A Scattered Missal Written by Laurentius

Vassar College, Leaf 58

For the past few years I have been working on a catalogue of the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at Vassar College, due to be published early next year. It has been the spur to many of my investigations into the trade in single leaves in the US in the 20th century, including those sold by Dawson's Book Shop, discussed in a few previous posts (e.g. here). Just before I submitted the first draft of my text, I made a satisfying provenance discovery, concerning the Missal leaf shown above.

By trawling my images downloaded from US websites, and taken by me on visits to various US collections, I have found more than a dozen more leaves from the same manuscript, now at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the Claremont Colleges, Tufts University, Stanford University, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Apart from the overall appearance of the page, with two columns of 30 lines and well-proportioned margins, the most immediately distinctive feature of the manuscript is the contemporary foliation in red ink roman numerals to the right of the top line of text. Such foliation is not unique to this manuscript, but it is a quick way of finding images, whose script can then be compared with that of the Vassar leaf to confirm or reject the provisional identification.

 

 

 

The Vassar leaf has only one two-line rubric and one two-line flourished initial, but the other leaves show us that the two-line initials alternate, as we would expect, between blue and red with flourishing in the opposite colour:

One other leaf has a three-line puzzle initial:

and two have a painted foliate initial:

 

None of the text that I have found is distinctive or offers any clues as to the date or place where the manuscript was made. I was therefore pleased to realise that a leaf I had seen and photographed in 2014 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is apparently the final leaf of the parent manuscript (as it is foliated with a high number, 308, and is blank on the verso), and has a scribal colophon:

 

 

folio "cccviii"

 

"Laurentius me fecit"

Having found the colophon on fol. 308, Google Books enabled me to find a description of the intact manuscript described in a Frankfurt bookseller's catalogue from 1881:

I do not yet know about intermediate owners during the next 60 years, until Dawson’s Book Shop offered leaves in their Catalogue no. 158: The Written Word Through Forty Centuries (October 1941), nos. 51 and 52, priced $3.00 for leaves with painted initials and $1.00 for leaves without them:

The Vassar leaf (which does not have a painted initial), was acquired from Dawson's two months later, in Dec[ember], for [$]1, as recorded in pencil in the lower margin: