The "Tain," which survives in three manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries, concerns a conflict between Connaught and Ulster, Ireland's western and northern provinces.
Only when I quoted this – from the art critic John Ruskin – did she respond: "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
Another work often attributed to Baldwin, the Ad laudem Bartholomaei Exoniensis episcopi de coloribus rhetoricis, survives in three manuscripts and a fragment of a fourth.
Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787, and between then and 1793 she wrote a large body of material that has survived in three manuscript notebooks: Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third.
Consequently, there are some 140 different manuscript versions of the text in three manuscript groups, in a dozen different languages and dialects an immensely complex and controversial body of material representing one of the most obdurate philological problems inherited from the Middle Ages.
The most famous collection is a manuscript, the Cantigas de Santa María, compiled by King Alfonso X the Wise of Castile and Leon in the second half of the century and preserved in three manuscript copies at the library of El Escorial, northwest of Madrid, the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.
Anglo-Saxon poetry survives almost entirely in four manuscripts.
Theobald's lyrics, with their music, have survived in six manuscripts.
Most Old English poetry is preserved in four manuscripts of the late 10th and early 11th centuries.
The text, containing more than 11,000 lines of verse, has been preserved in five manuscripts, which are kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Eng.; the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., U.S.; and the British Museum, London.
They are addressed in eighteen manuscripts, briefly discussed below.
