Gillyatt Sumner, John Mozley Stark, and Manuscripts from Erfurt

'G. Sumner, Woodmansey, 1856.'
[Source]

In the previous post we saw that a manuscript from Erfurt appeared, like many Erfurt MSS, in the 1836 von Bülow sale, before finding its way to Gillyatt Sumner. Both previous blogposts have images of Sumner's ownership inscriptions at the top, and both are dated 1856. Another manuscript, now in Paris, also has an ownership inscription dated 1856, shown above.

These three inscriptions are not exceptional. Of the manuscripts in the Sumner auction catalogue of which I have traced descriptions or digitisation, here are the dates of their ownership inscriptions:

1854: lot  543
1855: lots 528, 530, 533, 537, 562, 578
1856: lots 524, 527, 531, 595
1857: lots 522, 548

Of these 13 MSS, therefore, he bought one in 1854, six in 1855, four in 1856, and two in 1857. 

The outliers in terms of acquisition-date are not Erfurt manuscripts: lot 566 was bought in 1846, and lot 550 has an inscription recording that:

'This manuscript was purchased in 1839, by 
Gillyatt Sumner, Woodmansey, of the 
Reverend Mr. Render, Minister of the 
Catholic Chapel in Kingston upon Hull':

[Source]

Sumner's home in Woodmansey (slightly south-east of Beverley) was only about 6 miles, less than 10km, away from the Catholic Chapel in (Kingston-upon-) Hull: 

Sumner's proximity to Hull is relevant. In his description of Chichester Cathedral, MS Med. 3, an Erfurt-Bülow-Sumner manuscript, Neil Ker laconically states that this was 'Item 45 at £1. 5s. in Stark's cat. 5 (1855)' [1]. A bit of digging reveals that this is a reference to John Mozley Stark, Catalogue No. V: A Catalogue of Ancient Manuscripts [...] on Vellum and Paper, Chiefly from the Carthusian Monastery at Erfurt, in Germany [...] (Hull, 1855). 

This rare catalogue is apparently not available online, but there is a copy at the Bodleian: 

It contains 81 numbered items, and the verso of the title-page has the following Notice:

In the following collection, nearly every volume bears its ancient owners' mark, 
"Liber sancti Petri in Erffordia."
or, "Iste liber pertinet ad Carthusian. Erffordia." 

The Bodleian manuscript that we looked at last week, a copy of Herolt's Sermones Discipuli de Tempore, is doubtless item 56 in this 1855 catalogue:

It is very probable that Sumner bought all his Efurt manuscripts from Stark. He may have bought a few of them before the 1855 catalogue was published (we saw above that he acquired at least one in 1854), others in the year of publication, and some more the following years (by which time Stark may have been willing to reduce the prices of unsold items, or Sumner may have had access to further funds). 

In due course I will add Stark references to my list of Sumner MSS here. This will doubtless fill gaps in the provenances of many Erfurt manuscripts, because the Stark catalogue was apparently not consulted by previous scholars for their publications, including:

• Matthias Eifler, Die Bibliothek des Erfurter Petersklosters im späten Mittelalter (Böhlau Verlag, 2017)
• Balázs József Nemes, Bibliotheca Cartusiae Erfordiensis: Dokumentation über den überlieferten Buchbestand der Erfurter Kartause, 3., korrigierte und erweiterte Version (2022), available online from here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries II: Abbotsford – Keele (Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 393.