ABSTRACT
That the cult of the ‘new martyr St Thomas’ spread throughout Latin Christendom with remarkable rapidity in the twenty or so years following the murder in the cathedral is well known, and needs no repetition here, 1 but the picture is constantly being refined, as new manuscripts are discovered and known texts are subjected to new scrutiny. The earliest known copy of Benedict of Peterborough’s Mir acula sancti Thome, for example, survives not in an English transcription but in a dated manuscript (1185), copied in the Benedictine monastery of S. Mamede at Lorvão in northern Portugal. 2 At the time of its discovery, a second Portuguese sibling was identified in the Alcobaca fundo in Lisbon, which may have been copied in or for this, the principal Cistercian house in the kingdom; 3 and a third, from the Augustinian monastery of S. Cruz in Coimbra, survives in Porto. 4 In all three, the Miracula are accompanied by a short passio, which functioned as a set of readings for the office of Matins. Meanwhile, copies of both Benedict’s Miracula and the secundum opus miraculorum by William of Canterbury had been inserted into the great Lectionary in Clairvaux itself; 5 and the twelfth-century fragment of Benedict in London, British Library, Egerton MS 2818, derives from Pontigny. 6 From the same time frame survives an exceedingly interesting liturgical text, which was copied into a manuscript in the great imperial monastery of Stavelot-Malmédy in the last quarter of the twelfth century. Although the existence of the text has been noted both in the Analecta Hymnica and by Andrew Hughes, 7 there has been no historical discussion of the manuscript, the text, or its context.
