All Ashburnham Manuscripts Catalogues Available Online

In a couple of previous posts (here and here) I discussed the privately-printed catalogues of the hugely important collection of medieval manuscripts formed by Bertram, 4th Earl of Ashburnham at his stately home, Ashburnham Place:

A bit like his contemporary Sir Thomas Phillipps, he could be extremely irascible, but while Phillipps was usually helpful to scholars wishing to see his manuscripts, Ashburnham did not want visitors. The serial publication of Phillipps's catalogues, in parts, was famously disorganised (as detailed in the first volume of A.N.L. Munby's Phillipps Studies, 1951) making complete copies very rare. The publication of Ashburnham's catalogues was not messy, but distribution was limited, and it is not easy to find copies outside major research libraries.

In my previous posts I said that only the Libri and Appendix portions of the catalogue were available online, but I now find that a three-volume set at Cornell, including the previously-unavailable Barrois manuscripts catalogue, and the Index volume, has been digitised and is available through the Haithi Trust.

"BRAUNSCHWEIG", The Ashburnham Price-Code

One price-code missing from the excellent The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade: A Preliminary Guide, by "Exhumation" [i.e. Ian Jackson] (Berkeley, 2010),

and thus apparently unrecorded, is that of the man who, besides Sir Thomas Phillipps, formed the largest and most important private collection of medieval manuscripts in 19th-century England, namely, Bertram, 4th Earl of Ashburnham (1797–1878).

Hearst's Other Brölemann-Mallet Manuscripts

As related in the previous post, the Beauvais Missal was bought at the Brölemann-Mallet sale in 1926 by Permain on behalf of William Randolph Hearst. Lest there be any doubt that Permain was acting for Hearst, we can look at the other manuscripts bought by Permain at the Brölemann-Mallet sale, and find that they all later belonged to Hearst, and were all listed in the 1941 Gimbel-Saks-Hammer catalogue.

Even where the attributions to a country or century are incorrect, or absent, positive identifications can be made based on other features such as the dimensions and numbers of leaves:

Catalogi bibliothecarum antiqui

I recently found that Gustav Heinrich Becker's Catalogi bibliothecarum antiqui (Bonn, 1885) is available online.

It provides transcriptions of more than 130 pre-1200 lists of books / library catalogues, some very short, some very extensive. Many had been printed before, and references to the earlier editions are cited.  Here, for example, are the pages with the catalogue for Durham, preceded by the end of Arras, and followed by the beginning of Bec:

The Church Congress Exhibitions

I occasionally encounter a manuscript with a circular paper label printed in blue with the words "Church Congress Exhibition", or occasionally "Ecclesiastical Art Exhibition", and a number added by hand:

  

Ashburnham Appendix and other catalogues

In response to the post about the Ashburnham-Libri manuscripts catalogue, one reader asked me about catalogues of the other Ashburnham manuscripts. The catalogues privately printed by Ashburnham himself are still not all available online, but each is represented online by at least one copy of the relevant auction catalogue.

Barrois
Catalogue of the Portion of the Famous Collection of Manuscripts, the Property of the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Ashburnham, Known as the Barrois Collection ... Which Will be Sold by Auction ... Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge ... 10th day of June, 1901, and Four Following Days: 

• a lightly annotated copy at the Robarts Library, University of Toronto
• a copy at Cornell University

There are also various related publications, notably:

Catalogues de vente numérisés contenant des manuscrits médiévaux

Jean-Luc Deuffic has added an extremely useful page called Catalogues de vente numérisés contenant des manuscrits médiévaux to one of his websites. I am sure that as I explore the catalogues he has located online it will prompt more posts here in due course.

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."

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.

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:

Guiffrey's sigla for the Duke de Berry's inventories

Going straight to an entry in the edited inventories of the Duke de Berry without reading the introduction can lead to some confusion.

Guiffrey's base-text (in his vol. I) is the manuscript completed on 31 January 1413 (nos. 1-1099), with additions made until the Duke's death in 1416 (nos. 1100-1251).

Following the main text of each entry he often adds in smaller type the manuscript's marginal additions. He also often refers to the equivalent item as recorded in the other inventories (in his vol. II): that of 1401-03 (the MSS being recorded in 1402); a list of gifts given to the Ste-Chapelle, Bourges from 1404-07; and the posthumous inventory of 1416-c.1418. There is usually also a valuation, expressed in "liv.[res] t.[ournois]":

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:

Bodleian, MS. Auct. D. 4. 6

Bodleian, MS. Auct. D. 4. 6 is a 12th-century English Glossed Psalter, well known for its initial apparently naming the scribe/artist and patron: "Ioh(ann)es me fecit Rogerio".

Two 19th-century collectors' marks

I have just spent a day at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.














A list of Western MSS still in the library between the auctions in 1932-1933 and 1967-1968 was drawn up in 1961 by Ludwig Bieler, and is available in the reading room as a typescript.

This alerted me to some boxes of cuttings and leaves, of which I was unaware: W. MS. 165. Several items had one or both of a couple of owners' ink-stamps with which I was unfamiliar. Here are the relevant entries from Lugt: