New Acquisition: Collection of Medieval Paleography and Illumination Specimens
Special Collections and University Archives has added to its collections a packet of ten individual manuscript leaves useful for the teaching of medieval manuscript writing and illumination of Western Europe from the 13th to 15th century.
The set represents a variety of scribal hand styles, levels of decoration, and time periods in manuscript codex production including the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Over this span of time, manuscript production became increasingly secularized as books came to be created and bound outside of the monastic scriptoria in Europe and available to the laity. The specimen leaves are exclusively works on parchment, but they vary in dimension, layout, and genre, including choirbooks, devotionals, and contemporary Medieval writing. Most are written in Latin, but vernacular works are also represented, including a Dutch Book of Hours.
The leaves represent a variety of lavish book decoration practices including: illuminated capitals, rubrication, floriated borders, and gold work. The packet notably includes a manuscript leaf recovered from a later binding, which demonstrates the durability of vellum and the practice of recycling vellum in early codex practices. A list of the individual leaves follows:
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- 1. A Choirbook leaf This hymn is dedicated to Saint Hilarion whose life story was written by Jerome in 390 at Bethlehem. The leaf contains many marginal notations in a later ca. 16th c. hand. It employs the stave of 4 lines usually attributed to an Italian Benedictine Monk called Guido of Arezzo (approx. 991-1033) and is a useful resource for music notational history.
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- 2. Fragment from a pre-15th century manuscript recovered from a binding of a manuscript written by Nicolas of Lyra, Catena Aurea in Epistolas Pauli [on Romans], in Italy during the mid-13th century. Nicholas was born in Lire, Normandy, France and entered the Friars Minors at Verneuil. He flourished in the 14th c. as a commentator of the Bible, called Postills, from his manner of placing the biblical text first and post illa (after the words of the text) offering his own explication.
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- 3. A leaf with a Medieval text attributed to Albertus Magnus (c. 1200 – November 15, 1280). Also known as Saint Albert the Great, Albert was a German Dominican friar and Catholic bishop. Later canonized as a Catholic saint, he was known during his lifetime as the greatest German philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. The leaf is likely from his work on astrology titled, Speculum Astronomiae (1260), as the text focuses on phases of the Moon.
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- 4. 13th century Bible leaf Includes a portion of Genesis (chapter 49). Rubricated initials in Carolingian minuscule script.
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- 5. A Breviary leaf with gold initials (ca. 1420, France). In essence, a Breviary is an abridgment of liturgical books of different kinds, such as the Psalter, the Antiphonary, the Responsoriary, the Lectionary, etc. Before the rise of the mendicant orders (wandering friars) in the thirteenth century, the daily services were usually contained in a number of large volumes. The first occurrence of a single manuscript of the daily office was written by the Benedictine order at Monte Cassino in Italy in 1099.
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- 6. A Psalter leaf (ca. 1450, France) A psalter is a volume containing the Book of Psalms, often with other devotional material bound in as well, such as a liturgical calendar and litany of the Saints. The volume this leaf derives from was intentionally made small for the purpose of easy transport and availability. Contains rubrication and gold initials.
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- 7. A Book of Hours leaf (15th c., Germany) with extensive floral border, gold initials and line decoration.
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- 8. A Book of Hours calendar leaf (ca. 1400) The book of hours is a devotional book extremely popular in the Middle Ages. Most contain a similar collection of texts, prayers and psalms, often with appropriate decorations, for Christian devotion. Illumination or decoration is minimal in many examples, often restricted to decorated capital letters at the start of psalms and other prayers, but books made for wealthy patrons were extremely lavish, with full-page miniatures. A typical book of hours contained a calendar of Church feasts.
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- 9. A vernacular Book of Hours leaf (14th c., Dutch) An interesting example of the evolution of common prayer intentionally made to be accessible to commoners. Although the most heavily illuminated books of hours were enormously expensive, and written exclusively in Latin, this small book has no illumination and few rubricated initials and could be read by the general laity.
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- 10. A miniature leaf probably a psalter. Gold initials and minor rubrication. Hopefully, one of you reading this blog post can come help us add more descriptive content!?!
This set of manuscript leaves and fragments will serve as a valuable tool for teaching the history of the book and the range of manuscript embellishments and handwriting styles in Western Europe in the Medieval period. It also reflects the core cultural role the Catholic Church played in the lives of people in Europe at that time. In addition to this set of leaves, the library holds many other Medieval books and fragments – over 60 items — available for classroom viewing. Many of these codex are found in the Burgess manuscript collection, and include, for example, an extremely rare 12th century work by Rabanus Maurus, created by the Cathedral-Abbey of the Assumption in Pontigny (commonly known as Pontigny Abbey), a Cistercian monastery located in Pontigny on the River Serein (founded in 1114). A few titles, in their entirety, are also available to view in our digital collections repository at Oregon Digital, and include Le Geste de Garin de Monglane (a Cheltenham Abbey manuscript).
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