Pioneer Connoisseurship in Upper Canada: Henry Scadding’s 1901 Bequest of Early Manuscripts at the University of Toronto

In 1901 the University of Toronto received a bequest of five medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the estate of Rev. Henry Scadding. These represent the first early manuscripts documented in Ontario and include the first Greek manuscript in Canada. Scadding’s acquisitions are documented in pamphlets he wrote for an annual display of books at the Canadian Industrial Exposition and in the “Addendum” to an article he published in 1875. The evidence yields six reasons for Scadding’s pioneering ownership of manuscripts: 1. To validate progress in Canadian rare book bibliophily; 2. To represent a civilizing British ideal; 3. To illustrate textual diffusion from the Old World to the New; 4. To preserve ancient sources like better-known English collectors did who gathered Greek manuscripts in the Levant; 5. To practice the professional “science” of Textual Criticism; 6. To acquire items relevant to his teaching of classical literature and history at Upper Canada College. Scadding’s reasons for owning manuscripts were broadly academic. He imagined that his Greek Gospel book, now the “Codex Torontonensis,” might yield valuable readings upon collation. For his Vulgate bible, he studied irregular orthography and spelling errors as evidence of monastic ignorance. At the same time, Scadding fantasized about the provenance of his manuscripts. He imagined that Thomas Becket may have owned his Greek Gospels, and that John Wyclif may have consulted his Latin Gospel book. In these and similar terms, Scadding engaged in the specious “redeployment … of materials from an earlier time” that Heather Murray observed in his writings on Shakespeare.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.