<p style='text-align: justify;'>Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 258 is a composite manuscript comprised of several originally separate parts created in England between the 12th and 15th centuries. Among the many and various texts in the manuscript are stories about Christian saints, texts on theology, confession and penance, Alexander the Great, natural history, Christian apocrypha, moral fables, penance, short poems, and brief medical recipes. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Among the many interesting features of Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 258 is its medieval binding: the volume does not have a typical medieval binding where the quires have been laced into hard boards covered with leather, limp-parchment or tawed skin, but instead has a home-made binding of an envelope of limp-parchment and linen stuffed with documents. The binding was constructed by taking a piece of semi-limp parchment a little more than twice the width of a leaf in the volume, laying it flat, placing several mid-15th century documents pasted together on top of the semi-limp parchment, then placing a piece of linen on top of the documents and sewing all three layers together with a linen thread. The three-layered cover was then folded in half (with the linen on the inside), and the quires were attached to the binding by <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(293);return false;'>stab-sewing through the full-thickness of the binding</a>. The sewing to close the fore edge of the rear cover came apart after the cover was finished and the various layers of the cover are now loose at the rear of the manuscript. Some of the <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(289);return false;'>documents that were pasted together</a> to line the cover have become separate in the intervening centuries and contain dating clauses for the reign of King Edward IV (reg. 1461-1470 and 1471-1483). The unusual format of the cover suggests that it may have been assembled by a former owner of the manuscript. A likely candidate for the former owner and binder is an otherwise unknown 'Goodwyn' who wrote his name on the <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(1);return false;'>outside of the front cover</a>, and the <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(285);return false;'>inside of the rear cover</a> and may have also written his name on the <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(2);return false;'>inside of the front cover</a> where it is rendered as 'Goodwin 1496' in what may actually be a slightly later hand.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Little is known about the provenance of the manuscript, since it does not appear in any records of the holdings of Pembroke College library before 1898. It may have arrived a little earlier than that, since an 1879 Pembroke College bookplate is found on the <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(2);return false;'>inside of the front cover</a>, but as bookplates were often used for several years after they were printed, the bookplate alone is not sufficient to establish an earlier date of acquisition. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Sarah Gilbert<br /> Project Cataloguer for the Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries Project<br /> Cambridge University Library</p>
