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]

Manuscripts from St-Jacques, Liège [Part I]

At the recent TEFAF art fair at Maastricht, one of the items that piqued my curiosity was a very handsome copy of Peter Lombard on the Psalms, offered by Dr Jörn Günther Rare Books. It has an impressive provenance from the early 19th century onwards, but it also had some unsolved clues to its earlier history.

In particular, there are shelfmarks in the upper right corner, and an inscription in the lower margin of the first page:

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.

"What Counts as Provenance Evidence?"

There is a detailed analysis of a variety of marks found in a single book here:
https://msuprovenance.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/problems-in-provenance-research/
under the title "What Counts as Provenance Evidence?", on the blog of the Special Collections Department of Michigan State University. It's worth a read. The following is an extract:

[...]

Some markings are relatively straightforward and easy to understand, while others are more mysterious. How many different marks do you see?  Let’s be literal at this stage and refrain from judgment about which particular inscriptions are important for determining provenance.  I count at least 15 different potential provenance markers on these two pages alone.  I’ll highlight those below:

Click to enlarge

[...]

Stephen Ferguson's blogging at Princeton

I have recently found blog-posts by Stephen Ferguson at http://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/author/stephen-ferguson/

A sample post, similar to those I post myself, is this (from here: http://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/2013/05/17/shelf-marks-of-sunderland-books/):

Shelf-marks of Sunderland books

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Stephen Ferguson

	Horace. Ars poetica with commentary of Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1576) Call number: PTT 2865.311.076. [Shelf mark on verso of front free endpaper, which is marbled on recto. The front paste-down is marbled. These are the only marks of ownership.]
	Charles Spencer, third Earl of Sunderland (1674-1722), his “books are easily recognizable by the bold shelf-marks written in ink on the verso of the upper cover in the upper left hand corner.” S. DeRicci, English Collectors of Books & Manuscripts (1530-1930) and Their Marks of Ownership (Cambridge, 1930), p. 39.

For more about the history of the Sunderland Library, see the record for the 18th century manuscript catalogue of the Library held at John Rylands Library:
http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb133-engms62.txt

The Post-Medieval Owners of "The Bohun Bible"

The literature on the "Bohun" Bible suggests that the parent volume was written perhaps for a nunnery, perhaps in East Anglia, and was perhaps volume III of a four-volume set of which volume I is now British Library, Royal MS. 1 E.iv.

The last leaf of the parent volume of the dispersed leaves, now Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. bib. b. 4, f. 46v (formerly f. 413v in the parent volume), is inscribed “Richardus Legh me possidet Anno Domini 1613” (the first four words are repeated below this, but are crossed through in both cases); this is presumably Richard Legh, b. 1549(?), of East Hall, High Legh, Cheshire, or Richard Legh, b. 1554, of West Hall, High Legh. Extensive genealogies of these families can be found here.

Relative locations of Lymme, High Legh, and Nether Tabley

Below the Legh inscription on the Bodleian leaf is:

"Ex libris Petri Leicester de Nether-Tabley: qui liber mihi Dono datur a Richardo Maria Dumvill de Limme Armigero, 27 die Martii, Anno Domini 1665.”

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.