This website provides Open Access research materials from Walter Bower's Scotichronicon, a major work of Scottish historiography written at Inchcolm Abbey during the last decade of Bower's long tenure (1418-49) as abbot of its community of Augustinian canons.

The text is a revised edition of 89 chapters from the critical edition published by D.E.R. Watt et al. through Aberdeen University Press (1987-98). The primary purpose of this open access resource is to document Bower's reception of Thomas of Ireland's Manipulus florum (1306), an influential collection of authoritative Latin quotations that I have edited for The Electronic Manipulus florum Project, but it also serves as an addenda/corrigenda for Watt's edition in other ways, and so includes some quotations that Bower may not have derived from Manipulus.

This website provides revised editions of relevant chapters from Libri 2-4, 5 & 6, 7 & 8, 9 & 10, 11 & 12, 13 & 14, and 15 & 16; Liber 1 has no quotations from Manipulus florum.

My 2019 article in The Innes Review, which announces the launch of this website, notes that John of Fordun also made use of this florilegium in composing Chronica gentis Scotorum (c. 1360), a major source for Bower's Scotichronicon. There are three cases in which Fordun surely derived quotations from a copy of Manipulus florum and Bower perpetuated them: Milicia p, Liberalitas p & Liberalitas af.

Because Bower's use of Manipulus was unknown to Watt and his colleagues, this discovery has significant implications for the critical edition of this text, as many of the quotations derived from Manipulus were not found by Watt and his colleagues, some were misidentified, and in several cases the textual variants from the original source were attributed to Bower's agency rather than his intermediate source. Moreover, there are many instances in which Bower incorporated quotations into his text without indicating them as such, so Watt and his colleagues didn't realize that they are actually quotations.

The 125 passages that correspond to a quotation in Manipulus are indicated with red font and linked to PDF apparatus files which provide the passage from Scotichronicon together with the relevant entry from Manipulus in parallel columns for ease of comparison, as well as the passage from the original source/sources, and in some cases the intermediate source that Thomas of Ireland used. However, there are some cases in which the passage in the Scotichronicon, the Manipulus and the original source are identical; for example, a quotation from Gregory the Great that appears in Scotichronicon 12.39 (vol.6, p.412, ll.18-20) is also designated as Fortitudo l in Manipulus florum. Such cases have only been included if they were misidentified or not found by Watt and his associates, which is not so in this case.

Digital OCR scanning of Watt's Latin edition was carried out in the Fall of 2015 by Veronica Parkes, an undergraduate student in Medieval Studies and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, working under an internal research grant, but I have transcribed Latin passages in the notes myself, and proofread and corrected all texts as well. Bower's reception of Thomas of Ireland's florilegium was then determined by using the Janus intertextuality search engine for the online edition of Manipulus florum.