14:285. The Greek version of the pref- ace is printed as part of the text in Septuaginta: id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interpretes, 2 vols., ed. A. Rahlfs, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart, 1949), 2:756. In exceptional cases, Baruch is placed between Jeremiah and Lamentations; see, e.g., BL, MS Add. 37058 (France, second half 13th c.); and Sion/Sitten, Archives du Chapitre/Kapitelsarchiv, MS 15 (Italy, 11th c.) fol. 154v. I am grateful to Saara Leskinen for many helpful suggestions. My research has been generously funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. 2 For examples of manuscripts containing the preface after the incipit to Lamentations, see BL, MS Add. 37058, fol. 242v; BL, MS Egerton 2908 (Italy, 13th c.), fol. 239v; St. Gall, Kantonsbibliothek, Vadianische Sammlung, MS 332, fol. 278v (see http://www.e-codices .unifr.ch/de/vad/0332/278v/small, consulted 31/03/2011; second half 13th c. or beginning of 14th c.; from Northern France or Southern England). 148 cornelia linde explicit or incipit.3 In fact, while Lamentations is now regarded as without doubt a self-contained biblical book, in the Latin Middle Ages Jeremiah and Lamentations were frequently perceived as a single biblical book, the latter being a direct, if clearly distinguishable, continuation of the former. This perception is mirrored by the fact that, judging from the small sample of manuscripts I have consulted, the running title for Lamentations seems to have been more frequently Ieremias rather than Lamentationes.4 The connecting preface helped the reader link the two books closely together. In addition to these formal peculiarities found in the Latin manuscript tradition, St. Jerome provided further information on the text by pointing out its acrostic and metrical form in the original Hebrew, the former mirrored in the Latin by the introduction of the Hebrew letter names.5 With regard to its textual structure and artistic composi- tion, Lamentations thus offered its medieval Latin commentators various points for discussion. This article deals with John Pecham’s views on the formal aspects of Lamentations as expressed in the preface to his Expositio in Lamentationes Jeremiae prophetae, the oldest known Franciscan commentary on this bib- lical book. The Englishman Pecham (ca. 1225/1230–1292), later to become archbishop of Canterbury, was a novice of the Franciscan Order at Oxford before leaving for Paris between 1257 and 1259. He was magister regens in theology and lector in Paris from 1269 to 1272.6 Besides a commentary on Lamentations, his exegetical works include postills on the Song of Songs, Ezekiel, Luke, John and Hebrews.7 3 See, e.g., BL, MS Add. 37487 (Italy, 13th c.), fol. 237rb and Aarau, Aargauer Kantons- bibliothek, MS WettF 11, fol. 259v (http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/kba/WettF0011/259v consulted 31/03/2011; last quarter of 13th c.; of German-speaking provenance). The informa- tion given by the critical apparatus to Lamentations shows that the preface is found at times before, at times after the inscriptio tituli; see Biblia sacra latinam (Rome), 14:285. 4 The following manuscripts have “Ieremias” as the running title: BL, MS Add. 50003 (Catalonia, 1273); BL, MS Egerton 2908; BL, MS Add. 38115 (second half of 13th c.); Aarau, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, MsWettF 11. BL, MS Add. 37058 has “Liber Ieremie”; St. Gall, Kantonsbibliothek, Vadianische Sammlung, MS 332 has “Lamentationes”; and BL, MS Add. 37487 has “Treni”. 5 See p. 155. 6 See Decima L. Douie, Archbishop Pecham (Oxford, 1952), pp. 3, 6, 8 and 10–12. Among his other works are the Perspectiva communis, the Tractatus de sphaera and several poems. In accordance with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: from the Earliest Time to the Year 2000, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford 2004), 43:362–368, I am using the spelling “Pecham” rather than “Peckham”. 7 For a list of Pecham’s works, see Richard Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540 (Turnhout, 1997), pp. 290–297. Stegmüller (3:403, no. 4085) mentions a lost commentary on the Gospel of Mark by Pecham..