Another Brölemann "Catalogue B" Description

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In 2015 I wrote a post about the catalogues of the important Brölemann collection. One more Brölemann manuscripts has recently been digitized (shown above), which prompts me to repeat part of what I wrote before, with some additions.

A Sighting of The Myrour of Recluses

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Five years ago I had the pleasure of researching, for an auction, a newly-discovered Middle English manuscript, of which no other complete copy was known: the so-called Myrour of Recluses. Most of the text had recently been edited from the only known (incomplete) copy at the British Library, but crucially this new manuscript has a prologue in which the author dates his work: "This Wednysday bi the morow the even of the blissed virgyne seynt Alburgh the secunde yeere of the worthy cristen prince kyng Henry the fift" (i.e. 1414).

The Mortuary Roll of Lucy of Hedingham

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The first of a series of consecutive fixed-term contracts I had at the British Library was a post in 2002 to select medieval manuscripts with specific regional associations, for inclusion in a digitisation project called "Collect Britain" [defunct website], whose purpose was to emphasise that the Library's collections are relevant to the whole of the British Isles, and to make selected items accessible to everyone online, and not just those who, by living in London, could more easily visit the Library in person. It was a wonderful experience, that allowed me to consult a couple of thousand manuscripts that I would otherwise never have had a reason to look at.

One manuscript that particularly fascinated me is the Mortuary Roll of Lucy de Vere, first prioress of the Benedictine nunnery at Castle Hedingham, Essex. The nunnery was founded by the de Vere family, Earls of Oxford, whose family seat was Hedingham Castle [Wikipedia] [1]. The first part of the roll is shown above, with a detail here:

BL, Egerton MS 2849

A Manuscript in Lyon, Dated 1469

Lyon, BM, MS 624 (541) [Source]

Browsing images downloaded from the Bibliothèque virtualle des manuscrits médiévaux (BVMM) this week, I came across a manuscript with unusual script and very distinctive penwork decoration, now in Lyon, shown above, and here in a close-up detail:

Regular readers will recognise this strange decoration, which combines full and half fleurs-de-lys alternately blue or gold, with dense filigree penwork in red and blue, from a recent post:

Sims collection, Maryland (detail)

I am not only pretty confident that the penwork is by the same person, but also that these two books were written by the same scribe (though he was writing more carefully in the ex-Durrieu Book of Hours than in the Lyon manuscript).

Otto Ege's "Chain of Psalms" Manuscript: Another Update and a Cautionary Tale

Notre Dame, cod. Lat. b. 11.
(Image courtesy of the Hesburgh Library,
University of Notre Dame)

Things have moved rapidly since last weekend's two blogposts about Otto Ege's manuscript of the Sermons of Philip the Chancellor.

David Gura kindly sent me an image of the first page of the Notre Dame manuscript (shown above), which allows us to see the decorated initial, and the incipit with abbreviations that von Scherling expanded incorrectly:

detail

Otto Ege's "Chain of Psalms" Manuscript: An Update

I sent a tweet about yesterday's blogpost, and within a few hours I had a response from David Gura, who published a catalogue of the Notre Dame manuscripts in 2016, and recognised the von Scherling-Ege manuscript in my blogpost as Notre Dame cod. Lat. b. 11:

Otto Ege's "Chain of Psalms" Manuscript

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In a previous post I reported that Otto Ege's 12th-century Italian Lectionary (Fifty Original Leaves / Handlist no. 3) appears in Erik von Scherling's Rotulus catalogue vol.IV (Winter, 1937). Looking again at that catalogue, I now realise that a widely-dispersed manuscript, whose text he referred to as a "Chain of Psalms" (FOL / Handlist no. 4; of which a leaf is shown above), is also there.