The 1524 "Hildesheim" Prayerbook

Many American and private collections have one or more leaves of an easily-recognisable prayerbook dated 1524 and attributed to Hildesheim.

A Google Images search for hildesheim leaf 1524 produces lots of hits:

Midweek miscellany I

In addition to my regular Saturday posts, I have decided to do occasional posts midweek, when I have some small observation or discovery.

Having posted twice about the dismembered Pietro Ursuleo manuscript, I thought it would be worth putting side-by-side the miniatures of the Evangelist Matthew. It is interesting how remarkably similar they are, despite being by different illuminators: the leaf in South Carolina is attributed to Cola Rapicano, while the Cambridge volume is attributed to Matteo Felice.

More on the Psalter and Passion Sequences written by Pietro Ursuleo of Capua

In a previous post I wrote about the dismembered Psalter and Passion Sequences written by the humanistic scribe Pietro Ursuleo of Capua.

I have recently found a description of the book when it was still intact.

More Initials from the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona

A year ago I wrote a blog post about cuttings from the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona, all but one of which I believed to be in institutional collections. In correspondence with Geneviève Marièthoz, who is actively working on the Bible, I subsequently learned that six more initials are in a private collection in France.

By pure luck I recently found reproductions of four more previously-unrecognised initials on two consecutive days. The first was in the collection of Adolf von Brekerath of Berlin, sold by Lepke in Berlin, 17–21 November 1916, lot 12:

The Restitution of a Charter Dated 1199

Earlier this year I was looking at a collection of leaves and documents and came across one that looked particularly appealing, being written in a very elegant script and having a large intact seal:

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.