Otto Ege's 12th-Century Italian Gospel Lectionary

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Sotheby's currently have an online sale including more than thirty single leaves from Otto Ege manuscripts, including a leaf from his well-known 12th-century Italian Gospel Lectionary, shown above. I helped to catalogue the sale, giving me a reason to reconsider the parent manuscript, which I have not really thought about since a blogpost in 2015.

The main purpose of my 2015 post was to share a 1937 description of the manuscript before it was was disbound and dispersed, but I did not pursue this to its logical conclusion, to see how much we could deduce about its provenance and contents from the old description and available images.

Otto Ege's Copy of Thomas Aquinas on Peter Lombard's Sentences

 

One of the most easily recognisable manuscripts dispersed by Otto Ege was a copy of Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, Book I. Typical leaves look like the one above.

[The 1766 Rubempré sale, IV:] The Date of the Sale

I have written before about the tendency of those who write about manuscripts (including me) to treat auctions and auction catalogues as interchangeable, and the inaccuracies this may cause. The Rupempré auction provides a good example.

The 1766 Rubempré sale, III: Manuscripts from the Merode-Westerloo Collection

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Philippe-François de Merode (d.1742), 2nd Prince of Rubempré (shown above), and suggested that he acquired the illuminated Apocalypse that was later sold, in 1766, by his son, Maximilien-Leopold de Merode (1710-1769), 3rd Prince of Rubempré.

Of the other manuscripts in the 1766 Rubempré sale, at least one ought to be identifiable; lot 631 has a distinctive colophon at the end:

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"Liber Decretorum ... anno Nativitatis J. C. 1326 Ego R. Joglar complevi seu perfeci Deo juvante Librum Decretorum ..."