The Abbé Charles d'Orléans de Rothelin's MSS

The catalogue of the library of the Abbé Rothelin (1691-1746), printed in 1747 and used for his auction in 1749, is now available online through Google books.

M. Marion, 'Une bibliothèque ecclésiastique: les livres de l'abbé de Rothelin', Revue française d'histoire du livre, 56 (1987), pp. 201-11 states that only 27 items in the catalogue are pre-1500 MSS. Finding them among the more than 5000 lots would be tedious if it were not for an index at the back of the catalogue listing the lot numbers of MSS (including the post-medieval ones). Many are books of hours, but there are also non-religious texts such as the Roman de la Rose, Chronicles, etc.

Among the manuscripts are the Bible historiale illuminated by Jean de Bruges, presented by Jean Vaudetar to King Charles V, now in the Meermanno-Westreenianum Museum in The Hague, and the Sherborne Missal at the British Library:


A blog-post elsewhere provides a biography of the Abbé and usefully reproduces his bookplate:

Wikipedia: English book and MSS collectors

I have just noticed that Wikipedia has a category "English book and manuscript collectors".

Of course the entries are of variable quality, but that for Thomas Martin of Palgrave, for example, based on an out-of-copyright edition of the DNB,  is reasonably thorough and has a good bibliography.

Pecia.fr

The always-interesting Pecia blog has the beginnings of an investigation into a book of hours apparently once owned by a member of the Largez family:

Sur la piste d'un Livre d'heures à l'usage de l'abbaye Notre-Dame de Daoulas (Finistère)

It was more recently in the collection of  George Weare Braikenridge (1775-1856)  'perhaps the largest collector of general and local antiquities in the West of England', a catalogue of whose collection, containing a few books of hours, is online.

Unrecorded printed book from Oseney

A query on the very useful "can you help?" section of the CERL provenance website reveals a book from Oseney Abbey not recorded in MLGB:

The CUL incunabula provenance blog now has an RSS feed

Laura Nuvoloni, who is cataloguing the Cambridge University Library incunabula, has a very interesting occasional blog about her discoveries.

I used to visit sporadically in the hope of finding new posts, but there is now an RSS feed at the top of the page, so it is easy to subscribe to new posts and/or comments.

An unrecorded Bible from Norwich

In the Catalogue de la bibliothèque et des collections de feu Crosse, directeur du Journal de conchyliologie dont la vente aux enchères publiques ... du 20 au 30 novembre 1899 ... Paris, lot 27 on p. 32 is the following:

Guiffrey's sigla for the Duke de Berry's inventories

Going straight to an entry in the edited inventories of the Duke de Berry without reading the introduction can lead to some confusion.

Guiffrey's base-text (in his vol. I) is the manuscript completed on 31 January 1413 (nos. 1-1099), with additions made until the Duke's death in 1416 (nos. 1100-1251).

Following the main text of each entry he often adds in smaller type the manuscript's marginal additions. He also often refers to the equivalent item as recorded in the other inventories (in his vol. II): that of 1401-03 (the MSS being recorded in 1402); a list of gifts given to the Ste-Chapelle, Bourges from 1404-07; and the posthumous inventory of 1416-c.1418. There is usually also a valuation, expressed in "liv.[res] t.[ournois]":