Psalter Cuttings at Princeton and Yale, II

Attentive readers will have noticed several things about the cuttings shown in the previous post. First, the text on the backs of the initials demonstrate that the parent manuscript was written in very short lines (typically only three to five words per line). It must therefore have been written in two columns, as is confirmed by the back of this Yale cutting:

and this Princeton cutting:

In both cases, we can see the end of some lines of text which form part of a left-hand column, and parts of flourished initials that introduced verses in an adjacent right-hand column. (In both these cases, therefore, we know that the illuminated initial on the other side was in the right-hand column).

13th-century Psalters are rarely written in two columns.

Initials From an Early 13th-Century English Benedictine Psalter, at Princeton and Yale

I have always had a particular interest in 12th- and 13th-century English Psalters (including this one), so on my first visit to the Princeton University Art Museum, in about 1992 -- long before digital cameras were generally available -- I took special interest in a group of five illuminated initials including the one above. It appears to show a hare with big ears, and a fox with a bushy tail, playing a game of chess or checkers. [1]

Things To See In Madrid

Last weekend I went to Madrid for the first time, so today I will stray away from the usual provenance theme to mention a couple of other manuscript-related things I saw while there.

First, there is currently -- and until 4 January -- an exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional of the Hours of Charles V, which was recently disbound for conservation:

Google's Handwriting Recognition

"a silent warning"

This post is not directly about the provenance of medieval manuscripts, but it concerns something that I am sure will increasingly affect provenance research (not to mention research into most other subjects).

The next several paragraphs may seem irrelevant, but bear with me.

A Bible in Philadelphia [III]: The Bible of Cardinal Pedro Gómez de Barroso?

Something that I did not mention in the previous two blog posts, and is also not mentioned in any of the online descriptions of the Bible, is what appears to be a sort of itinerary, in a 14th-century hand:

[Source]

• Intravit C...am(?) .lvj. de me(n)sis(?) / madij
• Fuit t(ra)nslat(us) ad eccl(es)iam / Coli(m)brien(sis) [i.e. Coimbra] .lviij.  xxv Aug(us)ti
• Fuit t(ra)nslat(us) ad Ulixbon' [i.e. Lisbon] / lxiiij .xxiij. Julij

At first I though that the three dates might be a record of someone's journey southwards in a single year, but the fact that the Roman numbers in the inscriptions progress from 56 to 58 to 64, while the dates go from May to August, then back to July, suggests that the dates are not from a single year, and the Roman numbers represent (the last digits of) different years. If so, the three dates and two legible place-names are:

• May 1356
• 25 August 1358 -- Coimbra
• 23 July 1364 -- Lisbon

I wondered if this might represent the career of a 14th-century cleric, as he was transferred from one church to the next?

A Bible in Philadelphia, With a Spanish(?) Provenance [II]

In the post two weeks ago, I traced the so-called Patou Bible (Philadelphia, Free Library, MS Lewis E 242) back through an 1877 auction catalogue to the Cistercian abbey at Loos, which owned it by the early 18th century, and discussed a 15th-century owner, Jean Patou. But I deliberately omitted the book's earlier provenance, which I'll begin to address today.

Italian Illuminated Cuttings and Leaves in Berlin

Hot on the heels of my last post, news of another new catalogue of cuttings and leaves, this time in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, and focusing on Italian illuminated items.