Ege Leaves at Occidental College

The Ege leaves in the Occidental College collection include:

• Psalter; France, mid-13th century
• Gwara HL10
• Psalms 119:136-154
• Apparently with a pencil folio number "14"
• de Ricci, Census, II, p.1938–9, no.12, tells us that Ege had bought the manuscript in 1922 from Adler, Munich, and that before disbinding it it had only 82 leaves, containing Pss.70-150 and canticles, misbound.
• Despite being correctly attributed to France by de Ricci, Ege attributed it to Germany

Robert Ormes Dougan Leaves at Occidental College

Most of the medieval manuscript leaves in the Library's Special Collections at Occidental College were given by Robert Ormes Dougan (1904-1999), and have his bookplate on the mount:

The curious legend "London - Perth - Dublin - San Marino" is explained by his obituaries in The Independent [of London] and the LA Times: of Scots origins (the landscape on the bookplate is presumably Scottish), he attended university in London; after WWII he was the city Librarian of Perth (Scotland); in the early 1950s he became deputy Librarian of Trinity College, Dublin; and in the late 1950s he moved to the US and spent the last part of his career at the Huntington Library, San Marino.

The leaves he gave to Occidental each have a typescript description which ends with a price-code, usually typed, but in one case added in ink:

Description with price-code "mxd" added in blue ink in the lower right corner

Description with price-code "uma" in the lower right corner

Is it possible to crack the code?

Otto Ege and other leaves at UC Santa Barbara

The University of California at Santa Barbara (actually a few miles west of Santa Barbara, near Goleta) has a small but interesting collection of medieval manuscripts in their library's Special Collections department, including a Reims Book of Hours and three Bibles, which will be the subjects of future posts. 

The campus is right on the coast, making it a doubly nice place to visit:

They also have a varied collection of leaves and fragments, some illuminated. Some, but not all, were described by Christine Rose, "Medieval MS Fragments at UCSB Library", Soundings: Collections of the University Library, vol.XVIII, no.24 (1987), pp.35-59. A listing of the majority of the leaves and fragments is available online and as a PDF from here.

The most handsome leaf has an historiated initial: it shows a sainted bishop (St Clement) kneeling on (green) ground, praying to and being blessed by the Hand of God in heaven, some laymen behind him, and in front of him a sheep or lamb standing on a blue rock, with a stream of water flowing from near its raised fore-leg:

Ege Leaves at the Paris Book Fair

The Salon internationale du livre ancien, Paris, is currently underway in the impressive setting of the Grand Palais.

Among several dealers offering medieval manuscripts, Giuseppe Solmi has a significant number of leaves and fragments, many of them formerly used in bindings, but also some cut from books. Among these were at least two ex-Ege MSS.

One is the Thomas Aquinas on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book I, mentioned in the previous post and HL40 in the Gwara Handlist, here with a part of Quaest.1, art.1: "competit. Praeterea nihil quod pluralitatem ... cuiuslibet de ratione horum":

There is a description on the seller's website.

The other is the Aurora, Gwara HL7, also mentioned in the previous post:

Description on the seller's website.

Otto Ege Leaves at UCLA

In Scott Gwara's recent book on Otto Ege's manuscripts, he lists a single leaf at the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA, which comes from the manuscript that is HL1 in his Handlist (and FOL1, i.e. no.1 in the Fifty Original Leaves ... portfolios).

UCLA, Charles E. Young Research Library

He had not visited the Library (he helpfully lists as his Appendix IX the "Collections Consulted in the Preparation of the Handlist"), and presumably knew of the one leaf only from the published catalogue: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the University of California, Los Angeles, compiled by Mirella Ferrari and edited by R.H. Rouse (1991), in which it appears with its Ege provenance.

In fact there are four other previously unrecognised ex-Ege leaves in this catalogue, plus at least one more at UCLA. In Gwara Handlist order, they are: