Friendship and publishing in Geoffrey Brito’s Sol meldunensis: a collaborative gift book from Cirencester Abbey for Geoffrey, abbot of Malmesbury, 1246–60

The regular canons of Cirencester Abbey and the monks of Malmesbury Abbey formed a literary exchange in the 1130s with Robert of Cricklade and William of Malmesbury. This friendship surfaces again with the publishing circle of Alexander Neckam (1157–1217), whose nephew, Geoffrey Brito, a canon of Cirencester Abbey, organized pittances with the ‘friends of Master Alexander’ to perpetuate the writer’s memory. Geoffrey presented Sol meldunensis, a miscellany of Alexander’s works as a continuous theological treatise. This compilation forms the main production unit of Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.6.42. Marginalia in four Cirencester manuscripts corresponding to Geoffrey’s extracts prove that these were the compilation’s direct sources. The miscellany was a gift to Geoffrey, abbot of Malmesbury from 1246 until 1260, framed with poems on friendship that emphasize collaboration and criticism. The volume is a multilevel composition, extended with a leaf of tinted drawings of St Francis and St Dominic, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetia Merlini, and Geoffrey Brito’s verse anthology Felix ille. The Cirencester decorator’s integration of these contributions into the rest of the volume shows that the manuscript is a collaborative product, either the result of co-production at Cirencester or the result of an exchange with Malmesbury, reflecting the spirit of Geoffrey’s poems.