The images we looked at in the previous blog from Arthur Lauria's 1955 catalogue of Manuscrits, incubables, livres rares, reliures, has a couple more images of the interior of his premises. One shows an open doorway in the corner of a room, shown above, through which can be seen parts of three framed manuscript leaves hanging on a wall:
In early November I watched an online presentation in which Agata Gazzillo briefly showed the image above [1]; I had a sense of recognition, so I took a quick snap with my phone.
Thanks to the caption, it was easy to track down the source: A. Racinet, L’ornement polychrome: cent planches en couleurs, or et argent, contenant environ 2,000 motifs de tous les styles, art ancien et asiatique, moyen âge, renaissance, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1869 [and later editions]), pl. 39.
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| '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.
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| '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).
In 2018 Mitch Fraas contacted me with a query, explaining that,
"I found myself down a rabbit hole looking for more on an English collector named Gillyatt Sumner (d. 1877). I wonder if you've run across him before? De Ricci gives him (as G. Sumner) as the provenance of two mss. one at Houghton (Ms. Lat 27) and another at LC (Ms. Ac. 271 - De Ricci vol. 1, p184, no.17). Likewise, Ker gives him in the provenance of about a dozen entries [recorded in the Schoenberg Database]"
I could not remember having seen the name before, but a bit of Googling produced a startling hit:
CHARGE OF SODOMY. – Gillyatt Sumner, an old man with white hair, who has resided at Woodmancy, near Beverley, and a young man named Crabtree, from Bradford, were charged with committing sodomy. The charge was made by a boilermaker in the employ of Messrs Samuelsons, named Jones. Holgate, who with prisoners and some others, had occupied beds on Wednesday night in a room at the Regatta Tavern, High-street, with several witnesses were examined, and the case was adjourned until to-morrow (Friday).
(The Hull Packet and East Riding Times; issue 3989.) [1]
Among the bibles broken up by Otto Ege and/or Philip Duschnes is one often called the bible of 'Mirmellus Arnandi' (of which an example is shown above), produced in Paris c. 1300. Leaves were no. 14 in the famous Ege portfolio of Fifty Original Leaves.
The bible derives its name from the description of a cache of 210 of leaves sold at Sotheby's, 11 December 1984, lot 39: some of the leaves have erased inscriptions in formal gothic script the lower margin, and from those that remain partially legible, Christopher de Hamel concluded that the bible was 'Bequeathed to a Dominican Convent in 1450 by Mirmellus Arnandi, lawyer and judge', e.g. 'Ego mirmelus [sic] arnandi legum doctor et [...] Judex' on the leaf with the beginning of the book of Nahum.
A couple of weeks ago I looked at two early 16th-century Flemish miniatures from the Stroganoff Collection. In a blogpost in 2017 (with a postscript a week later) I identified a cutting from an early 14th-century Italian Antiphonary illuminated by the Master of the Brussels Initials, as being from the collection, and five years later, in 2022 I showed that other cuttings from the same manuscript were also probably once in his collection. I can add one more to the group.
The collection of illuminations (not to mention his complete codices, printed graphic arts, etc.) of Victor Goldschmidt [Wikipedia], of Heidelberg (shown above) is not well known. Perhaps the best known item in it was a miniature of St Gregory the Great, from an 11th-century Moralia in Job, which was published by Rosy Schilling, with a Foreword by Georg Swarzenski, Die illuminierten Handschriften und Einzelminiaturen des Mittelalters und Renaissance in Frankfurter Besitz (Joseph Baer, 1929) [PDF here], p. 3 no. 3 and Taf. IV, and is now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:
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| [Source] |
"Someone" has -- very tediously -- persuaded Google to remove (for a second time) my most recent blogpost. So let's just replace it with this (click the image to enlarge it):
The irony is delicious :-)
On the left is a book-review published in 2012; on the right, one of several editions of The Book of Hours of Louis De Roucy:
I have just encountered, for the first time, this letter from Sydney Cockerell [Wikipedia] to the Editor of the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 30 no. 169 (April 1917), p. 154 [click the images to enlarge them]:
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| This and the following images are used Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (CC-BY-NC-ND) |
Interesting manuscripts can be found in unexpected places. At the CULTIVATE MSS conference in London a year ago [PDF programme], there was a presentation about the collection of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust [Wikipedia], which was interesting but had very little to do with medieval manuscripts. One partly-medieval volume was mentioned and very briefly shown on screen, however, and after several months of emailing I was eventually able to get a complete set of images of the relevant part of it. One detail is shown above.
Anyone who has ever attempted to describe a manuscript will have faced the issue of terminology for describing script. Over the course of the last 75 years numerous books and articles have been written, and conferences held [1], discussing the issue, and yet we have still not arrived at any real consensus.
I think that two main drivers lay behind these publications and conferences, especially the earlier ones. One was to try to make palaeography more "scientific" (with implications of reliability and accuracy), and the other was to compensate for a lack of reproductions. It seems to me that the former was somewhat misguided [2], and the latter is now outdated [3].
If a series of Books of Hours are described as being mid 15th-century French, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Italian, then the knowledgeable reader will have a very good idea of what the script of each of them looks like, and how they differ from one another, without a formal description of their script. The same goes for an 11th-century biblical text, a 12th-century patristic text, a 13th-century academic text, a 14th-century legal text, a 15th-century Humanistic one, and so on. The date and place of origin, plus the type of text, is usually enough to indicate in general terms what the script looks like. No amount of description can ever convey its precise appearance – any attempt to do so is at best futile, and at worst misleading [4].
In March last year ago I wrote a blogpost about the minor (i.e. small foliate, not historiated) initials cut from the Murano Gradual. For a long time I had been very sceptical that they were indeed from the Murano Gradual -- because their style was so unlike the style of the minor initials that occur on the back of a few of the cuttings of historiated initials -- but when I eventually took the time to look closely at their script and musical notation, the relationship became plain.
I therefore compiled a list of all the Murano Gradual's minor initials known to me: my hope is that, one day, someone will be able to emulate the exercise of reconstruction done by Margaret Rickert in the 1930s ("Fragmentology" is not a new field of study!), which resulted in three publications:
Margaret Rickert, ‘The Reconstruction of an English Carmelite Missal’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, vol. 67 no. 390 (Sept. 1935), pp. 99-113 (available to those with access to JSTOR here)
Margaret Rickert, ‘The Reconstruction of an English Carmelite Missal’, Speculum, XVI no. 1 (1941), pp. 92-102, pls. I-V (available to those with access to JSTOR here)
Margaret Rickert, The Reconstructed Carmelite Missal: An English Manuscript of the Late XIV Century in the British Museum (Additional 29704-5, 44892) (London: Faber & Faber, 1952)
It is a masterclass of reconstruction. Not only did she work out the original sequence of the major, historiated initials (a comparatively straighforward task), but was also able, astonishingly, through a painstaking examination of the tiny portions of text preserved on their backs, to put hundreds of the small, minor, initials into their relevant places:
A miniature in the Wildenstein collection (shown above), the largest surviving work by the Master of the Murano Gradual, has usually been identified as depicting "Mission to the Apostles". In a previous blogpost, I suggested that the subject is instead The Selection of St Matthias (as an apostle, to replace Judas).
Even if my suggestion is correct [1], there is still an oustanding puzzle about the miniature: it appears above a single line of text and music, and the text consists of a single word "INCLITUS":
No one has ever been able to identify the text this comes from.
I have just noticed that Forum Auctions have a calendar in a forthcoming sale (28 September, 2023, lot 24), with a short description and a two-page opening reproduced in the online catalogue (shown above).
The description tells us that it is a six-leaf quire, bound in "19th century vellum-backed marbled boards", which suggests it was removed from its parent manuscript at least a century ago.
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| [click to enlarge] [source] |
One of the reasons my previous post may be significant is that it demonstrates that von Scherling kept issuing catalogues of medieval manuscripts during the hiatus between vol. III (1933) and vol. IV (1937) of his Rotulus series.
