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| 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).
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.
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:
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).
[Update, 10pm, 19 Feb. 2023:]Another article has been published, in the Tages-Anzeiger, but itis 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
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:
