Brotherton Collection MS 501, in Leeds University Library, is a fifteenth-century
anthology of Middle English religious verse and prose, best known for the Prick of
Conscience with which it begins. It received its first proper description in 1952,'
and it has recently been described in detail by Ralph Hanna (1982) and N. R. Ker
(1983).2 Nevertheless the published descriptions are unsatisfactory in one way or
another, and the manuscript's special character has not been brought out
