Illustrating Brendan’s Adventures: Chartusian Readers and the "Navigatio sancti Brendani"

In the fifteenth century the Carthusian monastery at Mainz owned many manuscripts of the "Navigatio Sancti Brendani"; in two of them (now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud. misc. 173 and Laud. misc. 44) the text is illustrated with vivacious marginal drawings, drawn by a reader in the first of these, and reproduced in the second. After clarifying the relation between the manuscripts, the paper discusses this double series of drawings as evidence of readers’ response to wonderful and entertaining aspects of the tale. Both the contamination, prompted by textual concerns and extended to the drawings, and the illustrations themselves, give insight into scribal practices in Carthusian libraries.