Cuttings of Initials from the 'Pontigny Bible', II

The 1958 Alan Thomas description shown in the previous post records that the two initials were 'From the Hachette collection', in which they were described 'as being English'. Without this lead, we would not have been able to deduce that lot 48 in the 1953 Hachette sale [1] were cuttings from this bible, and without the Hachette description we would also not have known that there are potentially four such cuttings, not just two: 

 

One of the other two Hachette cuttings was doubtless this one, now at Harvard: 

 Houghton Library, MS Typ 315 [Source]

This was bequeathed in 1984 to the Houghton by Philip Hofer, who had bought it from Quaritch in 1956 (i.e. just a few years after the 1953 Hachette sale) [2]; it was no. 301 in the 1954 Quaritch catalogue cited in the previous post, with a reproduction:

A detail of it is also reproduced in colour in the 1869 Racinet plate with which we started the previous post: 

[detail]

The Racinet volume was published by the 'Librairie de Firmin Didot frères, fils et Cie', and the caption to Plate XXXIX, which reproduces our initials, tells us that they belonged to Ambroise Firmin Didot [3], and derive from the Abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés, Paris: 

I do not know what the basis was for this attribution, and unfortunately the situation is muddied by the fact that at least one, and perhaps two, of the other cuttings indicated by this caption cannot be from the same (French) Bible, because the image numbered '34', a large initial 'P', is obviously Italian: 

Another one, no. 35, is 12th-century French, but the style is somewhat different from the other initials:  

The situation is complicated still further by another similar cutting. In response to my previous post, Richard Linenthal got in touch and kindly shared several bits of relevant information, including the fact that he had catalogued another similar cutting from the Hachette collection in Quaritch's 1985 Bookhands II catalogue [4]:

In the next post [which will not be next weekend, as I will be in Rome] I will draw together what we have learned, and discuss the attribution of these cuttings to 'The Pontigny Bible'

Notes 

[1] Collection André Hachette: manuscrits du XII^e au XVI^e siècle, miniatures, imprimés des XV^e et XVI^e siècles, riches reliures armoriées [La vente aura lieu le mercredi 16 Décembre 1953] (Paris: Librairie Giraud-Badin, 1953).

[2] Laura Light, The Bible in the Twelfth Century: An Exhibition of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library (The Harvard College Library, 1988), no. 2 pp. 15-16 (ill. on p. 14).

[3] For MSS from his collection (apparently not including the present initials) see François Avril, ‘Les manuscrits de la collection d’Amboise Firmin-Didot’, in Les Didot: trois siècles de typographie & de bibliophilie, 1698-1998, ed. by André Jammes (Agence culturelle de Paris, 1998), pp. 91–103.

[4] Bernard Quaritch Ltd, Catalogue 1056: Medieval Manuscript Leaves with a Selection of Charters, Bookhands of the Middle Ages, Part II (London, 1985), no. 5