A Cutting from a Chartres Cathedral Antiphonary

Some time ago I saw a curious cutting at Maggs Bros. It was hard to know if the composition was pure fantasy, or whether the (?)processional cross and the "heraldry" might be significant.

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:

The Duprat Bible [Part I]

The so-called "du Prat atelier" of 13th-century Parisian illuminators was named by Robert Branner after a luxurious large (c.440×320mm) Bible that is now in Boston Public Library (MS. f. Med. 104):

Boston, Public Library, MS. f. Med. 104, vol.IV, fols.434v-435r

Parts of its recent provenance are well known, but thanks to images taken by Lisa Fagin Davis I have been able to fill in much of the gap between the 16th century and 1830.

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 Ferrell Roman de la Rose: a Budé, Bourré, and Pérussis Puzzle

After reading the blog post about a manuscript in Liège with the arms of Jean(?) Budé, Dominique Vanwijnsberghe kindly told me about a late 18th-century illuminated leaf, added to a late 14th-century manuscript in the Morgan Library, New York (MS G.32, of which there are images and a description online), which also has the Budé arms half-way down the right border.

Visiting me in London a few weeks later Dominique very kindly gave me a copy of his excellent book, “Moult bons et notables”: L’enluminure tournaisienne à l’époque de Robert Campin (1380–1430) (Leuven, 2007), in which the image below is fig.285.

New York, Morgan Library, MS G.32, fol.1r

Detail of right border

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.

A Companion Volume of the Jean Budé Liège Prayerbook

By coincidence, this week I came across what appears to be a companion volume to the Prayerbook discussed in a recent post.
[Throughout this blog you can click images to get larger versions]

Another Manuscript Commissioned by Jean(?) Budé

The University of Liège has recently digitized some of its most important illuminated manuscripts. Among them is a very unusual volume, MS Wittert 39:

A Miniature from the Loredan Hours in Los Angeles

LACMA exterior (from Google streetview)

A recent visit to LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) led to some nice surprises. One was the discovery of another of the missing miniatures from the so-called Loredan Hours, about which I wrote previously.

It has a pope, cardinal, king, and layman kneeling before God in heaven, and illustrates a suffrage for Peace:

Los Angeles, LACMA, 58.62.1, verso

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

Jougla De Morenas, Grand armorial de France, available for download

I have just discovered that Henri Jougla de Morenas (continued by Raoul de Warren), Grand armorial de France: Catalogue général des armoiries des familles nobles de France ... (1934–1952) including the Supplément,  is available via the web as a series of PDFs.

Get them before the links break!

• 1: van der AA – Bataillon
• 2: de la Batardie – Coëtlogat de Clegrio
• 3: de Coëtlogon – de Fieubert
• 4: des Fieux – de Martimprey
• 5: Martin – de Richaud
• 6: Richaudeau – Zylof de Steenbourg et de Wynde (followed by Sources and bibliography)
• 7: Supplément

http://palisep.fr/bibliotheque/jougla/tome_01.pdf
For volumes 2–7 just change the numeral in the URL.

Here, for example, is the entry for the Hurault family, discussed in a recent post:

A few other books are available from the same website: http://palisep.fr/bibliotheque/

There is also a link to a very large heraldic bibliography, with links to digitized books, here.

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:

The Post-Medieval Provenance of the Taymouth Hours (BL, Yates Thompson MS. 13)

I have recently read and reviewed Kathryn A. Smith, The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of Self in Late Medieval England (The British Library: London, 2012).

I have often argued that the post-medieval and even modern provenance of medieval manuscripts can provide valuable clues to their medieval origins and owners, and the Taymouth Hours may be a case in point. I will consider the manuscript's provenance in two parts: here considering its post-medieval homes, working backwards from the present, and then its origin patron in a subsequent post.

The manuscript was bequeathed to the British Museum by the widow of Henry Yates Thompson in 1941. It had escaped being sold in the three Yates Thompson auctions of 1919-1921 because Yates Thompson had given it to her a few years earlier: in 1917 he inscribed its flyleaf as follows:

"This volume, one of the
choicest of my English MS.S.
I gave to my dear wife on her
birthday Jan[uar]y 10th 1917 to
mitigate her grief at the
news that I intended to sell
my collection of 100 illumi-
nated MSS.
                 [signed:] HYT."

The first flyleaf has Yates Thompson's bookplate annotated, as usual, with the acquisition details:

"57": the number of the MS in Thompson's collection,

"nee.e.e": the price he paid, using his price-code "bryanstole", i.e. "£500 0s. 0d."

"Earl of Ashburnham May 1897": the source and date of acquisition.

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.

Miniatures from the Loredan Hours

Four miniatures from a Book of Hours illuminated by Willem Vrelant and the Fastolf Master (now Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 575), have recently come to light. The manuscript was the main subject of James Douglas Farquhar, Creation and Imitation: The Work of a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illuminator, Nova University Studies in the Humanities, 1 (Fort Lauderdale, 1976). The manuscript was exhibited last year in the Flemish manuscripts exhibition in Paris.

The coats of arms below the miniatures have been erased from leaves which have been dispersed:

But most of those in the parent volume preserve the original heraldry: