Bible Leaves in Philadelphia, London, and Paris

I have recently become more interested in large Bibles. (Small ones may of course be very interesting, too, but they can be very fiddly to handle, often involve a lot of page-turning and eye-strain for very little reward, and if they are not in an institutional collection they are often unfoliated (or incorrectly foliated), which makes them difficult to describe and collate).

The 13th-Century Bibles from Norwich

Almost exactly four years ago I posted a reference to an unidentified Bible from Norwich Cathedral, which I found in an 1899 auction catalogue:

In the process of making additions to the new edition of N.R. Ker's Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (about which there will be a future blogpost) I realised that "Clingham" (which I had not been able to identify, and does not appear to be a place-name), must be a mis-reading of "Elingham". Ellingham is about 15 miles south-east of Norwich:

More About the Bible of Louis de Harcourt, Vol.II

I recently visited Houghton Library at Harvard and was able to see MS Typ 239, discussed in a previous post. I am now able to show colour images of features which I could previously only show in black and white, or not at all. First, here is the ownership inscription of Louis de Harcourt:

Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library,
Harvard University, MS. Typ 239, fol. 335v

Yet More About the Cuttings From the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona

In a recent post I discussed some of the missing cuttings of the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona, known only from old photographs.

Within a few days of that post Bill Stoneman, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard, identified for me the present whereabouts of one of the initials I had discussed; and just a few days after that Geneviève Mariéthoz sent me news that two more cuttings have been acquired by the Bibliothèque municipale in Angers.

A Parchment Hole Used by an Artist (Midweek Miscellany 2)

This really has nothing to do with provenance, but it's too good not to share.

This drawing ...

Detail, recto

... appears in the lower margin of the huge (c.530×370mm) Clumber Bible (France, c.1395):

Full-page view

Detail, verso

The most detailed published description of the manuscript is: Sam Fogg, Illuminated Manuscripts: An Exhibition at the Blumka Gallery, New York (London, 1999), no.12 pp.44–49.

Cuttings from a 13th-Century Royal Spanish Bible

A week ago I visited the current exhibition of manuscripts at Lille. It was mostly very unimpressive, with low-quality objects displayed in a bizarre setting. But it did have a few high-quality items, notably the two surviving full-page miniatures of the Liessies Gospels.

One other item especially caught my eye: a framed group of 13 cuttings from a Bible, owned by the Musée de Picardie, Amiens, with bright burnished gold backgrounds, and unusual interlace ornament on many of the extremities of the historiated initials:

An unrecorded Bible from Norwich

In the Catalogue de la bibliothèque et des collections de feu Crosse, directeur du Journal de conchyliologie dont la vente aux enchères publiques ... du 20 au 30 novembre 1899 ... Paris, lot 27 on p. 32 is the following:

A dismembered 14th-century Bible

Looking at the new Catalogue 60 from Phil Pirages I note on the front and back covers two more leaves from a fine 14th-century Bible from Perugia(?) that was apparently dispersed by Goodspeed's bookshop, Boston, c.1935.

A Walsingham MS

While at the Chester Beatty Library I also had the opportunity to look at the so-called Walsingham Bible (Western MS. 22) (on which see Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, no. 59).

[Source]

Ker (MLGB, 2nd edn., p. 192) associates it with Augustinian Canons of Walsingham, but with a "?" as the only evidence is a leaf of a Walsingham rental bound in as the first medieval leaf of the volume (fol. 2).

On a back flyleaf, however, is inscribed in a late medieval hand "Domine dominus [noster] qua(m) admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra [i.e. Psalm 8:2] Henric(us) Burnham" (fol. 135v).