The Backs and Edges of Cuttings

Regular readers will know how often the backs of leaves and cuttings provide vital information. There may be a significant attribution (e.g. "From the Cathedral at Como"); a direct indication of a former owner (e.g. notes initialled "TMW" by Thomas Miller Whitehead); an auction lot number that allows it to be identified in a sale catalogue; text and/or music that allows the ambiguous subject-matter of an initial to be identified; or traces of a characteristic type of adhesive mounting-tape, that reveals it to have been sold by Otto Ege.

This week, I started to write a note about some interesting ideas presented by Christopher de Hamel in the Introduction to the recently published catalogue of the Burke Collection [1], but I quickly became side-tracked by his discussion of a cutting from Santa Maria degli Angeli, shown above.

Wernher von Eistetten: The Puzzle Solved

In a previous post in January last year, I discussed a group of cuttings that seem to come from the Dominican nunnery at Zurich, and I laid out some 19th-century evidence suggesting they were illuminated in 1300 by Wernher von Eistetten, monk of Kaiserheim. But this presented a problem: as I wrote,

"It is not clear why a monk of the Cistercian abbey of Kaiserheim, in Bavaria, might write a manuscript for a nunnery in Zurich, about 260km to the south-west"

The Zion Collection

In the 1990s I catalogued a 13th-century Bible with varied and interesting indications of provenance, including an inscription "Zion MS. 2" on the first flyleaf, as shown above. Here it is in context:

The St Albans Bible [II]

A number of end-of-month deadlines mean that I again fail to write blog this weekend, but I have added a list of leaves to my Membra disiecta pages, here.

Here is a leaf of the Bible displayed in St Albans Abbey:

The historiated initial was excised, and has been replaced in modern times by a local artist:

And here is a second leaf at the Abbey, in which the hole from an excised initial has been patched with a piece of another leaf from the Bible:

The St Albans Bible

The so-called St Albans Bible (shown above) was made in Paris in the 1320s or 1330s. The earliest certain record of its existence is when it was sold as “The Property of a Lady” at Sotheby’s, 6 July 1964, lot 239, when it consisted of 526 leaves in a 16th century vellum binding. It was bought at the sale by Philip Duschnes for £1,500, and he was selling it as single leaves by the following year.

Although it was a very substantial volume, it was far from complete, "wanting the first two leaves of the prologue and the first leaf of each of the four gospels", with "initials or decorations cut from about thirty leaves". Some leaves simply have holes where the initials were cut out, and others have the holes patched with pieces of text or border decoration from other leaves:

Email notifications for this site

There is no new blogpost this weekend, because "Feedburner", the system used by this site to send email notifications of new posts, is being discontinued, and so I have had to spend some time setting up an alternative service, using "Follow.it".

I think that I have successfully moved the email adddresses of all subscribers to the new system, but it is possible that there will be glitches. If you are seeing this message after Sunday 13 June 2021, and have not had the email or RSS notification that you were previously used to receiving, please let me know (blogspot@manuscripts.org.uk), and I will investigate.

Hopefully I'll be back with a normal blogpost next weekend ...

A New Leaf from the Pontigny Copy of Florus & Didymus

McCarthy Collection, BM1115, verso

After many publication delays, vol. III of the catalgoue of the McCarthy collection of manuscripts appeared a few weeks ago [1]. One item that proved to be have a particualrly interesting provenance, from its origin to the late late 20th century, is a leaf from a 12th-century copy of Florus of Lyon's Commentary on the Pauline Epistles and Didymus the Blind's On the Holy Spirit. 

A leaf that was previously unknown to me has resurfaced in the most recent catalogue of Phillip Pirages [Archive.org], so now seemed to be a good moment to set out what I found out for the McCarthy catalogue entry, and add another membra disiecta page to this site.