Saturday, 27 May 2023

Otto Ege's Terence: An Addendum


Last weekend I posted about Otto Ege's manuscript of Terence's Comedies. I reproduced at the top of the page an image of a leaf in a private collection in California that I was able to examine a few weeks ago, thanks to the very kind hospitality of the owner. After he read my post, he contacted me to tactfully draw my attention to the fact that I seemed to have made an oversight.

Sunday, 21 May 2023

Otto Ege's Terence

 

Private collection, California

Leaves from some of Otto Ege's manuscripts are very easily recognised. He did not sell many leaves of manuscripts written in Humanistic script, for example, and among these, his copy of Terence's Comedies is distinctive (an example is shown above).

Sunday, 23 April 2023

A Czech Antiphonal Leaf Dated 1576

On a visit to the Houghton Library in 2018 I went through a box of miscellaneous single leaves, containing all sorts of interesting items. One is a Czech Antiphonal leaf, of which a detail is shown above.

Saturday, 8 April 2023

A 13th-Century Peter Lombard now in Liverpool

This week's post is really just a series of observations, followed by a puzzle to which I hope a reader might be able to offer a solution.

Some months ago I went to Liverpool, and among the manuscripts I wanted to see was a very fine copy of Peter Lombard's Gloss on the Psalms, produced probably in Oxford in the early 13th century. It is well known, having been catalogued by George Warner when owned by Dyson Perrins, and having been included in Nigel Morgan's Survey of Early Gothic English Illumination [1].

It is an extremely handsome volume, with wide margins, as can be seen in the image above; here is a close-up of one of the historiated initial:

 

Saturday, 25 February 2023

The "De Roucy" Hours?: An Addendum

Last weekend I asked Ellie Jackson, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, for a copy of an article she published last year, and she kindly sent me a PDF: 

Eleanor Jackson, ‘Pursuing the Percys: The Original Owners of the Percy Psalter-Hours’, Journal of Medieval History, 48.4 (2022), 524–45

It concerns a late 13th-century Psalter-Hours that I examined nearly 25 years ago when it was in a private collection; it was acquired by the BL in 2019. By coincidence, one of the things it addresses is so relevant to the blog I wrote a few weeks ago about the heraldic arms in the so-called "de Roucy" Hours, that I thought it would be worth writing this brief addendum to that post. (If you have not already read it, I suggest you do so before continuing here).

Sunday, 19 February 2023

#ReceptioGate: Recent News

I hope to get back to my normal blogging about manuscripts soon, but I have been dealing with (a) some (hardcopy) publications deadlines and (b) some more legal threats from Prof. Rossi's lawyers in Rome and London.

So, for those of you not on Twitter, I will simply bring you up to date with the news that there have been three publications in the past couple of days.

On Friday, the Nieuwscheckers.nl fact-checking site based at the University of Leiden published two new reports. They are in Dutch, so I use Google Translate for the following extracts.

The first, under the headline "RECEPTIOgate: Book about the persecution of the Jews also contains cut and paste work without a source", demonstrates and meticulously documents extensive copying, without adequate citation or use of quotation-marks, from the published and unpublished work of others.

The second, with the title "Rose is a rose is a rose: the art of Carla Rossi", shows how Rossi, working under her alter ego (or heteronym as she prefers to call him), "Lev Matvej Loewenthal", has copied paintings by the Italian artist Silvia Molinari, and offered them for sale. It is well worth visiting this page to see the animations that demonstrate the near-identical details of some Molinari and Rossi paintings.

Finally, the German-language Swiss newspaper "Blick" (which according to Wikipedia is "the most read paid newspaper in Switzerland") has today published a brief report of the ReceptioGate affair:


Rossi has repeatedly tried to frame the scandal as the hateful ramblings of a single blogger (motivated either by envy for her greater accomplishments, or by involvement in the "illicit trafficking" in dismembered manuscripts, which she has heroically exposed) and has sent legal threats to at least five other people and organisations who have taken my side (none of which, so far, have been shown to have any merit). I am therefore grateful to the journalists -- especially Peter Burger, author of the Nieuwscheckers articles -- who have helped spread the story beyond the confines of Twitter.

[Update, 10pm, 19 Feb. 2023:]
Another article has been published, in the Tages-Anzeiger, but it is behind a paywall, requires registration, so for the time being you will need to register an account if you want to read it in full. (If you prefer not to register, I imagine it will be shared in full online fairly soon).
One of its main revelations for me is that it perhaps explains the timing of a series of messages I received on 17 January, stating that Rossi had killed herself. Similar messages were sent to the journalist who had given her a deadline the next day for responding to his questions. (Of course she had not killed herself, as we know because she has been changing the status of her UK-registered company, and sending legal threats, since then). 

https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ploetzlich-heisst-es-sie-sei-tot-880980438270 


Here again are the links to the other three articles:





Sunday, 22 January 2023

The "De Roucy" Hours?

In The Book of Hours of Louis De Roucy (RECEPTIO Academic Press, 2022), Prof. Rossi writes:

"What is noticeable in this manuscript, apart from the constant presence of owls in the borders, is the heraldic shield of its first owner. It appears with an unusual insistence, on average every ten pages, at least six times in the retrieved leaves, depicting a blue lion on a field of gold, Or a lion azure armed and langued gules (Fig. 8 et seq.)" (p. 22):

Figs. 8a-8f reproduce these six shields:

But in my blogpost here, I described the background as silver (argent) not gold (or), and note examples of French families that bore these arms:

I also provided a close-up detail of one example from the manuscript: