Evidence for Transposition Errors Affecting the Text of Gildas’s De Excidio

Scholarly consensus maintains that the British writer Gildas was effectively ignorant of fifth-century events and therefore had no idea where to properly fit the famous passage known as the gemitus Britannorum into his quasi-historical diatribe. This study found that the four distinct groupings of twenty-three, twenty-three, twenty, and twenty-two words that comprise the passage are actually palaeographical evidence of a loose bifolium. By determining the format of the autograph, it will be shown that textual corruption occurred during transmission due to factors both primary (loose folia in the exemplar) and secondary (copyist innovation). This paper also offers a proposed textual reconstruction of the displaced segment, which shall greatly affect our both our appreciation of Gildas and our ability to use his narrative as a reliable historical source.