St Dunstan of Canterbury
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Happy feast of St Dunstan! Here is an extraordinary image, very likely drawn by St Dunstan himself, with commentary by Dr Allan Barton:
This image of Christ drawn in pen and ink [Bodleian, MS. Auct. F. 4. 32 - Part I, f.1r.] is almost certainly the work of St Dunstan of Canterbury. It is in a manuscript known as St Dunstan's Classbook, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is a composite of material dating from the 10th-century, mostly in St Dunstan's own hand and written while he was a monk and Abbot of Glastonbury. In this image St Dunstan has depicted himself prostrated before the image of Christ with the Latin text: Dunstanum memet clemens rogo Christe tuere, Tenarias me non sinas sorbsisse procellas (Merciful Christ, I ask you to defend me, Dunstan, That you may not permit the storms of Taenarus (the underworld) to swallow me).
The provenance of the manuscript is quite extraordinary and links the work directly to Dunstan's own monastery at Glastonbury. The individual parts were listed in the possession of Glastonbury Abbey in 1247. There are provenance inscriptions that place in the abbey's possession in the mid-15th-century and the antiquary John Leland saw the manuscript there when he visited in 1538. By 1600 it had found its way to Oxford and was in the possession of the mathematician Thomas Allen, a fellow of the former Benedictine foundation Gloucester Hall. Allen was a noted collector of former monastic manuscripts and also had in his possession at one time, another notable relic, the St Cuthbert Gospel of St John. A church-papist, he probably bought the manuscript due to its association with St Dunstan and for its value as a relic. He gave the manuscript to the Bodleian Library in 1601.
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Dr. Allan Barton is a medievalist, historian, scholar of church art and architecture (especially stained glass) and craftsman. Allan writes about church art and architecture at Vitrearum, and his craft studio, based in Lincoln, England, is The Guild of Theophilus.
Text by Allan Barton, used by permission. Image of Oxford, Bodley MS. Auct. F. 4. 32 f.1r ('St Dunstan's Classbook') from Digital Bodleian, reproduced under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC 4.0. Manuscript description here.