More Initials from the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona

A year ago I wrote a blog post about cuttings from the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona, all but one of which I believed to be in institutional collections. In correspondence with Geneviève Marièthoz, who is actively working on the Bible, I subsequently learned that six more initials are in a private collection in France.

By pure luck I recently found reproductions of four more previously-unrecognised initials on two consecutive days. The first was in the collection of Adolf von Brekerath of Berlin, sold by Lepke in Berlin, 17–21 November 1916, lot 12:

The Restitution of a Charter Dated 1199

Earlier this year I was looking at a collection of leaves and documents and came across one that looked particularly appealing, being written in a very elegant script and having a large intact seal:

The Ferrell Roman de la Rose: a Budé, Bourré, and Pérussis Puzzle

After reading the blog post about a manuscript in Liège with the arms of Jean(?) Budé, Dominique Vanwijnsberghe kindly told me about a late 18th-century illuminated leaf, added to a late 14th-century manuscript in the Morgan Library, New York (MS G.32, of which there are images and a description online), which also has the Budé arms half-way down the right border.

Visiting me in London a few weeks later Dominique very kindly gave me a copy of his excellent book, “Moult bons et notables”: L’enluminure tournaisienne à l’époque de Robert Campin (1380–1430) (Leuven, 2007), in which the image below is fig.285.

New York, Morgan Library, MS G.32, fol.1r

Detail of right border

The Bible of Louis de Harcourt (d.1479), Patriarch of Jerusalem and Bishop of Bayeux

In a few weeks' time a well-known dealer will open an exhibition of manuscripts at his gallery in central London. He tasked me to check and revise the existing descriptions, and I undertook to amplify them with new research where possible. This led to some satisfying discoveries, some of which I may post about in the coming weeks.

One of them arose from my recent investigations for this blog of the manuscripts in the 1926 Brölemann-Mallet auction catalogue, several of which were bought by Messrs William Permain for William Randolph Hearst.

English Book Sale Catalogues 1801–1900: A Preliminary Version

Just a few days after publishing the previous post I happened, by pure chance, to discover that a preliminary draft of the long-awaited continuation of Munby and Coral's work has very recently been made available online thanks to Annette Fern. It had been on the website of the Bibliographical Society of America for less than a week, and there has not yet been a formal announcement.

It consists of a chronological list of about 17,500 different catalogues of sales from January 1801 to December 1900, and locations of extant copies of those catalogues in about 150 libraries in the UK and USA.

Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676–1900

One of the most useful tools for provenance research on medieval manuscripts has been made available for online consultation and download:

List of Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676–1900, Now in the British Museum (London, 1915)

A Companion Volume of the Jean Budé Liège Prayerbook

By coincidence, this week I came across what appears to be a companion volume to the Prayerbook discussed in a recent post.
[Throughout this blog you can click images to get larger versions]