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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:
I am very aware that there are many people who are not on Twitter, and are therefore not up-to-date with the recent revelations in this ongoing saga. I have not posted anything new here since 29 December, partly because the minutiae may not interest most people, and partly because it would be too time-consuming to report everything that has happened.
But it seems worth writing a new post now, because of an article published online yesterday by Peter Burger, of the Dutch fact-checking website 'News Checkers' , based at Leiden University (nieuwscheckers.nl). It is in Dutch, but Google Translate and Deepl both do a very good job of translating it into English (and, I assume, other languages).
I recommend that you read the whole article, but the "headline" revelation is that a 40-page article about Michelangelo's poetry, published in 2017 by Rossi in an online Journal of which she was "Editor in Chief", and re-distributed by her as her own work on her university website, her Academia.edu page, and her Researchgate page, is very largely copied from an article published in 2004 by Matteo Residori, an Italian scholar writing in French, now of the Sorbonne Nouvelle University.
According to the Dutch analysis, 77% of Rossi's 2017 text came from Residori's 2004 publication, and another 6% from a French scholar's work, published in 2007.
In response to this revelation, Rossi published on her Academia.edu page an image, supposedly showing an earlier version of the Michelangelo article, in which due credit is given to Residori (in red) and her own name does not appear:
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| [Source (archived copy)] |
Needless to say, she does not cite her source for this image. Even if it does come from an earlier version of her original online publication, this does not change the fact that Residori's work is not acknowledged in this way in any of the other archived versions of the online publication, which all look like this:
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| [Source] |
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"Qualques [sic] imbéciles, dans sa chasse aux sorcières lancée par Peter Kidd et poursuivie par des crétins sur Twitter, a cru trouver un plagiat dans cet article, auquel manque l'en-tête paru dans le magazine."
[6 Jan. 2023: Google deleted the previous version of this page, so I have removed the parts that were presumably the source of a complaint, and tried to tidy it up in other ways. The old version is archived online elsewhere]
