Manuscripts from St-Jacques, Liège [Part II]

St-Jacques, Liège, c.1735 [Source]

Online searches locate several fully or partially digitised manuscripts from St-Jacques, including Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Riant 35 (description here; digitisation here), which has an ownership inscription and title on the front flyleaf:

"Liber monasterij s(an)c(t)i Jacobi leodie(n)s(is)"
Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Riant 35, f. i verso [Source]

and shelfmarks "G.91" and "E.30", comparable to those in the Peter Lombard manuscript (discussed in the previous post), on the first page of text:

[Source]

It also has a note at the back, recording that it was bought in 1426:

"Liber m(ona)sterij s(an)c(t)i Jacobi in i(n)sula leodien(sis)
que(m) acquisivit e[?] p(ri)or de (commun)i bursa ecc(les)ie
in a(n)no d(omi)ni M° cccc xxvj° p(ro) tribus griffonib(us)"
Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Riant 35, f.124r [Source]

The Duprat Bible [Part II]

The previous post left the Duprat Bible in the 1724 catalogue of the Château d'Anet.

Whoever bought the Bible divided each volume into two and rebound them in the present 18th-century bindings, for an unidentified owner, with a gilt “P L” (? or "L P" ?) monogram stamp in each corner:

The Helmingham Hall Manuscripts

Helmingham Hall, Suffolk

I have recently had reason to examine some manuscripts from the Tollemache family collection at Helmingham Hall and, as I mentioned in the previous post, have just finished reading Janet Ing Freeman's The Postmaster of Ipswich: William Stevenson Fitch, Antiquary and Thief (London, 1997), an account of the way in which many manuscripts were stolen from the collection in the 19th century.

This has prompted me to post about how those that survived Fitch's depredations can be recognised.

von Scherling's Roman de Troie Miniatures

A week ago I mentioned and illustrated a pair of full-page miniatures from the earliest illuminated manuscript of the Roman de Troie, which were offered for sale, with the two shown above, by Erik von Scherling in his Rotulus catalogue, vol.IV (1937), no.1817:

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

The Colbert Libraries (Midweek Miscellany 3)

The "Histoire de la Bibliophilie" blog has recently posted about the libraries of the various members of the Colbert family, including a family tree; portraits of, and biographical information about, the key individuals; discussions of their auction catalogues; and images of their binding-stamps, including these:

The JBC monogram of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83)

The Bible of Louis de Harcourt (d.1479), Patriarch of Jerusalem and Bishop of Bayeux

In a few weeks' time a well-known dealer will open an exhibition of manuscripts at his gallery in central London. He tasked me to check and revise the existing descriptions, and I undertook to amplify them with new research where possible. This led to some satisfying discoveries, some of which I may post about in the coming weeks.

One of them arose from my recent investigations for this blog of the manuscripts in the 1926 Brölemann-Mallet auction catalogue, several of which were bought by Messrs William Permain for William Randolph Hearst.

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