New Pages Recording Membra Disiecta

Google's Blogspot blogging templates allow for rarely-changing content, such as an "About" or a "Contact" page. I plan to experiment by using such pages to keep track of identified leaves and cuttings from dismembered books. In the past I have given lists of such leaves in blog-posts (e.g. here and here) and then added a series of addenda, when I learn of new leaves.

There are several dismembered books that I am actively working on as part of a catalogue of a private collection, and I hope that by making my lists available, it will encourage readers to send new information. To take one example, I currently know the whereabouts of only about a dozen of the 40-ish cuttings from the Burkhardt-Wildt Apocalypse, but I am sure that readers will know about others.

Among the manuscripts I anticipate tackling are:

A Postscript to: A Psalter Leaf at Harvard

A few months ago I wrote a post about a leaf at Houghton Library, with a miniature of the Baptism of Christ on one side and a Beatus initial on the other, in which I identified it as one of the leaves sold anonymously by Gustav Nebehay at Sotheby's in 1926.

Only later did I realise that this conflicted with the account of its provenance as published in 2010, which implies a direct line of ownership to Houghton from an auction in 1912, with no mention of the 1926 auction:

"Sold at auction in Munich in 1912 to Edgar Huidekoper Wells (1875-1938), it was acquired by George J. Dyer for the Fogg Art Museum (1927.21) before being transferred to Houghton Library in 1990"

with a footnote detailing the 1912 auction: C.G. Boerner, Leipzig, Auction CX: Manuscripte und Miniaturen des XII. bis XVI. Jahrhunderts, Handzeichnungen des XV. bis XVII. Jahrhunderts, Versteigerung ... 28. November 1912, lot 15; the image above is taken from this catalogue.

A Flemish Miniature in 19th-Century Australia

I have recently been looking at two leaves from an extremely fine Flemish Book of Hours, in a double-sided frame, in a private collection.

Descriptions of One Manuscript or Two?

[Digital Library@Villanova University; Source]

One of the challenges of tracing a manuscript from owner to owner is to verify that it is indeed a single manuscript whose path you are following, not two or more similar ones. We can exemplify this problem by looking at the catalogue descriptions of the Villanova manuscript discussed in a recent post.

Other Tuns as Part of a Rebus

It occurs to me that a suggestion in the previous post will only seem plausible if the reader knows how common it was for a tun to form part of a rebus, so here are a few more examples:

Rings + tun = "Ringeston" (as discussed here).

A tun in a press = Preston

A Scribal and Illuminated Rebus?

Among the digitized manuscripts at Villanova University, PA, is a very small (approx.100×70mm) 14th-century English copy of some of Augustine's works, with a single illuminated page at the beginning:

[This and other images: Digital Library@Villanova University; Source]

The thing that strikes me as most unusual about this first page is the lower border, with foliage sprouting from what looks like a hole in the side of a wooden barrel:

"Ancient Illuminated MSS in the Library at Calveley"

My interest was aroused by the description of of a 19th-century album that will be sold next week, whose catalogue description does not have an image:

I asked the auctioneer to send me some photos, and I have just received the images. The title-page is shown above.