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:

Mapping Books: The Dispersal of the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain

I just found this interesting blog-post by Mitch Fraas:
http://mappingbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-dispersal-of-medieval-libraries-of.html

An excerpt is below, but the full post is worth reading.

[...]
As of last week, the MLGB3's online database  included over 6,000 records for books and manuscripts owned by medieval libraries. In order to look at them in aggregate I used the ever-helpful wget utility to pull down each record in order. I was left with a gigantic mess of html with the useful data hidden within it. After extensive cleanup and parsing of the data I was able to throw the location names of the original medieval libraries as well as current owners against David Zwiefelhofer's geocoding service (which I believe uses the Yahoo API) to get longitudes and latitudes. This didn't go entirely smoothly as the names of ruined monasteries tend not to register very well in geo databases. Fortunately, there are a wealth of wikipedia entries providing detailed long./lat. information on a wide range of English historical sites and I was able to fill in the blanks.

Libraries in Medieval Great Britain (MLGB3)

Current Locations of Books from the MLGB3

Worldwide Current Location of Books in MLGB3

What most struck me from this preliminary view (I'll wait until the final MLGB3 release to make sure) is how much less movement there was than I expected. That is, if books owned by medieval libraries are any indication, the cultural patrimony of Great Britain has not moved far from its home. Over 93% (5900/6316) books from the MLGB3 data show up as being currently held in Great Britain leaving just 416 in other locations. This visualization of course elides the many movements of books between when they were cataloged or inventoried in the medieval period and when they reached their current place of residence. That being said, I wonder how a similar map of the dispersal of French or German monastic libraries would look? Are 93% still in their country of origin (loosely defined)? I doubt it.

[...]

An Unknown MS from Nostell Priory

While in Los Angeles this summer I enquired of several local institutions about their holdings, and got a very helpful response from Emma Roberts at the Los Angeles Public Library, who sent me pictures and other information about their only medieval manuscript. Before I left LA I was able to spend an hour examining and photographing it.

The volume consists of a front flyleaf and a back pastedown; one quire of 8 leaves; one partial quire of 6 leaves; and 12 more individual leaves, some of them consecutive, others isolated, in the remains of its medieval oak binding:

Unrecorded printed book from Oseney

A query on the very useful "can you help?" section of the CERL provenance website reveals a book from Oseney Abbey not recorded in MLGB:

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 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).