Filling Blank Spaces in Medieval Manuscripts (a.k.a. On (to) Wisconsin)

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

My last visit to the University of Wisconsin – Madison took place in 2014. At that time, I blogged about medieval material in two campus collections: Special Collections and the Chazen Museum of Art. It was a great pleasure to return to campus this weekend to deliver the keynote for the annual UW Graduate Association of Medieval Studies Colloquium, where I was treated to a dozen very impressive lectures by graduate students discussing their dissertation research. After lunch, I led a manuscript workshop before delivering my keynote at the end of day. The theme for the colloquium was “Blank Space,” loosely defined. For my keynote, I selected several UW early manuscripts to use as case studies in how medievalists – fragmentologists in particular – can fill the different varieties of blank space accrued by manuscripts as they journey through space and time: congenital, chronological, textual, codicological, and cultural. These methodologies are critical skillsets for medievalists.

A slightly-abbreviated version of my keynote follows. I am extremely grateful to GAMS President Helen Smith for inviting me to Madison, Research Services Librarian for Special Collections Carly Sentieri for sharing images and information, and to Maria Saffiotti Dale, Thomas Dale, Martin Foys, and all of the students and faculty who gave me such a warm welcome and shared their ongoing research.

Medieval manuscripts are much more than the texts they record and the illuminations they preserve. They are travelers through space and time, especially those that have made their way from medieval Europe, Africa, or Asia to 21^st-century America. As they move through the centuries and across the miles, they collect information – signs of use, readership, and ownership – but they also accrue damage. That damage may lead to the loss of evidence along the way. Filling these blank spaces is reparative and, by extension, imperative.

UW MS 161

Our first case study is Special Collections Manuscript 161, a Book of Hours written in mid-15^th-c. France. Unlike the damaged objects we’ll look at next, this manuscript was born with blank spaces, ten of them in fact. Only one miniature was filled in, the first in the Hours of the Virgin series, illustrating the Annunciation (left). By looking at the surrounding textual context, and knowing what we know about traditions of illustration in late medieval Books of Hours, we can fill these blanks and posit what should have been. The frame below, which opens the Hours of the Cross, should have held an illustration of the Crucifixion, for example.

These are physical, and congenital, blank spaces. But this manuscript also has a chronological lacuna. How can we fill in the blanks of its journey from 15^th-century France to 21^st-century Wisconsin? Let’s start with the evidence within the manuscript itself.  The calendar includes a notice in red – indicating that it is particularly important – for the Feast of St. Lazarus on October 20, a date specifically celebrated in Autun in central France. In addition, two contemporary prayers at the front of the manuscript invoke St. Melanius (Bishop of nearby Troyes) and a very obscure virgin saint named Hoyldis, also venerated in the same region. That internal evidence places the manuscript’s origins in or near Autun. Moving forward in time, we find early inscriptions by members of the French  Grailleult family at the back of the codex.

By the nineteenth century, the manuscript had crossed the Channel; inside the front cover (left) we are helpfully informed that the codex had been owned by one Elizabeth Riches of “Sorne’s Town near London” (likely today’s Shorne – identified by UW Professor Martin Foys, who knows a thing or two about the philology of English rural placenames). In 1819, Riches gave the manuscript to “J. Mann,” and Mann gave it in turn to “Mr. Sutcliff’s Library in the Academy at Little Horton” in 1821. A bit of internet research identifies Mr. Sutcliff as Baptist preacher John Sutcliff, whose library was donated to Horton Academy (now Rawdon College) when he died in 1814. At the Academy’s Jubilee in 1854, Mr. Sutcliff’s Library was described as “Consisting of nearly three thousand volumes, chiefly of the works of Continental, American, and our own [that is, Baptist] divines, embracing almost all subjects, it was peculiarly fitted for the Theological Institution. Many of the works are rare and difficult to procure.” Miss Riches’ donation would have been a welcome addition to this impressive collection.

That takes us up to 1821, which is as far as we can go given the evidence in the manuscript itself. We don’t know when, or under what circumstances, the manuscript was de-accessioned by the Academy library. But thanks to the extraordinary online resource the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, which I have mentioned in numerous posts, we can make our way from England to Wisconsin. If we search the Schoenberg Database for Books of Hours associated with Autun with 106 leaves (or 109, since some dealers count the added leaves at the end), we find multiple sales of this very manuscript, along with a lengthy trail of ownership. All of this information had been lost by the time the manuscript arrived in Madison. Thanks to the Schoenberg Database, we can fill in the chronological blanks and recover this manuscript’s history by tracking it through space and time

Sotheby’s London, 24 May 1911, lot 591

The manuscript was sold by Sotheby’s London five times: in 1911, 1937, 1943 (from the collection of Albert M. Patrick in Birmingham, UK), 1945, and 1981. In the 1911 Sotheby’s catalogue, the UW manuscript is clearly identifiable as lot 591: the dimensions, the number of lines, and the description of the number of blank frames all confirm the identification (with thanks to British scholar Laura Cleaver for the image). At that sale, the manuscript was sold to a London bookseller named Dobell for £7. Dobell offered it unsuccessfully for £12 in 1911, and, with more success, in 1912, which was when it was likely acquired by a British collector named William Moss of Sonning-on-Thames, a lovely country village not far from London (it’s where George and Amal Clooney live, so you know it’s fancy). Moss owned the manuscript until 1937, when (as Laura Cleaver informs me) his doctor advised him that he needed to go abroad for the good of his health and he sold most of his collection at Sotheby’s: the catalogue politely describes him as “changing his residence.” After sales in 1943 and 1945, Sotheby’s sold the manuscript for the last time in 1981, and San Francisco dealer Bernard Rosenthal sold it to the University of Wisconsin four years later.

This codex was born with blank space. By the time it reached Wisconsin, the provenance had been lost and the manuscript had acquired chronological lacunae that we can now fill, tracing its journey from Autun to Shorne to Little Horton to Sonning-on-Thames to Birmingham and, eventually, to Madison. But manuscripts may acquire other types of blank spaces as they move through space and time. It is the sad fate of uncounted manuscripts – tens of thousands, at least – that they have not survived the journey from there and then to here and now intact. Aside from the damage inflicted by fire, insects, water, and war, human hands have taken a toll as well, as manuscripts were taken apart by late-medieval binderies to use as binding scrap, or cropped by collectors, or dismembered by modern biblioclasts in the name of capitalism. That destruction leaves its own kind of blank space.

Let’s start with the two small fragments that together comprise UW MS 186 (below). The shape and staining on these two little bits identify them as having been used as structural components in an early-modern binding, and while a note in the folder says that they were removed from a 1546 edition of Paulo Giovio’s Elegies printed in Venice, I can confirm that they were NOT removed from UW’s copy of that book. They must have been removed from a different copy before UW acquired them.  The script looks 13^th-century Italian to me, so it makes sense that it would have made its way into the binding of a book printed in Italy.

But what was it before it was a pastedown inside of a sixteenth-century Venetian printed book? A Google search identifies the text as “De conflictu vitiorum et virtutum,” a very popular work on Virtues and Vices attributed to the 8^th-century Abbot Ambrosius Autpertus, of the Beneventan house of San Vincenzo al Volturno. The text is edited in the Patrologia Latina, so it’s not difficult to identify the specific portion preserved on these fragments. The format of the fragments – tall and narrow – suggests that the original leaves had two columns. In a two-column manuscript, the recto and verso of the innermost column, at the gutter edge, are not consecutive with one another, while the recto and verso of the outer column are. We have both situations here.  The recto and verso of the first fragment are consecutive, identifying this as the outer column of its original leaf. By comparing the layout of the fragment with the text of the edition, we can figure out approximately how much text is missing, filling in the blank space of the missing inner column on both recto and verso. Was the other fragment part of that same leaf? Unfortunately not. The second fragment was cut from a different leaf, as the text is not consecutive with the first fragment. And because the recto and verso of the second fragment are not consecutive with each other, we can identify this as the inner column of its leaf.

The next question is: how much is missing between the verso of the first fragment and the recto of the second? Exactly one column! This means that the second fragment immediately follows the missing column on f. 1v. These fragments were originally part of two consecutive leaves (below).

The outer (missing) column of the second fragment would have preserved the last few lines of the Virtues and Vices homily; the text on the verso remains unidentified but was likely a lapidary of some kind, a text describing the properties of gemstones.

Chazen Museum 2001.30

We can use a similar methodology to investigate the blank space surrounding this gorgeous historiated initial, Chazen Museum 2001.30, which I mentioned in the 2014 blogpost. The initial has been attributed to Vincent Raymond de Lodève, a French artist active in Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century. And thanks to a brilliant piece of art historical and codicological research by Maria Saffiotti Dale, formerly the Chazen Museum Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, we now know that this initial was once part of an antiphonary made for use in the Sistine Chapel itself, a Vatican Library manuscript known as Cappella Sistina 11. Maria’s 1998 article demonstrated that the manuscript’s five missing leaves had initials on them, initials that were later cropped out and that she was able to identify (she later convinced the powers-that-be at the Museum to acquire the cutting for the Chazen collection). It’s not entirely clear when the damage occurred, although it’s certainly possible – likely even – that the leaves were removed during the famed looting of the Sistine Chapel by Napoleonic forces in the late 18^th century. We also know from archival records that Vincent Raymond painted these initials in 1539. It was Maria who identified the source manuscript and determined the location of the missing initials in the original codex.

The Chazen initial was cut from a missing leaf originally found between folios 90v and 91r (above). You can easily tell that something has gone wrong in this opening because the page on the left is the dark (hair) side of the parchment, while the facing page is the creamier (flesh) side; elsewhere in the manuscript we find, as expected, flesh side facing flesh side, and hair side facing hair side. Maria determined that the kneeling Pope represents not just any old generic Pope but Clement I himself, whose feastday is November 23. When such initials are cut from their parent manuscript – a not uncommon practice – the miniatures present themselves by default as self-sufficient works of art, especially when framed and mounted (I’ve written about the semiotic implications of this practice here). But such miniatures are decontextualized. Without Maria’s work, we would not be able to identify this rather generic kneeling Pope as Clement I or be able to restore the initial to its rightful place, not only within the manuscript but on its original leaf. This process is facilitated by the survival and accessibility of the fragmentary text on the other side.

Chazen Museum 2001.30, dorse

Often, such miniatures are adhered to a backing that obscures any textual evidence, a backing that might not be able to be removed without damaging the cutting. Not all Curators are as steeped in the work of identifying cuttings as is Maria Saffiotti Dale, and knowing how important the hidden evidence can be, she requested that the dealer from whom the Chazen acquired the cutting engage a parchment conservator to 1) determine if the backing could be safely removed, and 2) after making that determination, actually remove the backing, so that she could study the textual evidence.

The removal of the miniature left a lacuna in the leaf, and the missing leaf is itself a lacuna that surrounds the miniature. Can we re-contextualize the miniature by filling that blank space?

Visualizing a Leaf without its Miniature and a Miniature without its Leaf

Because the leaves were foliated after the leaf with the miniature was removed, the missing leaf has no folio number. We’ll call it “90bis”, which means the second folio 90. We can’t tell from looking at the cutting whether it was taken from the front (recto) or back (verso) of the leaf, but we can figure it out. Here’s how: by searching the CANTUS database for a chant for Lauds of St. Clement that starts with [O] and ends with the word [domini] (on folio 91r), we find the Lauds antiphon “Orante sancto Clemente apparuit ei agnus domini,” an identification made by Maria several years ago. If the initial is placed near the bottom of the verso, the chant is a perfect fit:

If we turn back to the other side, we find the fragmentary text “evangelium…at in pectore,” and, knowing where the initial fits on the page, we also know where this fragmentary text fits on the recto. If we search CANTUS for the phrase “in pectore,” we find exactly what we’re looking for: “Virgo gloriosa semper evangelium Christi gerebat in pectore suo non diebus neque noctibus vacabat a colloquiis divinis et oratione cessebat,” a Vespers antiphon for St. Cecelia, whose feastday just happens to be on Nov. 22, the day before Clement!  What about the rest of the missing text? We can use CANTUS to complete the chant that begins at the bottom of f. 90v, which also fits perfectly on f. 90bis recto. We’ve now reconstructed both sides of the original leaf and can digitally restore it to the codex.

 

These case studies demonstrated how we can fill in the blanks left when a leaf is damaged. The next case study will fill a codicological blank space.

Univ. of Wisconsin, Special Collections, s.n.

This UW Special Collections bifolium (no shelfmark yet, as it was acquired recently) was removed from its quire early on, after which it was trimmed and folded to create a bookcover. The text can be easily identified as Cicero’s De officiis. The style of script places it in Italy in the 15^th century, right in the middle of the humanistic revival of classical learning. It’s a very well-known work, so it was simple to find an edition online and identify the text preserved on each of these two conjoint leaves. On the left, chapters 47-52, and on the right, chapters 64-69. That’s a pretty big lacuna to fill, from chapters 53 to 63. But with an edition at hand, we can figure out not only how much text is missing but also calculate the number of intervening leaves and, by extension, bifolia. So this is not only a textual blank space but a codicological one as well.

Each leaf of the fragment, recto plus verso, is approximately 3,700 characters, including spaces. The number of characters between the end of the verso and the start of the conjoint recto is 7,883, including spaces. That is almost exactly two leaves. And when you have a conjoint bifolium with two leaves separating them? Those two leaves must be an intervening bifolium. And not only a bifolium, but the central bifolium of the quire, regardless of how many bifolia there were originally, because the leaves of that missing bifolium would have been both consecutive and conjoint. So now we know that the Wisconsin fragment was originally the second bifolium from the center of its quire.

MS 170a, no. 4

For our final case studies, we’ll be looking at the space surrounding whole single leaves like MS 170a, no. 4. As my readers will know, in the first decades of the twentieth century, it became common for bookdealers to dismember manuscripts and distribute leaves one by one. They knew they would make more money this way than by selling one leaf to one buyer. Each of these leaves presents itself as a distinct object, whole in and of itself, but in truth a leaf like this one is surrounded on all sides by lacunae, and the sum of these lacunae is the ghost of the lost book. The more leaves we can find, the more we can manifest the lost codex.

This lovely fourteenth-century fragment from France originally belonged to a  Breviary. The leaf preserves Office liturgy for the second Sunday in Advent; we know this because the responsories can be identified in the CANTUS database. But guess what? There’s ANOTHER leaf of this manuscript on campus, at the Chazen Museum (accession no. 2013.37.61). This leaf, by a very nice co-incidence, preserves liturgy for the THIRD Sunday in Advent. These leaves were near one another in the original manuscript but  came to Madison decades apart and by completely different routes, so it’s satisfying to be able to reunite them. By putting them side-by-side, we’ve already begun to fill the blank space left when the codex was dismembered.

The Chazen leaf was given to the Museum in 2013 by Barbara Mackey Kaerwer, who purchased it in 1954 from New York dealer Hans P. Kraus. The Special Collections Library, on the other hand, doesn’t have any information about exactly when or how their leaf was acquired – this is quite common with single leaves, which do tend to slip through the cracks. But I’ve figured out exactly how it got there.

According to my research on New York dealer Philip Duschnes and his sales of manuscript leaves, Duschnes was selling leaves of this manuscript from 1939 through 1948, although I have not yet been able to identify when or under what circumstances the codex was dismembered. But Duschnes wasn’t the only one selling leaves of this manuscript. You will likely not be surprised at this point to learn that leaves from this breviary were also sold by our old friend Otto F. Ege, as I discussed in my Purdue blogpost from a few weeks ago. According to the Lima Public Library sales ledgers, the Library sold 133 leaves from this manuscript between 1935 and 1941, making this one of Ege’s most popular manuscripts. The buyers were scattered across the country from Los Angeles to Nova Scotia and from Oregon to South Carolina.

From Lima, the leaves were sold to buyers in 51 cities across 24 states, including three in Wisconsin: Margaret Kaestner of Fond du Lac bought one in 1940 for $3; Mrs. Leslie Rowley of Madison spent $6.50 for hers in 1946, and, in 1944, the third was purchased for $6.50 by a Madison gentleman named George C. Allez. Allez was the Director of the University of Wisconsin Library School from 1941-1950. According to the Lima ledgers, he purchased six different leaves in 1944: Gwara Handlist numbers 5, 18, 24, 122, 123, and 244. These are the exact same handlist numbers which can be found today in the Special Collections MS 170a box! That can’t be co-incidence…these must be the very leaves that Allez bought in 1944.

There’s one more type of blank space that fragments leave behind: a cultural lacuna. Dealers in the 20^th century weren’t just dismembering Latinate manuscripts. Even more enticing to American buyers were the “exotic” manuscripts in non-Latinate alphabets such as Ethiopic, Syriac, Tibetan, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Persian, to name just a few. Such manuscripts suffered a traumatic double-decontextualization that stems from colonialist praxis: the removal of a codex from its community of origin – a community to whom it may have been sacred – followed  by its dismemberment and the loss of any evidence or knowledge about its point of origin or history, the acquisition of leaves by collectors who were exoticizing these “others,” and the deposit of these leaves in collections that through no fault of their own may not have staff with linguistic or content expertise to provide them with appropriate metadata to facilitate discoverability.

A prime example of this phenomenon is the Ege portfolio rather unfortunately titled “Fifteen Original Oriental Manuscript Leaves.” Ege created dozens of copies of this portfolio by dismembering fifteen manuscripts of non-European origin, seeing these as interesting examples of different writing systems. One of these portfolios belongs to the University of Wisconsin, donated to the University in 1986 by Ege’s daughter Elizabeth Freudenheim in honor of her own daughter Jo Louise earning a UW PhD in Nutritional Sciences. The set (shelfmark MS 195) includes leaves from several Arabic Korans, a Syriac prayerbook, an Armenian lectionary, an Ethiopic hymnal, a collection of Persian poetry, a Cyrillic hymnal, and part of a Tibetan prayer scroll, among others (below, l-r t-b).

Libraries often miscatalogue these leaves, because Ege’s descriptions are all that cataloguers have access to, especially in a Library where there may not be someone on staff, or even on campus, who can read Tibetan, or Syriac, or Ethiopic. For example, the Armenian lectionary (above, top row, third from the left) is generally said to have been written in the fifteenth century, although Ege skeptically also cites a now-missing colophon dating the manuscript to “1121 A.D.”

What Ege didn’t realize is that the Armenian calendar is quite different from the Gregorian. Something dated 1121 in Armenian was in fact written in Anno Domini 1671…you have to add 550 to convert the date. So the manuscript was actually written in the 17^th century. There’s no reason a cataloguer would be expected to know that the colophon’s date was according to the Armenian calendar, because that information has been lost. The Armenian leaf is an important example of how critical it is to consider and respect the cultural context in which a leaf was written and to acknowledge the damage inflicted on a manuscript when it is removed from its community of origin, dismembered, and decontextualized. That’s a blank space we should all try to fill.

The Proof is in the Parchment: Manuscripts at Purdue

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

Last week, the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America (the learned society of which I am Executive Director) took place at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. It was a delightful, congenial, and edifying gathering of more than three hundred medievalists who spent three days learning from one another, viewing exhibits and performances on campus, and generally enjoying each other’s company. After the conference, I had the great pleasure of taking an actual manuscript road trip to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, about two hours south of Notre Dame. I had been invited to lead a workshop and deliver a lecture about some recent discoveries concerning manuscripts and fragments in their collection. Seems like a great time for a blogpost!

Photo by Kristin Leaman

Like most midwestern U.S. collections, Purdue has only a handful of pre-1600 manuscripts of European origin, most of them fragments. But if I’ve learned anything in the decade since I started this blog, it’s that every manuscript has a story to tell, if we know how to listen.

Mr. Bragge Buys a Manuscript

We’ll start with MSP 164, a  fifteenth-century codex from Germany that preserves Gregory the Great’s Homilies on the Book of Ezechiel, followed by a subject index.  The manuscript includes two skillful miniatures: on folio 1r, Pope Gregory sits at a medieval writing desk copying an exemplar, wearing his papal regalia; on f. 51 recto, a second miniature depicts the unidentified Man in white linen of Ezekiel’s visions measuring the Temple, as in chap. 42, verse 15.  The color scheme, the style of the initials, and the heavy outlines – almost like a woodcut – are typical for German manuscripts of this period.

MSP 164, f. 51r

The style of the script and decoration certainly place the codex in the mid-15^th century, but there is more evidence in the manuscript that narrows it down even further.  In red colophons on ff. 98r and 106r, the scribe has actually told us precisely when he completed the manuscript and where!  On f. 98r, he notes that he was writing at Huysburg Abbey (in Germany, near Halberstadt) under the abbacy of Theoderic, who was abbot from 1448-1483.  But on f. 106r, we get an even more specific date: “Anno incarnationis dominicae Millesimoquadringentesimosexagesimosexto” (seriously, that’s how he wrote it): i.e. the year 1466. That was easy!

MSP 164, f. 106r

MSP 164, f. 98r

 We’ve learned several things from this initial examination: the manuscript was made for a community of Benedictines in Huysburg, Germany, in 1466, and was provided with a handy subject index to use when composing sermons. Slightly later marginal notes indicate that it was used in this way for decades. But what happened next?  Incredibly, Huysburg was one of the few German monasteries that survived the Reformation. The abbey was suppressed in 1804 during the secularization in Prussia, when its buildings and estates passed to the State and its library was dispersed.

To find out what happened after the dispersal of the library, we need to head to the internet, in particular to the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, a resource administered by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  The Schoenberg Database is a provenance database in which each record represents a transaction involving a single manuscript. There are currently nearly 264,000 records in the database, representing sales, gifts, and recorded observations of tens of thousands of individual manuscripts over hundreds of years. Sales of the same manuscript can be linked together in the database, providing a trail of ownership.  If we search for sales of manuscripts of Gregory’s Homilies on Ezechiel associated with the Abbey in Huysburg,  we find three linked records that seem to represent sales of this very manuscript: Covent Garden bookseller Joseph Lilly in 1863, Sotheby’s London in 1876, and Sotheby’s London again, in 2014.

The 1876 sale (at left) is identified only as the collection of a “Gentleman of Consummate Taste and Judgment” (as the catalogue eloquently put it); this elegant gentleman was collector William Bragge, a civil engineer who traveled the world for his work on railways and other projects. As an antiquarian, he was particularly interested in the history of tobacco, but he also took advantage of his travels to build an important collection of rare books and manuscripts, much of which was deaccessioned at this 1876 Sotheby’s sale.

There are several more pieces of evidence to consider, two modern pencil inscriptions on the first flyleaf that help fill in the period between the Bragge sale in 1876 and Sotheby’s in 2014. The inscriptions are faded and difficult to read, but thanks to some post-processing by University of Oklahoma professor William Endres (thanks, Bill!), the lower inscription – at least – can be read: it was written in Philadelphia, on Christmas Day 1905, signed “A.S.R.”

MSP 164r, image processed by William Endres

A.S.R. in Philadelphia in 1905 is almost certainly antiquarian book dealer Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, who died in 1952, although the inscription is not in his hand. The inscription on the right is more challenging, and may require imaging under ultraviolet light to discern completely. I’ve got “Reverendae Matris”…something…”Maria Louis”…something…and maybe signed “Edmond Philips,” although I’m not totally certain about that bit. At the very least, we know that the manuscript was in Philadelphia by 1905.

Finally, here’s why it’s always valuable to see the actual object rather than relying solely on digital imagery. On that same leaf, in the lower right corner, is an embossed ownership stamp that is not legible under direct white light (left). Using raked light (coming in at a 90 degree angle, that is), I was able to read it (right). I’m fairly certain that it says “Ursuline Academy.” The Ursulines are communities of Catholic nuns, and there are multiple Ursuline Academies around North America. I don’t know – yet – which Ursuline Academy once owned this manuscript, but I hope to figure it out eventually.

MSP 164, f. 1r, Embossed Ownership Stamp (direct light)

MSP 164, f. 1r, Embossed Ownership Stamp (raked light)

As I hope I’ve demonstrated, a  whole codex like this one accretes significant amounts of evidence over its lengthy life span that we can use to reconstruct its journey from there and then to here and now. Unfortunately, most medieval manuscripts don’t survive intact.

A Stowaway!

Purdue University, Archives and Special Collections,  VSF BX1749 .A648 1477

For an example of this, we’ll take a look at an early printed book, the Summae theologicae of St. Antoninus, Archibishop of Florence, who died in 1459. This theological work was published by Venetian printer Nicolas Jenson in 1477. It’s lovely, clean and bright, with delightful handcolored woodcut initials throughout, in a contemporary chained binding. But we’re not here to talk about early printed books. Why, then, are we looking at this? Because it contains a stowaway: inside the front and back covers are fragments from an earlier manuscript.

An Upside-Down Surprise!

In the fifteenth-century, this binder needed pieces of parchment to secure the leather turnins, and a pile of old manuscripts was just the thing. In all likelihood, this manuscript was falling apart in the 1470s or had been superceded by a printed book or more up-to-date manuscript, so the codex was dismantelled to be recycled as part of the binding. This early-modern recycling was extremely common, and it’s why I always recommend that librarians survey their early bindings to see if they happen to have bonus fragments that they might not have known about. These leaves come from an early 11^th-century copy of Haimo of Halberstadt’s homilies. The leaf in front is Haimo’s Homily 18, for the 2^nd Sunday after Epiphany, and the one in back is from his Homily 15, for Epiphany itself.

Left: Inner Upper Board (rotated 180°); Right: Inner Lower Board

Like this manuscript, which may very well be the oldest European manuscript at Purdue, untold thousands of codices have been lost due to fire, flood, war, and other dangers, early-modern recycling, or the knife of the biblioclast. In early 20^th century America in particular, as readers of this blog will know well, dealers were in the habit of cutting up manuscripts to sell leaf by leaf, at a significant profit. By asking a different set of questions, we may be able to determine how and when a leaf was separated from its sister leaves, search for more leaves from the same manuscript, and even work to digitally remediate the destruction of biblioclasm in a virtual space.

A Tiny Little World Traveler

MSP 136, f. 9

Let’s start with f. 9 in the fragment collection MSP 136, a tiny little manuscript page. When I say tiny, I mean TINY. It’s only 3.5 x 4.3 inches,  about the size of a standard index card. That is extremely small for a medieval manuscript, and tells us something important right away: by contrast to the codex of Ezechiel homilies, which was designed to be read from a lectern or writing desk, this manuscript was meant to be portable. Next, we need to determine what kind of manuscript this is.  From the rubrication, we can see that it contains lessons 4 through 9 of one feast and lessons 1 through 3 (and the rubric for the fourth) of the next. It also has other prayers and chant texts (but no music). That makes it a breviary, a liturgical manuscript with readings for the Divine Office for the use of the priest or other officiant.  One rubric tells us even more specifically which feastday we’re looking at: Dominica quinta post epiphaniam (“Fifth Sunday after Epiphany,” in mid-February).

Next question: can we approximate where and when was it produced? The style of the script looks like 15^th-century Italy to me, but it’s hard to be more specific than that with so little evidence. But the metadata in the Purdue online catalogue identifies the date of origin with surprising specificity: 1464. How could the Purdue cataloguer have known that? It certainly isn’t recorded on the leaf itself. The record continues:  “We know the name of the scribe (Bartholomew) and precise day on which the manuscript was completed (December 22) from an inscription on the last folio of the once-intact book.” Interesting! But again, where did that information come from? Time to start Googling.  A search for “breviary, 1464” brings us to the indispensable provenance blog by British scholar Peter Kidd, who has in fact conducted significant research on this very manuscript and explains the whole story in this 2022 blogpost.

Sotheby’s, 29 June 1938, lot 512

The Purdue leaf was purchased from Dawson’s Bookshop in Los Angeles several decades ago. According to Kidd, Dawson’s acquired the whole manuscript sometime after it was sold at Sotheby’s on 29 June 1938, lot 512 (above).  And here we see the source of the specific date of 1464: when whole, the manuscript had a colophon identifying the scribe not as Bartholemew but as one Karolus de Blanchis de Bardano, rector of the tiny 12^th-century  Church of St. Bartholomew in Cune, in the Italian diocese of Lucca. The tiny church still stands today in the village of Cune, not far from Pisa. Karolus goes so far as to record that he completed the manuscript at the 18^th hour of the 22^nd of December, 1464.  

Next we turn to famed manuscript scholar Christopher de Hamel, who, in his work on manuscripts in New Zealand (see Bibliography below), traced the provenance of this manuscript back even further: he identifies it has having been part of the collection of  William Ardene Shoults (1839–1887) of London, who bequeathed it to his widow Elizabeth. In 1888, the first Anglican Bishop of Dunedin convinced her to donate the manuscript – along with many other books and manuscripts from her husband’s collection – to help establish the library of Selwyn College in Dunedin, New Zealand, which deaccessioned and sold it at Sotheby’s in 1938. He goes on to record that the manuscript was then acquired by bookseller  Marks & Co., of 84 Charing Cross Road in London, who presumably sold it to Dawson’s Bookshop in Los Angeles soon thereafter.

Here’s the final chapter of the story. Dawson’s offered the codex for sale in February of 1940 for $75, but apparently no one was interested. By April of that same year, they tried a different tactic. They dismembered the manuscript and began selling single leaves for around $1 each. With more than 300 leaves to offer, they could make a lot more money this way. Purdue purchased the leaf directly from Dawson’s, and it was Dawson’s who provided the Purdue cataloguer with the information about the date and place of origin, which of course Dawson’s knew because they had once owned the complete manuscript with the colophon. And guess what happened when they dismembered it? They separated the colophon leaf from its sisters. If the Purdue cataloguer hadn’t preserved that information, even though there was no supporting evidence on the leaf itself, the job of identifying this little wanderer would have been much more difficult. And the colophon leaf? It has disappeared, so do keep an eye out for it.

This tiny manuscript has led an extraordinary life.  From Italy to London to New Zealand, back to London, to Los Angeles, then, broken and in pieces, this single leaf  blowing on the winds of commerce and  settling down at last in West Lafayette, Indiana. Taking into account the extra 4,000 miles you have to travel to get from London to New Zealand by boat instead of flying, that’s a total journey of nearly 42,000 miles. This leaf is a resilient little survivor.

But we’re not done yet. The last question is – can we find more leaves? Now that we have so much information, it is actually quite simple to find more. Google “breviary, Lucca, 1464” and you will find, among others, four leaves for sale right now on EBay for around $250 each.

Miss Popularity

MSP 136, f. 6

Next up is leaf 6 of MSP 136, a lovely fourteenth-century fragment from France. Like the Lucca leaf, this leaf comes from a Breviary, in this case preserving Office liturgy for the feast of Mary Magdalene on July 22;  we know this because the antiphons and the Responsory “Pectore sincero dominum Maria” can be easily identified with her liturgy using online resources like the CANTUS liturgical database. In addition, the readings include biblical quotations about her life.

When working with fragments, the measurements of the leaf and the layout of the text work together to create almost a fingerprint: if you find leaves with the same dimensions and the same number of columns and lines, you may have a match. The writing space, in particular, is a often a clear indicator that two leaves do indeed come from the same parent manuscript. The Purdue breviary leaf has 30 lines of text in two columns and measures around 7 x 4.75 inches. Using these criteria,  I’ve identified leaves of this manuscript offered by New York dealer and biblioclast Philip Duschnes as early as 1939.

According to my research on Duschnes and his sales of manuscript leaves, he was selling leaves of this manuscript from 1939 through at least 1948, although I have not yet been able to identify when or under what circumstances the codex was dismembered. But Duschnes wasn’t the only one selling leaves of this manuscript. Duschnes counted among his friends and business associates our old friend, Cleveland bookdealer Otto F. Ege, who – again as readers of this blog will know – was among the most prolific of the twentieth-century American biblioclasts.

Because leaves of this manuscript are always no. 24 in the Ege portfolio titled Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts, they can be cited as Handlist 24 (referring to Scott Gwara’s handlist in the book Otto Ege’s Manuscripts). Here are some examples of Handlist 24 from the portfolios at the University of Colorado, University of Minnesota, Stony Brook University, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (note that these leaves are almost always misidentified as a Book of Hours rather than a Breviary, legacy data that comes from Ege himself). But Ege also sold leaves of this manuscript outside of the portfolio collections.  We know this because of extensive sales ledgers recently discovered in the basement of the Lima, Ohio, Public Library by Ohio State University curator Eric Johnson (below).

Ledgers from the Lima Public Library. Photos by Eric Johnson.

Ege had a long-standing business relationship with the Lima Public Library whereby they would sell leaves on his behalf and keep 30% of the proceeds to support their Staff Loan Fund. According to the ledgers, the Library sold 133 leaves from Handlist 24 between 1935 and 1967, making this one of Ege’s most popular manuscripts.  The buyers were scattered across the country from Los Angeles to Nova Scotia and from Oregon to South Carolina, in fifty-one cities across twenty-four states, including three Indianans: a Mrs. Harry George from Bedford bought one for $5 in 1937, Mrs. Ruth S. Ryan of Evansville bought two leaves in 1942, for $3.50 and $6.50 respectively – the pricier one likely had more decorated initials – and Gary’s own Sara Fenwick paid $2.50 in 1946. Do their descendants still own these leaves? Are they hanging on Ruth Ryan’s granddaughter’s living room wall or stored in a trunk in Sara Fenwick’s great-nephew’s attic? We may never know, but it’s always possible that leaves like this may appear in a roadside antique barn or online auction, so keep an eye out.

Separated at Birth

MSP 136, f. 4 (The “Bohun” Bible)
(447 x 310 (311 x 205) mm, 2 columns, 22 lines)

For our final case study, we’re going to combine fragmentology with codicology, the study of the materiality and structure of a manuscript, using this gorgeous oversize Bible leaf from mid-fourteenth-century England. The first thing to notice is that it is HUGE: nearly 18″ x 12”. Originally, this was likely the third of a four-volume set, with hundreds of leaves in each codex, nearly a thousand in all. That’s a lot of sheep, a lot of labor, a lot of time, and a lot of resources. This was a valuable object. It’s also very well known among those who study dismembered manuscripts (there are more of us out there than you might think!).  It is known as the Bohun Bible (pronounced “Boon”) because of an early but uncertain association with the English Bohun family, who were themselves closely associated with the English royal family in the mid-fourteenth century, when this manuscript was produced.

Thanks to research by Peter Kidd and Christopher de Hamel, among others (see Bibliography below), we know quite a lot about this manuscript.  Several seventeenth-century English owners signed the last page, which is currently at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.  The last of these was Sir Peter Leycester  (d.1678). Peter Kidd recently found a description of this manuscript in Sir Peter’s library catalogue, where the Bible is described as “Part of a greate Latine Bible in Manuscript: a fayre character with greate Gold-Letters (about the tyme of Henry VI, as I coniecture, it was writ) contayninge the Proverbs & all the Prophets.”  These early collectors removed several of the pages, some with miniatures, and by 1927 the main portion of the codex had been dismembered by the London dealer Myers & Co. De Hamel and Kidd have identified several hundred leaves, including the leaf at Purdue.

This volume originally preserved a portion of the Old Testament from Proverbs to the prophet Malachi, on 413 oversize folios. Each biblical book would have begun with an elaborately decorated page like the one at the right, the beginning of the prophetic book of Nahum, which sold at Christie’s in 2015 for…wait for it…a whopping £62,500 (or around $79,000). There were twenty-two Biblical books in the manuscript, which means there were twenty-two pages like this, of which about half have been located. Many were removed by those 17^th-century owners,  one of whom noted the fact by leaving marginal notes lamenting the destruction such as the note on f. 410 recto (below), which reads “from the 17^th verse of this 14^th Chapter of Zechariah, is torne out & wantinge.”

Folio 410r, detail (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. bib. b. 4). Photo by Peter Kidd.

Purdue’s leaf preserves Ecclesiasticus Chapters 39 and 40, with the beginning of Chapter 40 set off by a lovely initial.  Given that each leaf has headings that identify the Book and marginal numbers identifying the chapters, putting the leaves in order would be a simple task. It is made simpler by the fact that most leaves are foliated by an early-modern hand. Some leaves are unnumbered – these are the ones that were removed early on, before the foliation was added. Purdue’s leaf is folio 107, a fact that will be important for this next exercise.

Modern parchment-making

First, I need to take a moment to explain how medieval manuscripts are physically constructed.  We start with an animal, generally a sheep, goat, or calf. The animal is slaughtered and skinned,  the skin scraped and cleaned and soaked and stretched in a lengthy process that creates parchment, the writing surface for the manuscript.  The skin is cut into rectangular pieces called “bifolia.” The number and size cut from each skin is dependent on the size of the animal and the desired dimensions of the finished book.  

In the case of the Bohun Bible, each skin provided two bifolia, or four leaves, which would mean a useable surface area of 36 x 24 inches, a fairly large animal.  Once trimmed, the parchment sheets are folded in half to create two attached leaves (or “bifolia”), nested in groups of four, five, or six to create small notebooks called  “quires” on which the text is written. In the Bohun Bible, quires were comprised of four nested bifolia. Once the quires were ready, they were stacked in order and sewn between boards to create the finished book.

The biblioclast reverses the process…removing the quires from the binding, removing the sewing from the gutters, separating the bifolia from one another.  But he doesn’t stop there – the biblioclast must parse the manuscript even further, splitting the atom and dividing the bifolium into two leaves.  What I want to do today is bring two of those separated leaves back together, digitally if not haptically.  If we can figure out which leaf was originally attached to, that is, conjoint with, the Purdue leaf, we can reconstruct  the original bifolium, which in turn can help us to understand more about the structure of the original codex and further remediate the damage of biblioclasm.

Purdue’s leaf is folio 107.  We know that f. 105 had a catchword, because that leaf is currently at the Bodleian Library.  This means that f. 106 (still untraced) was the first leaf of the next quire, and  f. 107, our leaf, was the second. We can now start diagramming how the quire would have been structured (below). Folio 108 is at Vassar College, and f. 109 belongs to the Free Library of Philadelphia. Folio 110 was sold in Boston in 1979 and is now untraced. We now have our first conjoint pair: the leaf in Philadelphia (the fourth leaf of the quire) must originally have been both consecutive and conjoint with the leaf sold in 1979 (the fifth leaf)! The laws of manuscript physics demand it.

Quire Diagram including the Purdue leaf

Here’s where things get interesting. Remember when I mentioned that some leaves were removed before the foliation was added? When they appear, they can be situated in the correct sequence thanks to the Biblical text, although they do interfere with the niceties of sequential foliation.  This leaf, recently acquired by the University of Notre Dame, has no folio number but preserves the text of Ecclesiasticus 44 and 45. It clearly belongs in our quire.  It also has no catchword, so it can’t be the final leaf of the quire (that last leaf is currently untraced). That leaves us with two possible placements: leaf 6 or 7 in the quire. It can’t be the 6^th, because it isn’t consecutive with the fifth leaf (the one sold in 1979).  So it must be the 7^th leaf. And guess what that means?  The Purdue leaf and the one at the University of Notre Dame were originally a conjoint pair! That’s an amazing coincidence…these leaves haven’t seen each other in at least 100 years, and here they are today only 100 miles apart!

 And now we can put Purdue and Notre Dame back together, digitally if not haptically (the leaves appear to be different colors because they were each imaged in different lighting). If we align them, we can see that the Purdue leaf has been slightly trimmed at the bottom and the Notre Dame leaf was trimmed at the right, likely for framing by previous owners.

Reunited!

We can even tell which part of the skin was used for this bifolium, because of the contours of the outer edge of the Purdue leaf (lower left, above).  This indentation is the armpit of the animal, as it were. A leaf of the manuscript currently belonging to the Free Library of Philadelphia may even have been cut from the same skin, as the armpit contours fit together quite nicely (middle left below):

The conjoint of FLP 66.3D is untraced, so we can’t say for sure, but it seems quite likely that these three leaves were cut from the same animal skin. Centuries after the parchment was sourced, its animal origins are still discernable.

Think about what we’ve done here: using principles of codicology and the methodologies of fragmentology, we have made our way backwards from the dismembered leaves to the conjoint bifolia to the original quire all the way back to the animal itself, grazing unsuspecting on a green hill in the English countryside in the middle of the fourteenth century.

The proof, indeed, is in the parchment.

Additional Bibliography:

C. de Hamel, “The Bohun Bible Leaves,” Script & Print 32 (2008), 49-63.

P. Kidd, The McCarthy Collection, Volume II: Spanish, English, Flemish and Central European Miniatures (Ad Ilissum, 2019), no. 17 (pp. 86-90).

M. Manion, V. Vines, & C. de Hamel, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in New Zealand Collections (Thames & Hudson, 1989), p. 80, note 2.

Fragmentology in the COVID-era Classroom

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

It’s been a rough few years, friends. We have all been through so much during the pandemic, and for students and teachers the pivots and policies have been particularly difficult and frustrating. Trying to stay safe, learning to teach online, dealing with trauma and loss, getting used to social-distanced and masked pedagogy, in addition to the usual pressures of teaching and learning. It was a particular delight, then, to see my extraordinary Simmons University School of Library Science students here in Boston make their way through this semester’s course “The Medieval Manuscript from Charlemagne to Gutenberg” not only with resilience and steadfastness, but with enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity, and the joy of discovery.

Stony Brook University, “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts,” no. 31

As always, the final project for my class this semester was a digital reconstruction of one of the Books of Hours dismembered by Otto Ege in the first half of the twentieth century. This year, we chose the lovely ca. 1430 Book of Hours from France whose leaves became no. 31 in the Ege portfolio, “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts.” Each of my fourteen students was assigned one leaf from one of the known portfolios (such as the leaf at Stony Brook University, shown at right) to research and catalogue. They had to use online resources such as the Hypertext Book of Hours to identify the text on their leaf, and then catalogue the leaf using the Fragmentarium database. Some of the students were so enthusiastic about the project that they catalogued more than the one leaf originally assigned to them. I did some as well, so that we could work with as many leaves as possible.

One of my students took extraordinary initiative and spent hours searching the internet to try to find more leaves. She found several, including a calendar page at Dartmouth College and a miniature that was recently sold by the Manhattan Rare Book Company. Both of these are rare and important finds for an Ege manuscript. Generally, it is very difficult to definitively identify miniatures from the Ege manuscripts, since they were sold separately from the text leaves that are found in portfolios and often are framed so that the text side is not visible, making it quite difficult to determine if the miniature came from the target manuscript. In this case, however, the bookseller had reproduced the text side as well, so we could tell for sure that this miniature was from our manuscript. The miniature (below) was a depiction of King David at prayer, the opening of the Penitential Psalms section of the Book of Hours. The gold ring surrounding the vines in the lower margin is a motif that appears in other leaves, and may suggest that the book was commissioned to commemorate a marriage.

I wrote to the bookseller to ask for more information, and he informed me that the miniature had just been sold to a private collector in New York City. He contacted the owner on my behalf, and the new owner emailed me directly to let me know that he in fact owned THREE miniatures from this manuscript! In addition to David at Prayer, he had acquired miniatures of the Annunciation (Matins, Hours of the Virgin) and the Nativity (Prime, Hours of the Virgin).

In the meantime, following the trail left by Scott Gwara in his entry for this manuscript from his monograph, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts ((Cayce, SC : De Brailes Publishing, 2013), pp. 128-129), the same student tracked down a copy of Judith Oliver’s catalogue of a now-defunct collection formerly belonging to the Boston University School of Theology, where four miniatures, including the Annunciation and the Nativity, were illustrated.

Judith Oliver, Manuscripts Sacred and Secular (Boston: Endowment for Biblical Research, 1985), pp. 58-59 (no. 97, figs. 20-23).

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Acc. 56.27

Gwara recorded a miniature as well, this burial scene belonging to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art that was purchased from Ege’s widow Louise in 1956. Now we had SIX miniatures to work with, two of which are untraced (the Annunciation to the Shepherds and the Adoration of the Magi, shown at right above). There are almost certainly several more miniatures that have not been located, completing the series for the Hours of the Virgin (the Visitation, the Presentation, the Flight into Egypt, and the Coronation of Virgin). There may also have been one or more miniatures illustrating the Gospel Readings that would have followed the calendar. With so much evidence, an art-historical analysis was possible. A group of students worked together to craft this stylistic description:

“Marginal rinceaux and painted line fillers, smallish acanthus leaves on miniature pages only. Margins also include gold trefoil and red, blue, and green flowers growing on the rinceaux. Rinceaux often seems to “sprout” out of the text, usually from a single gold initial or line-filler. Borders on recto and verso are mirrored for efficiency. Some leaves show a gold ring motif among the rinceaux. Miniatures with gold U-borders with flowers/ leaves in red and blue. Continental color palette: Blues, purples, jewel tone & continental design: botanical, leafy, organic. Miniature composition similar to Bedford Master Workshop (see Oliver, pp. 58-59), Dunois Master Workshop, and occasionally elements of Boucicaut Master Workshop (as suggested by Sotheby’s).”

[it is important to note that of the five other non-portfolio leaves identified by Gwara as coming from this manuscript, upon inspection only the Memphis leaf could be affiliated with Ege 31; the other four are from a different manuscript entirely]

In the end, we identified a total of thirty-seven leaves of this manuscript. After each student had catalogued their leaf/leaves in Fragmentarium, we then worked together in class to use Fragmentarium’s IIIF-sequencing functionality to digitally recreate the manuscript:

https://fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-f25b

While some students were scouring the internet for additional leaves, others were conducting codicological research. One student selected two leaves at random to catalogue – from Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut – that turned out to be consecutive. Several other students identified formerly-consecutive leaves, and we even found eight leaves in a row. These consecutive runs, combined with evidence such as surviving catchwords on several leaves, allowed us to partially reconstruct several quires (using an innovative and intuitive resource called VisColl). In those three quires, we identified four pairs of formerly-conjoint bifolia, highlighted in green above. Yale University’s Beinecke Library preserves a still-conjoint consecutive bifolium from the manuscript in its portfolio. Other pairs were reconstructed using textual and codicological evidence. The catchword on the verso of the leaf at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, for example (below left), indicates that this bifolium was the outermost of its quire (L9/L16 in the diagram above). In other words, each of these pairs of leaves were once attached to one another at the gutter as a single sheet of parchment, folded in half and sewn into the quire. When Ege dismembered the manuscript, he disbound the quires and split the conjoints. These pairs of leaves haven’t seen each other in nearly a century. Below, the leaf at Harvard University’s Houghton Library is virtually reunited with its former conjoint, now at the University of Saskatchewan, nearly 2,300 miles away.

We have analyzed art historical evidence and codicological evidence. What about the contents? The surviving leaves preserve portions of several sections of the manuscript: the Calendar, Hours of the Virgin, Hours of the Cross, Penitential Psalms, and the Office of the Dead. While we did not recover the critical pieces of liturgy that are usually used to determine Use (the antiphon and chapter reading for Prime and None of the Hours of the Virgin, as well as the Matins Responsories of the Office of the Dead), independent research by several students helped identify the origins of the manuscript. One student determined that the particular hymn used on the page she had been assigned seemed to indicate that the manuscript was for the Use of Paris. Another found that an atypical Psalm used at Vespers for the Office of Dead was also suggestive of Use of Paris. The few Matins responsories recovered for the Office of the Dead were consistent with Paris Use and, after a careful in-class analysis of the saints named on the calendar page, we felt we could confidently identify this manuscript as made for the Use of Paris.

That’s as far as we’ve gone so far. We spent several hours conducting provenance research in the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, trying to identify any pre-Ege sales of this manuscript (with help from provenance-researcher-extraordinaire Laura Cleaver and the always-helpful reference librarians at The Grolier Club Library), but we haven’t found it yet. The dimensions of the manuscript (190 x 160 (107 x 68) mm) are fairly typical, as is the number of lines (15), making it difficult to definitively identify this manuscript in an early sales record.

