A Gillyatt Sumner Manuscript at the Bodleian

'G. Sumner, Woodmansey, 1856'

Although I had first taken an interest in Gillyatt Sumner and his medieval manuscripts in 2018 (see previous blogpost), my interest lay dormant until a few years later when, during the Covid pandemic, I was employed for a period of lockdown to catalogue (at home, from digitized images) a number of Bodleian manuscripts, including Dep. c. 630, a copy of Johannes Herolt, Sermones discipuli, which had belonged to Sumner. (The resulting description and the digitisation can be found here, from which the image above is taken).

This was one of the easier manuscripts to catalogue, because a detailed description had already been published by Neil Ker and Alan Piper in 1992 [1]. They transcribe the ownership note of the Carthusian monastery of St Salvator, Erfurt, on the front pastedown:

'Volumen hoc pertinet ad domum Salvatoris ordinis Carthusiensis prope 
Erfordiam a domino Iodoco Cristen anno noviciatus sui 1465 
eidem intestatus traditus'.

In this we are told that it was given in 1465 by Jodocus Cristen, of Smoll; and from a colophon we learn that he wrote (or at least compiled) it in 1462:

'Et sic est finis huius libri 
intitulat' discipulus compi-
latus per me Iodoc. Cristen 
Sub anno domini Mº4[ . ]6 [...]'
[Source]

In their typically laconic manner, the Ker & Piper catalogue tells us that the manuscript was 'Lot 126 in the Bülow sale'. The reader is expected to know that many manuscripts from Erfurt were in the collection of Friedrich Gottlieb Julius von Bülow (1760–?1831), and sold in the Bibliotheca Büloviana [...] Sammlung von Büchern und Handschriften [...] Dritter Teil (Handschriften), Sangerhausen, 10 October 1836, in which the Bodleian MS is indeed lot 126:

Jodocus Cristen appears several other times in the Bülow catalogue, e.g. lots 89, 149, and 155:

 

He is fairly well documented, as he was elected abbot of the Erfurt Charterhouse in 1477, and then in 1479 first Prior of Martinstal Charterhouse, near Crimmitschau in Saxony.

Returning to the Bodleian manuscript. Ker & Piper record that it was lot 12 in the Sumner sale; this is an uncharacteristic error; it was in fact lot 527:

The previous lot, lot 526, was also doubtless from Erfurt:

In the next post I will explore how Sumner acquired these (and other) Erfurt manuscripts.

 

 

[1]  N. R. Ker and A. J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, IV: Paisley – York (Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 325-28.