A Italian Cistercian Breviary, in Newark, NJ

While in New York recently, I not only crossed the East River to go to Brooklyn, but also crossed the Hudson to go to Newark, New Jersey, because I had been in touch with Nadine Sergejeff at the Public Library, and she had kindly agreed to show me their medieval manuscripts. The one I was most interested to see is a Breviary, briefly described by Bond & Faye as being Cistercian, and perhaps from Lombardy:

An Unrecognised Book of Hours Made for Philip the Good [Part I]

Northampton, MA, Smith College, MS. 288, fol.45r

[All images of this manuscript are from Digital Scriptorium]

In a previous post I mentioned that ten medieval manuscripts belonging to Smith College have been put online via Digital Scriptorium; they include one that I did not see when I visited the College a year ago.

Skimming through the Digital Scriptorium images this summer my interest was piqued by MS 288, a Book of Hours whose first text (after the calendar) has a rubric which mentions the Duke of Burgundy and provides the scribe's name, Dominic of Burgundy:

Northampton, MA, Smith College, MS. 288, fol.14r
[Source - All images from Digital Scriptorium]

An Unrecognised York Breviary in New York

Earlier this year I catalogued a Missal of the Use of York, one of only a dozen known to survive, with an interesting provenance, owned by someone who wanted to sell it to a public institution. Maggs handled the deal and everyone involved is happy with the result: it is now at Lambeth Palace Library.

In the process of cataloguing it I became familiar with the features that distinguish the Use of York calendar from the much more common Use of Sarum, as outlined by Richard Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: a History, 2009, pp.445–62.

While browsing Digital Scriptorium (from which all the images below are taken) in advance of a recent visit to the Grolier Club, New York, I noticed that their MS 3 has most of these features.

A French 13th-Century Psalter at Smith College

Smith College, Northampton, MA, MS. 291, p.13
[All images from Digital Scriptorium]

Smith College, Massachusetts, is the most recent institution to join the Digital Scriptorium consortium. It has digitized 10 medieval manuscripts in their entirety and added them to the site.

I visited Smith for the first time last November, and wrote one post as a result, but have always intended to do more. Here I return to my notes on MS 291, a mid 13th-century Psalter.

A Thérouanne Book of Hours at Occidental

Occidental College has a very interesting and unusual Book of Hours, one of whose features is a unique(?) image of its patron saying the rosary.

 I provide a fairly detailed textual and iconographic descriptions below, but first the known details of its provenance.

A Reims Book of Hours written by Raulinus de Sorcy

A full set of digital images have recently been made available of a Book of Hours of the Use of Reims, now in Houston. It was alluded to at the end of a list of Reims Horae by Jean-Luc Deuffic in 2007, on his Pecia blog, and has recently been blogged about at Houston.

Following the gospel extracts (fol.15r) is the scribal colophon:

"Raulinus de Sorcy scrip-
toris hunc librum scripsit. et
in omnibus complevit. Misereatur sibi deus."