The semester is over, but the work continues. The linked-open data model and interoperable image sequencing reflect best digital practices. This means that if more leaves are identified, they can easily be added to the reconstruction, and if I ever do manage to find a sales record that seems to represent this manuscript when it was whole, I can update the Fragmentarium record accordingly.

This annual project accomplishes many of my goals for my students, all of whom are pursuing a Masters of Library Science: craft clean, consistent, linked data; work with digital images in a IIIF environment; analyze paleographical, art historical, and codicological evidence to determine the date and place of origin of a medieval manuscript; understand how to research and work with Books of Hours, which are among the most common genres of medieval manuscripts in North American collections; and work collaboratively. Each student’s record has its own persistent and citable URL, as does the reconstruction. The work of previous years can be found here, and for more information about other scholars who are doing reconstructions and studies of other Ege manuscripts, see this blogpost.

I hope to take on another reconstruction with Simmons students next fall, hopefully in a post-pandemic world. In the meantime, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, and Healthy, New Year.

Manuscript Road Trip: Otto Ege, St. Margaret, and Digital Fragmentology, Part 2

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

Back in 2014, I wrote about a lovely Book of Hours from late-fifteenth-century France that was dismembered by Otto Ege in the 1940s and whose leaves became number 48 in his “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts” portfolios. I demonstrated how the contents of that manuscript identified it as having been made for the liturgical use of Châlons-sur-Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne), near Reims in Northeast France, in the Champagne-Ardenne region. The manuscript included a lengthy versified Life of St. Margaret, patron of pregnant women, suggesting that it had been made for a woman. Today, I’m revisiting that manuscript to show you what she looked like.

As many of you will know by now, Ege and his wife Louise assembled forty “Fifty Original Leaves” (FOL) portfolios in the late 1940s (Louise continued the project after Otto’s death in 1951). Each portfolio contains fifty leaves, one from each of the same group of fifty manuscripts. Leaf 1 in one portfolio, for example, always comes from the same manuscript as Leaf 1 in every other portfolio of that name. Of the original forty, only twenty-eight have been found. Until now.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a gentleman from Ohio who had found my name and email address after searching online for information about Otto Ege. He was writing with very exciting news; in cleaning out his recently-deceased uncle’s home, he had found a box in a basement closet with a label reading “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts” and Otto Ege’s name inside. Given the state of his uncle’s home (left), it’s somewhat of a miracle that the box was recovered at all!

This portfolio was Set no. 1, long declared missing and never-before studied. His uncle had purchased it in the 1970s from dealer Bruce Ferrini, but its location since then had been unknown. I was, as you can imagine, stunned. Not only a previously-unknown Beauvais Missal leaf (no. 15 in the box), but an entirely unknown “Fifty Original Leaves” set! Fifty “new” leaves to examine, to add to the corpus of Ege leaves, to contribute to burgeoning scholarship on these manuscripts.

I spoke with the owner several times by phone, and he was quite happy to share images with me and other fragmentologists. It had been his uncle’s wish that his collection not be hidden away but be used for scholarship and teaching, and I am exceedingly grateful for his generosity.

The images arrived by mail a few days ago and I eagerly opened the thumbdrive and began looking through the scans. I’ve now shared images of particular leaves with scholars working on those manuscripts (as detailed here) and have added the new Beauvais Missal leaf to my own website and to my Fragmentarium-based reconstruction. I’ll be adding the new leaves of no. 29 and no. 30 to the Fragmentarium reconstructions of those manuscripts, projects undertaken by my students at the Simmons School of Library and Information Science over the past few years. My Simmons students reconstructed and studied FOL.48 in 2016 using Omeka, before Fragmentarium was up and running; their work can be found here.

No. 48 in the new portfolio is something particularly special. I’ve noted before that these portfolios almost always contain only text pages, not miniatures, because they were assembled as paleographical specimens. Ege and his sometime-partner Philip Duschnes would have sold the miniatures from these manuscripts separately. But set no. 1 is unusual, perhaps because it is in fact the first set; in this box, leaf 48 is a miniature.

And what a miniature! Originally found at the beginning of the Office of the Dead, this painting shows a woman in a maroon gown, with gold highlights illuminating the draped folds, standing before an arched facade (perhaps a church). She holds her left hand up in a defensive posture, because she is under attack. Death, as a decomposing corpse, has pulled a lengthy arrow from his quiver and is about to stab her in the heart. Death, we learn, comes for us all.

She is, almost certainly, the original owner of this Book of Hours.

The other identified miniature from this manuscript (currently in a private collection in New Zealand) is female-centered as well. Together, they would have served the same function as most miniatures in Books of Hours during this period: inspiring contemplation and prayer, piety and humility.

Sotheby’s London, 3 December 2013, Lot 21b

The other miniature (at right), illustrates the French verse Life of St. Margaret known as “Apres la sainte passion.” St. Margaret is shown in her standard iconographical setting, bursting from the belly of a dragon, crucifix in hand and her gown trailing from the dragon’s mouth. It is no wonder that she was the patroness of pregnant women. Margaret herself, in lines 535-549 of the poem, tells the pregnant reader that if she reads or listens to or even rests beneath the book in which Margaret’s life is recorded, she will deliver her child “without peril.” Imagine the emotional impact of these miniatures upon the pregnant reader: Death a terror, St. Margaret a comfort.

We may never know who this woman was. There simply isn’t enough evidence in the recovered part of the manuscript to identify her. But we know this much; she was a woman of child-bearing age who lived near Châlons-sur-Marne in the late 1400s.

And we know that she owned a book.

 

 

Manuscript Road Trip: Fragmentology in the Wild

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

*Updated as noted below*

A recent blogpost by tenacious and brilliant manuscript researcher Peter Kidd inspired me to write this post, on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for some time: an update on digital reconstructions of manuscripts dismembered and/or scattered by Otto Ege. If that name is new to you, take a look at this site, my blogposts here and here, and search Peter Kidd’s blog, to get the basics. If you happen to own any leaves that came through Ege’s hands, you’ll also want to find a copy of Scott Gwara’s seminal reference work Otto Ege’s Manuscripts (in what follows, the FOL and HL designations refer to Gwara’s handlist).

Wadsworth Athenaeum (Hartford, Connecticut), “Fifty Original Leaves” no. 4

Peter Kidd recently made significant discoveries about the provenance of the codex that became Ege FOL 4 (i.e. no. 4 in the “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts” portfolios), discoveries that were quickly supplemented on Twitter by University of Notre Dame curator David Gura’s realization that UND manuscript Lat. b. 11 is in fact a portion of the manuscript that became Ege FOL 4. I then contacted Dr. Yin Liu, a professor in the English Department at the University of Saskatchewan who is supervising a Master’s Thesis on this very manuscript, to tell her of Kidd and Gura’s discoveries. This is just one example of how networks of scholars are using social media to make discoveries and share information about fragments and fragmentology. Search #fragmentology or #OttoEge to see more such networks at work.

The potential for digital reconstruction of Ege manuscripts was first noted by Barbara Shailor in her 2003 article, “Otto Ege: His Manuscript Fragment Collection and the Opportunities Presented by Electronic Technology” (The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 60 (2003), 1-22). “For Otto Ege fragments now dispersed around the world,” she wrote, “the possibilities presented by modern technology are fascinating. It is only a matter of time, financial resources, and scholarly communication and perseverance before significant portions of Ege’s intriguing collection will be reassembled and made available electronically.” (p. 22) Since the advent of Digital Fragmentology as a methodological framework a few years ago, the number of digital reconstructions of dismembered medieval manuscripts has multiplied and continues to grow as more scholars see the potential of such research and engage with interoperable images to conduct their work. In particular, several projects are underway that take advantage of the coherent collections of leaves assembled by biblioclast Otto Ege and his wife Louise in the mid-twentieth century.

In the wake of the expanding universe of Digital Fragmentology, I thought it might be useful to gather in one place the current work being done by different scholars on Ege manuscripts, so that curators and collectors will know whom they should contact if they come across these leaves. All of these scholars will already be familiar with the leaves in the known “Fifty Original Leaves” portfolios, but if you come across examples that aren’t in portfolios, please let them know! Here are the projects of which I am aware:

Ege FOL 1: A twelfth-century glossed Bible. There is a large portion of this manuscript at Stanford University, and the curator of manuscripts there, Benjamin L Albritton, is working on a digital reconstruction. This was the first use-case employing IIIF-compliance in a shared-canvas environment, demonstrating how this technology could be used to digitally reconstruct dismembered manuscripts.

Ege FOL 3: A twelfth-century lectionary from Italy. Peter Kidd has blogged about this manuscript here, here, and here. (UPDATED 29 May 2021)

Ege FOL 4: This is the so-called Chain Psalter that is the subject of Ariel Brecht’s Master’s thesis at the University of Saskatchewan. If you find a leaf that isn’t in an Ege portfolio, please contact her.

Ege Fol 6: Hannah Goeselt (one of my former students at Simmons University) is studying this manuscript, known as the Cambridge Bible. If you find a leaf that isn’t in an Ege portfolio, please let me know and I will contact her.

Kent State University (Kent, Ohio), “Fifty Original Leaves,” no. 7

Ege FOL 7: This thirteenth-century copy of Peter Riga’s Aurora is being reconstructed by incoming Columbia University Freshman Sindhu Krishnamurthy, under my guidance. If you find a leaf, please let me know and I will contact her.

Ege FOL 8: The “Wilton Processional” is the subject of extensive study and publication by Alison Altstatt at the University of Northern Iowa. In particular, see “Re-membering the Wilton Processional” in Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 72, no. 4 (June 2016), 690-732.

