Samuel Fox, Menologium seu Calendarium Poeticum, ex Hickesiano Thesauro: Or, the Poetical Calendar of the Anglo-Saxons with an English Translation and Notes (London: William Pickering, 1830).
This is the first independent edition of the Old English calendar poem Menologium with the first English translation published in 1830. It also includes the Old English gnomic poem called Maxims II, which immediately follows the Menologium in the manuscript uniquely recording these poems, i.e. British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.i, or the C-manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The editor is Samuel Fox of Pembroke College, Oxford, who also published editions of the Metres of Boethius in 1835, and of the Old English Prose Boethius in 1864.
The exotic title, Menologium, has often been regarded as inappropriate for the Old English poem, since it is originally a term for a certain service-book of the Eastern Church, with which the poem has nothing to do. George Hickes used the term for the first time for the editio princeps of the work in his Thesaurus, yet he used it only secondarily, as in 'Calendarium seu Menologium Poeticum'. On the other hand, Fox, whose text is based on Hickes's with some corrections, modifications and errors, inverted the order as 'Menologium seu Calendarium Poeticum', and nearly all the later editors call it Menologium (Michael Lapidge seems to have been trying to make people avoid using it by promoting an alternative, 'The Old English Metrical Calendar', but it seems to have been in vain so far).
It seems that this copy has changed owners at least three times before coming into my possession. It has a bookplate of someone called Wilson Dobie Wilson (possibly a Scottish author, editor and traveller who lived between 1803-1838), who perhaps bought the copy in London on 9 April 1831. In 1925, the book came into possession of Walter Wilson Greg (1875-1959), a reputed independent Shakespeare scholar, and then came into possession of the library of King's College, London, from which it was withdrawn perhaps in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century.
Though not a book of special value, it is nice for me to have a copy of this quite rare book; I used it when I edited the poem, and I will need to use it again, since I am planning to prepare a new edition of Maxims II (together with Maxims I in the Exeter Book).
For more information about the Menologium, see my edition of the poem, The Old English Metrical Calendar (Menologium), Anglo-Saxon Texts 12 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015).
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