Computus, Crusade, and Construction: Writing England’s Monastic Past and Future in Oxford, St John’s College, MS 17

Oxford, St John’s College, MS 17 is an elegant computus anthology created at Thorney Abbey in Cambridgeshire between about 1100 and 1110. Its content, for the most part, follows a classic template. However, two features offer clues about the motivation behind its production. Contemporary annals in the Paschal tables describe how Thorney Abbey church was being rebuilt during a period of danger and tumult. Its survival and renewal were epitomized by the solemn translation of its Anglo-Saxon relics and the simultaneous arrival of new relics from the East. The manuscript also contains a mappamundi of a distinctively crusading character, but which positions England as entering the orbis terrarum from without. This exceptional manuscript, at once so conservative and so contemporary, reveals how the ‘monastic spiritual encyclopedia’ could be deployed to ‘write England’ at the turn of the twelfth century.