Ege FOL 14: A beautiful fourteenth-century French lectern Bible that is being studied by Mildred Budny. She has written about it extensively here.

Ege FOL 15: The Beauvais Missal, my own project. I’ve located 109 out of 309 leaves so far, but I’m always looking for more! This reconstruction is available in Fragmentarium. [UPDATED 12/26/20]

Ege FOL 20: A fifteen-line Psalter from the 14th century that is being studied by Judith Oliver. [UPDATED 5/19/21]

Ege FOL 28: A lovely Book of Hours for the Use of Metz studied and reconstructed by Simmons University students in the fall of 2019. [UPDATED 12/26/20]

Ege FOL 29: A Book of Hours reconstructed by students in my Introduction to Medieval Manuscripts class at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science (Boston, Massachusetts) in the fall of 2018, using the Fragmentarium interface. More on Fragmentarium here.

Ege FOL 30: Another Book of Hours rebuilt in Fragmentarium, this one undertaken by my Simmons students in the fall of 2017.

Ege FOL 31: This Book of Hours was studied by my Simmons students in the fall of 2021 and is online in Fragmentarium as well. For this Book of Hours, Use of Paris is indicated by the Calendar and liturgical variants in Matins of the Hours of the Virgin, and Vespers and Matins in the Office of the Dead. Several of the full-page miniatures from this manuscript have been identified in addition to those used as no. 31 in Ege’s “Fifty Original Leaves” sets.

University of South Carolina (Columbia , South Carolina), “Fifty Original Leaves,” no. 31

Ege FOL 41: Mildred Budny has written about this manuscript here.

Ege FOL 45: A Book of Hours reconstructed by my Simmons University students in the fall of 2022, using Fragmentarium. By analyzing the recovered portion of the manuscript they discovered that the manuscript was likely made for the Use of Paris or Arras, and may have been sold by Sotheby’s in 1948.

Ege FOL 46: This Book of Hours was reconstructed by Simmons University students in the fall of 2020, using Fragmentarium. By analyzing the recovered portion of the manuscript, they determined that the manuscript was likely made for the Use of Rouen or Coutances. [UPDATED 12/26/20]

Ege FOL 47: Another Book of Hours reconstructed by Simmons students, this one using Omeka in 2015 (as Fragmentarium hadn’t yet been launched).

Ege FOL 48: Yet ANOTHER Book of Hours reconstructed by yet MORE Simmons students, using Omeka in the fall of 2016.

Ege HL 51: This complex Aristotelian manuscript from Erfurt is being studied by Prof.  Riccardo Strobino at Tufts University. Leaves of this manuscript are no. 2 in Ege’s “Original Leaves from Famous Books, Eight Centuries” and no. 3 in the “Original Leaves from Famous Books, Nine Centuries” portfolios. These portfolios are numerous, and Gwara identifies several dozen locations (Gwara, pp. 100-102).

Ege HL 53: This Quran (no. 1 in two different portfolios: “Famous Books: Nine Centuries” and “Fifteen Leaves from Oriental Manuscripts”) is being studied by Maroun El Houkayem from Duke University. He is also tracking other Qurans dispered by Ege: HL 62, HL 70, and HL 71 (“Fifteen Leaves from Oriental Manuscripts” nos. 2, 11, and 12 respectively). His work is ongoing, so please do reach out to him if you identify leaves from any of these manuscripts.

Ege HL 61: Mildred Budny’s work on this tiny thirteenth-century Bible can be found here.

Ege HL 64: Andy Patton (Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts) has published a significant study of this fragmentary Greek Gospel book. See Andrew J. Patton, “The Fragmentation and Digital Reconstruction of Lectionary 2434,” in That Nothing May Be Lost: Fragments and the New Testament Text: Papers from the Twelfth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, Texts and Studies 29 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2022), 39–68. <http://pure-oai.bham.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/186749289/2022_That_Nothing_May_Be_Lost.pdf> [UPDATE as of 11 March 2023]

Ege HL 79: This manuscript isn’t the subject of a reconstruction (yet), but since it was written by the well-known humanistic scribe Bartolomeo Sanvito, it may be worth someone’s attention! More about this manuscript here (by Peter Kidd).

Ege HL 80: Although he isn’t working on a formal reconstruction of this humanistic Book of Hours, Peter Kidd has written about its history and dispersal here. It’s worth noting that the University of Colorado at Boulder owns several leaves, including a bifolium and two that are illuminated.

Garden of roses by Saadi: Persia, late 18th century (Brooklyn Museum, Z109_Eg7_p10_recto)

To help identify Ege leaves in your own collection, or if you want to work on any of the other Ege manuscripts, start your search with this selection of “Fifty Original Leaves” sets, beautifully digitized in open-access environments:

Newark Public Library

Ohio University

SUNY Stony Brook

University of Colorado

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

University of Minnesota

University of North Carolina

University of South Carolina

University of Toronto, Massey College

Other sets are posted on Denison’s Ege site, but these images are not always high quality. For other Ege-related leaves, you’ll want to refer to the indices in Gwara’s book. To help with these identifications, I’ve created a shared Dropbox folder with images and metadata for more than 100 different manuscripts dismembered by Ege. Check out my “Ege Field Guide” here.

If you do happen to find any of the above-mentioned leaves in your own collection, please contact the relevant scholars (or you can always reach out to me and I’ll pass the news along to the appropriate person). If I’ve missed any Ege-based reconstruction projects, please let me know and I’ll work to keep this list updated. In the meantime, follow #fragmentology and #OttoEge on Twitter to stay on top of breaking fragmentology news!

Manuscript Road Trip: Ege and Phillipps in Saskatchewan

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

Most of the time, this road trip is virtual, an exploration of digitized manuscripts and their associated metadata and platforms in collections throughout North America. But sometimes I take an actual road trip, visiting medievalists at institutions and heritage sites far from my home in Boston to study their manuscripts in the flesh, as it were. Last week was one of those times. I spent two delightful days in Canada, visiting the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and collection in a small private school three hours from there. These are among the northernmost pre-1600 European manuscripts in North America and, in the case of the school, some of the most remote.

Saskatchewan is the prairie of Canada, much like my home state of Oklahoma. Flat, big sky, beautiful serene scenery, windy, with glorious sunsets. Everyone I met was friendly and curious and eager to talk about and learn about the province’s medieval manuscripts. I was invited to Saskatchewan by Prof. Yin Liu and the University’s Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies program, and I am very grateful to Yin and CMRS for the invitation and for the warm welcome.

Prof. Liu discussing Ege leaves with University of Saskatchewan students

My first stop was, of course, Special Collections at the University, where curator David Bindle had laid out a selection of manuscripts, early printed books, and facsimiles for a visiting class in Bibliography taught by English professor Lisa Vargo. The room was full of old friends (by which I mean VERY old), including the University of Saskatchewan’s Otto Ege portfolio, one of the rare and extraordinary “Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts” sets of which forty were produced and only twenty-eight have been located. No. 15 in the set is a leaf from my old and dear friend, the Beauvais Missal. It was a great joy for me to have the opportunity to speak to the students about Otto Ege and his impact on the American market in single leaves in the first half of the twentieth century (if Ege is new to you, you can read about him in several of my blogposts).

U. Saskatchewan students getting to know the Voynich Manuscript

And guess what I saw nestled among the shiny golden facsimiles of glorious late fifteenth-century French manuscripts made for nobility: the shy and smudgy and outwardly humble but extremely detailed and accurate Siloé facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript! Naturally, I had to invite the students to come over and take a look as I walked them through the mysterious manuscript’s history and contents. An added and unexpected treat!

After the class, I had lunch with a group of faculty and students, mostly from the English department, many of whom were working with Profs. Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson on the massive and long-term Canterbury Tales project. Robinson has been working on the project for decades with the goal of transcribing all of the known manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and using computer algorithms to analyze the variants among the manuscripts to refine the received wisdom about the transmission of Chaucer’s work. Hundreds of students have worked on the transcriptions over the years as the project has migrated through various formats. Currently, the transcriptions are encoded using the Text-Encoding Initiative, with customized tags and a custom backend that uses IIIF-compliance to display images alongside the TEI transcription. Check out the project website for more details!

The original plan had been for me to head back to Special Collections after lunch to spend some time with the Library’s codices, but after Prof. Robinson and Prof. Bordalejo invited me to visit the Canterbury Tales Project workroom, I couldn’t resist the chance to be in the room where it happens. They even went so far as to set up an account for me so that I can participate in the transcription and encoding.

Univ. of Saskatchewan MSS 14.1 (the “Brendan Missal”), f. 98v. The red circle circumscribing a Greek cross is an “osculatory target.”

My time was limited, so after an hour or so Yin walked me over to Special Collections where I spent some time with this early fifteenth-century Missal recently purchased by the University. Although the codex is lacking several dozen leaves, it includes enough evidence to provide a rough localization to the Low Countries. One piece of this evidence is a fascinating later addition on the opening leaf, an inventory of the treasures of an “Altar of St. Brendan” written in Dutch and Latin that is most definitely worthy of further study. Line 5 of the inventory records a “Misboeck op perghemynte ghescreven” (“a Massbook written on parchment”) that may refer to this very codex. The inventory is witnessed by the notary Bernardus tor Schuren and is dated 1532. In the original portion of the manuscript, the Canon and the mass for Easter each include a fascinating detail, roundels in the bottom margin in red and orange encircling a Greek cross. These are almost certainly “osculatory targets,” meant to be kissed by the Priest as a sign of veneration.

