(Lots) More Libri Catalogues

Almost three years ago I did a post about some Guglielmo Libri catalogues of manuscripts that were available online.

Ten days ago the 'Histoire de la Bibliophilie' blog had a long post about a much larger number of catalogues of manuscripts described and/or sold by him (although many of them do not include medieval manuscripts):

[Source]

Phillipps MSS Catalogue Online

Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum in Bibliotheca D. Thomæ Phillipps, Bart., A.D. 1837 (Impressus Typis Medio-Montanis, 1837[–1871]).

I have a copy of the Orskey-Johnson reprint (2001) of the Phillipps catalogue. In the introduction A.N.L. Munby states that he knows of only about fifteen complete, or substantially complete, copies of the catalogue, of which only seven are available for consultation in public institutions, at the BL, London; Bodleian, Oxford; UL, Cambridge; BnF, Paris; KB, The Hague; Harvard, Cambridge (MA); and Newberry, Chicago. The reprint is a copy of one formerly owned by David Lew Feldman, New York.

[Any reader who does not know what an extraordinary book the Phillipps catalogue is, should consult the first volume of Munby's Phillipps Studies (1951), or this very brief summary]

In connection with an enquiry from a reader a couple of days ago I tried Googling a phrase from the catalogue, hoping that it might lead me to the present whereabouts of one of the manuscripts, but it took me instead to an online copy of the catalogue itself, of which I was unaware.

Antwerp Auction Catalogues Online

I recently taught a two-day course on 'Codicology and Cataloguing' at the London International Palaeography Summer School (as a change to my usual one-day Introduction to Provenance Research). As part of the course I had the students examine a fine Netherlandish Bible, MS 292 in the Senate House Library collection; it was described by Ker in MMBL, I, pp.367–8, who did not have much to say about the provenance:

but some gaps can be filled thanks to catalogues now available online.

The Restitution of a Charter Dated 1199

Earlier this year I was looking at a collection of leaves and documents and came across one that looked particularly appealing, being written in a very elegant script and having a large intact seal:

Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676–1900

One of the most useful tools for provenance research on medieval manuscripts has been made available for online consultation and download:

List of Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676–1900, Now in the British Museum (London, 1915)

The Beauvais Missal: A New Piece of the Provenance

Of all the manuscripts said to have been cut up by Otto Ege and now scattered around the world, none is as instantly recognisable as the Beauvais Missal, and perhaps none was as valuable when still intact. And yet, despite the lively interest in Ege and his manuscripts in recent decades, no one seems to have found out where he got it from.

A Girardot de Préfond Manuscript in New York Public Library

For several years I have wondered to whom this bookplate belongs:

New York, Public Library, Spencer MS 76, fol.i verso
Image: Digital Scriptorium

Archinto Catalogue Online

Some time ago I was pleased to discover that Google Books included an 1863 auction catalogue of books from the library of Count Carlo Archinto of Milan, as I had encountered important medieval manuscripts from this library at the Bodleian and Getty Museum.

Those I have seen are in distinctive green vellum-covered bindings. Two of the three Archinto MSS in Digital Scriptorium have such a binding, for example:

Typical Archinto binding
San Francisco, State of California, Sutro Collection MS 7
Source

Unidentified Hurault? Arms in a French Book of Hours

I am currently trying to identify some arms that appear twice in a Book of Hours, made in Paris(?) in the first half of the 16th century. They appear filling a half-page space at the end of the Extracts from the Four Gospels:

and again, rather cropped, in the lower border at the beginning of the Hours of the Virgin:

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:

John Batayle and the Smithfield Decretals

The Smithfield Decretals (British Library, Royal MS. 10 E.iv) is an exceptionally large (c.450 x 285mm.) and lavish (including more than 600 narrative bas-de-page scenes) copy of the Decretals of Gregory IX with the gloss of Bernard of Parma, thought to have been written in southern France c.1300, with decoration and an extra prefatory quire added in England some decades later.

The BL website has an online description with partial digitization and a description with full digitization.

Source

The main reason I found fault with a recent monograph on the Taymouth Hours is that it tends to treat hypotheses as facts. One of several such hypotheses is the proposal that the Smithfield Decretals was made for man called John Batayle who was a canon of St Bartolomew's, Smithfield, in the last quarter of the 14th century. This may be true, or it may not.

Didier Petit catalogue online

Didier Petit de Meurville (1793-1873) of Lyon was one of the major French collectors of religious art of the 19th century.

A partially annotated copy of his sale catalogue: Catalogue de la collection formée par M. Didier Petit a Lyon ... Paris, Dentu, au Palais Royal, (1843), is available through Gallica, and an unannotated one through Google Books.

The Abbé Charles d'Orléans de Rothelin's MSS

The catalogue of the library of the Abbé Rothelin (1691-1746), printed in 1747 and used for his auction in 1749, is now available online through Google books.

M. Marion, 'Une bibliothèque ecclésiastique: les livres de l'abbé de Rothelin', Revue française d'histoire du livre, 56 (1987), pp. 201-11 states that only 27 items in the catalogue are pre-1500 MSS. Finding them among the more than 5000 lots would be tedious if it were not for an index at the back of the catalogue listing the lot numbers of MSS (including the post-medieval ones). Many are books of hours, but there are also non-religious texts such as the Roman de la Rose, Chronicles, etc.

Among the manuscripts are the Bible historiale illuminated by Jean de Bruges, presented by Jean Vaudetar to King Charles V, now in the Meermanno-Westreenianum Museum in The Hague, and the Sherborne Missal at the British Library:


A blog-post elsewhere provides a biography of the Abbé and usefully reproduces his bookplate:

Pecia.fr

The always-interesting Pecia blog has the beginnings of an investigation into a book of hours apparently once owned by a member of the Largez family:

Sur la piste d'un Livre d'heures à l'usage de l'abbaye Notre-Dame de Daoulas (Finistère)

It was more recently in the collection of  George Weare Braikenridge (1775-1856)  'perhaps the largest collector of general and local antiquities in the West of England', a catalogue of whose collection, containing a few books of hours, is online.

The MSS of Louis Fidel Debruge Duménil (1788-1848)

The Description des objets d'art qui composent la collection Debruge Dumenil (1847), written by his son-in-law Jules Labarte, is available online.

It includes some interesting manuscript items under the heading of "Calligraphie", including a Breviary of Henri Tomacelli, abbot of Montecassino, dated 1404 (no. 645), which later appeared in the Firmin-Didot auction catalogue, and a so-called Pontifical (actually a Benedictional) destroyed in 1871, begun for John, Duke of Bedford, and finished for Jacques Juvenal des Ursins (no. 646):

and at the end of the section is an illustration of the latter:

 

on which see Reynolds and J. Stratford, 'Le Manuscrit dit “Le pontifical de Poitiers”’, Revue de l’art, lxxxiv (1989), pp. 61–80.

Firmin-Didot auction catalogue online

The 1882 auction catalogue of the Firmin-Didot collection is available online. The section on manuscripts (nos. 1-45) includes many important manuscripts, including  the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg (no. 3), now in The Metropolitan Museum, New York: