Thomas, Roman de Horn
England, c. 1170

University Library, Inc.5.E.2.2[2829], flyleaves
England?, early fourteenth century
Vellum, 198 x 133 mm (175 x 80 mm), 4 ff.

Thomas’s Roman de Horn is mentioned under the Chronicles, Stories, Myths theme. Despite the fact that the Thomas who authored the Horn wrote in Anglo-Norman like the Thomas who composed the Tristan, they are probably not the same individual. It has been argued, however, that Thomas de Kent, author of a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman romance about Alexander the Great, may have been the same Thomas who wrote the Roman de Horn. It must also be noted, though, that this is mere hypothesis and is not universally accepted.

Sometimes early printed books used folios of medieval manuscripts as flyleaves to protect the opening pages of the volume. Here, several leaves from a Horn manuscript have been bound in with a copy of Denis the Carthusian’s Quatuor novissimus, a theological treatise which has no relationship with the Horn story. These flyleaves contain the very end of the Horn.

This item was bought at Sotheby’s for the University Library by F. J. H. Jenkinson in 1897.