The Price-Code "CUMBERLAND"

This week I gave a presentation about "Price-Codes and Provenance" at a conference in London; one of my slides is above. I have posted before about how price-codes work.

The Bauffrement Roman de la Rose

Last year I studied a Roman de la Rose manuscript in a private collection, whose opening miniature is shown above, which can be dated about 1310–20. The binding and endleaves provide provide much of interest to the provenance-hunter, including the gilt stamp of Hudson Gurney:

Ege & Duschnes Matts/Mounts

In at least one previous post I have mentioned that distinctive card mounts ("matts" in American English) are an easy way to recognise leaves sold by Otto Ege. I have also discussed the close business relationship with Philip Duschnes.

But I had forgotten until recently that Duschnes sometimes put leaves in mounts very similar to Ege's, as these examples demonstrate:

Duschnes

1902 Forrer Catalogue now available online

It seems that Google scanned Robert Forrer's Unedierte Federzeichnungen Miniaturen und Initialen des Mittelalters (Strassburg, 1902) at the end of December 2014. Even though it appears not to be available in the UK through Google (except as snippet views) it is available through Archive.org.

"A Thousand Years of French Books" (1948)

I recently had a question from a MSS curator friend: Exactly when and where did the 1948 exhibition called "A Thousand Years of French Books" take place?

A Lavishly Illuminated 13th-Century Psalter-Hours Made for a Nun

There is a 13th-century Psalter from which leaves appear on the market with some frequency.[1] It is easily recognisable by several unusual features. For example, throughout the text there are unusually large initials (4 lines in height) most of which are historiated:

The Hangest Beauvais Missal in the 15th Century (III)

Having dealt in the previous post with the inventories drawn up at Beauvais in the 15th century, we can look now at a couple of points raised by them.

If the Hangest Missal is indeed part of the four-volume set described in the inventory, the verba probatoria of the second leaf after the calendar, "angelus domini", ought to belong to the first Sunday after Easter, and indeed these words do occur there, as an Offertory, as seen, for example, in this Paris Missal of c.1300:

BnF, ms. lat. 8885, fol.236r [Source]