GIOVANNI DI PETERBOROUGH (JOHN OF PETERBOROUGH). — Author to whom the admirable Chronicon Petroburgense ab a. 654 ad a. C. 1368, contained in ms. Cotton Claudius A. 5, is usually attributed.
An annotation written there by a seventeenth-century hand attributes it to Johannes Abbas, without providing any reference. But there was no abbot at Peterborough by this name between John de Caleto (1250–63) and John Deeping, elected in 1408. Simon Patrick, who in 1686 edited the publication of Simon Gunton’s history of the Church of Peterborough, attributes authorship of the Chronicon to John de Caleto, although it cites a work that appeared after the death of this abbot. Joseph Sparke, in his Historiae anglicanae scriptores varii (1723), considers John Deeping its probable author. J. Leland (1552) regards it as probably the work of Johannes Abbas de Burgo; John Pitts (De illustribus Angliae scriptoribus, Paris 1619, p. 448) says that “Johannes Burgensis”
was a learned and pious Cluniac monk, flourishing ca. 1340. All these, too, seem to be conjectures. Casimir Oudin (Commentarius de Script. Eccles., III, Paris 1722, p. 1088), repeats Leland and Pitts. The Chronicon was reprinted in 1845 and 1849.