But I wasn’t in Saskatchewan just to look at the books. That evening, I delivered the opening lecture of the CMRS annual colloquium series. The title of my presentation was “Scattered Leaves and Virtual Manuscripts: The Promise of Digital Fragmentology,” essentially a history of the study of fragments and the development of efforts to digitally reconstruct dismembered manuscripts. The lecture was well-attended with a lively discussion afterwards and a show-and-tell of Otto Ege leaves on display. My thanks to curator David Bindle for facilitating the display of Ege leaves.

Off on a road trip with Yin at the wheel!

The highlight of my trip took place the following day when I embarked on the ultimate manuscript road trip, driving deep into the plains of Saskatchewan to visit a small private collection of rare books and manuscripts at Athol Murray College of Notre Dame in Wilcox. This was, without doubt, the most remote collection I have visited in North America. We were two carloads of eager explorers: Yin and myself, Prof. Courtnay Konshuh, and three students (Tristan, Amanda, and Chloe). We drove through the rural towns of Craink, Moose Jaw, and Rouleau (familiar to Canadians, I’m told, as the fictional town of Dog River in the popular Canadian television show “Corner Gas”) before reaching our destination, the small railside town of Wilcox three hours from Saskatoon. The collection belongs to a small Catholic boys’ school founded in 1920 and now best known for its hockey team, although its extraordinary rare book collection should certainly put it on the map.

When we arrived, we were greeted by the archivist, who gave us a brief tour and introduction. The rare book collection is part of a museum dedicated to the history of the school and its founder, Father Athol Murray. Several relics of Father Murray’s life are part of the collection, including his old suitcase and scarlet vestments. The books came to Father Murray from several different sources; some were bequeathed by his father or other family members, others were gifted by friends or devoted students. For example, his copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle

The Nuremberg Chronicle

was a gift from a group of former students. According to the story, Father Murray – a Catholic Priest – had been saving his money to buy the volume but when he learned that a student was in need, he used that money to help the student instead, in what was clearly a typical act of generosity for the man commonly and lovingly known as Père. When the word spread of his decision to reallocate the money he had saved, a group of former students banded together to buy the Chronicle for him.

The collection was catalogued in 2003 by University of Saskatchewan student Michael Santer, as his Master’s thesis. The catalogue’s introduction serves as a biography of Father Murray, while the catalogue is focused on the printed books and their provenance. It was the appendix that caught my eye: the manuscripts. Santer worked with several University of Saskatchewan professors to create a handlist of the handful of manuscripts in the collection. In addition to several documents, the collection includes three incomplete but interesting codices: a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Legenda Aurea (Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, a lengthy collection of saints’ lives that was extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages); a late thirteenth-century collection of the Decretals of Pope Gregory X; and what appeared at first glance to be a late-twelfth or early-thirteenth-century fragmentary manuscript of several saints’ lives.

In its current state, the latter codex includes extracts from the Life and Miracles of St. Martin of Tours (attributed to the fourth-century French chronicler Sulpicius Severus) and the Lives of the Seven Sleepers (a Rip van Winkle-esque saga spuriously attributed to Gregory, Bishop of Tours) (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina no. 2320; for the full text, see Patrologia Latina 71:1107B-1110C). The manuscript has an esteemed provenance: at the bottom of the first flyleaf is the signature and shelfmark of none other than Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792 –1872), arguably the most prolific collector of all time, a man who has made his way into this blog several times.  This is Phillipps MS 22049, acquired by Phillipps in the late 1860s (see Munby, A. N. L., The Formation of the Phillipps Library Between 1841 and 1872 (Phillipps Studies No. IV), p. 208) and sold from the collection at Sotheby’s on 6 June 1898, lot 841. It’s not clear when Father Murray acquired the manuscript, but it was likely in the early decades of the twentieth century.

At first sight, I ascribed the manuscript to early thirteenth-century France based on the style of the script and the gorgeous, elaborate red and purple penwork.

Initial [T], The Lives of the Seven Sleepers (f. 21)

I say “at first sight” because after a more careful examination, several features of the manuscript struck all of us as unusual: the form of the [g], the complete lack of ampersands (“et” is not abbreviated in the manuscript, which is nearly unheard of), the occasional (i.e. inconsistent) appearance of biting bows, the use of a Romanesque-style script with Gothic features such as below-top-line formatting, the overly-elaborate penwork historiated initials, and, as Tristan and I discovered during our examination of the structure of the codex, the unusual collation.

The manuscript is fragmentary, currently consisting of only twenty-two leaves. A French manuscript from the thirteenth-century should be constructed of quaternions, signatures made up of four nested bifolia, i.e. eight leaves. These twenty-two-leaves, however, are comprised of a quire of twelve (with at least one bifolium missing, so originally at least fourteen) and a quire of ten. This format is EXREMELY unusual in northern Europe, especially in the thirteenth century. So I did what I always do when I have a difficult manuscript problem. I turn to Twitter, #MedievalTwitter in particular. I posted an image of the manuscript and within minutes was engaged in a conversation with paleographers from both sides of the Atlantic. In the end, expert paleographer Erik Kwakkel suggested that the manuscript was likely written in the fourteenth-century by a scribe attempting to imitate an earlier script, something that, while not exactly common, is not unheard of. We cannot know if the archaizing script was intended to deceive or to pay homage. Modern forgers, such as the Spanish Forger, are usually in it for the money. Our late-medieval scribe, on the other hand, may have been copying an older manuscript or simply practicing a different kind of script than the one he was used to. There is much more to learn about this lovely manuscript, including piecing together its journey from France to Phillipps to Sotheby’s to Saskatchewan.

 As we drove back to Saskatoon, dazzled by a blazing prairie sunset, we found ourselves wondering what Sir Thomas Phillipps would have thought about the fate of his MS 22049. I suspect he would have been puzzled at first (after all, the province of Saskatchewan didn’t exist until just a few years before his death). But as a collector himself, Phillipps would certainly have appreciated that the manuscript had found a happy home, first in the hands of the students’ beloved Père and now in the collection of the school he loved.

Manuscript Road Trip: Miami University (the one in Ohio, not the one in Florida!)

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

When my son decided to matriculate at Miami University of Ohio back in 2015, he had no idea that he would spend the rest of his life explaining that he attended “Miami University (the one in Ohio, not the one in Florida!).” The distinction is important – the University of Miami (the one in Florida) vs. Miami University (the one in Oxford, Ohio).  He’s been there for several years already and I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I had not visited Miami’s Special Collections until I went to see my son last week. Given what we all know about medieval manuscripts in Ohio (this is my third post devoted to the state), I should not have been surprised to find an excellent assortment of leaves and several very fine codices on the third floor of King Library. My thanks to curator Bill Modrow for facilitating the visit and to Miami Professor Anna Klosowska for exploring the collection with me.

Terence, Comedies (PA6755.H4/H43/1480 verso) (250 x 175 mm)

Miami University of Ohio (MUO) has acquired several loose leaves over the years, including a previously unknown leaf from a beautiful humanistic manuscript of Terence’s Comedies that was a victim of Otto Ege’s biblioclastic practices; it is also known as Ege Handlist (HL) no. 78 (see Gwara, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts, pp. 145-146; all references to Handlist numbers below come from Gwara as well). I’ve mentioned this manuscript before (here, citing the leaf at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and here, at the University of Vermont), and Barbara Shailor reproduced the Rutgers University Library leaf as Fig. I.2 in her 2003 article, “Otto Ege: His Manuscript Fragment Collection and the Opportunities Presented by Electronic Technology.” According to the great paleographer Albinia de la Mare, this manuscript was written by the humanistic scribe Giuliano di Antonio of Prato, Florence in the mid-fifteenth century (Shailor, p. 12 and note 6). By 1937, it was no. 65 in Ege’s personal collection as recorded in the de Ricci Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (II:1947). According to the de Ricci description, the manuscript originally comprised 103 leaves and – in 1937 – was still bound in its original wooden boards covered with brown leather. Ege acquired it from Dawson’s Bookshop in Los Angeles in 1935, and was selling single leaves by the early 1940s (Gwara, pp. 57-58). Gwara records nine known leaves (see pp. 145-146), a list to which the MUO leaf can now be added.

MUO, s.n., Gradual (Spain?, s. XV) (505 x 366 mm)

 This fifteenth-century gradual leaf, perhaps from Spain, is also noteworthy – not because of its music or script, which are not at all uncommon, but because of the small scrap of cloth adhered to the outer margin of the recto (about 25 x 50 mm):

MUO, s.n., Gradual, detail

This bit of embroidery was cut from a larger piece of cloth and adhered to the leaf to be used as a bookmark tab. This leaf preserves Masses for Sts. Fabian and Sebastian (January 25) and for the fifth day during the Octave of St. Vincent (January 27); one of these days was important enough to a user of this choirbook that they felt it worthwhile to mark the page.

Foliophiles, Inc., Pages from the Past

Otto Ege was not the only dealer assembling and marketing leaf collections in the twentieth century. MUO owns a portfolio titled “Pages from the Past” that was assembled by Foliophiles Inc. in 1964. This set includes specimens covering a wide spectrum of humanity’s written record, from papyrus documents and cuneiform tablets through medieval manuscript leaves all the way to examples of fine printing from the twentieth century. A similar set belongs to the St. Louis Public Library, and another can be found at the University of Missouri – Columbia.

The MUO library also owns several codices, one of which is particularly noteworthy: a lovely and heavily illustrated Book of Hours from Flanders (possibly Ghent), produced around 1460-70. Although the Hours of the Virgin is for the Use of Rome and the Office of the Dead is of indeterminate Use, the calendar and litany point to Flanders (spelling Ursula “Hursula” and Gertrude “Ghertrudis”, for example), as does the artistic style. The manuscript comprises 124 leaves, measures 145 x 100 mm, has fourteen full-page miniatures and nine historiated initials, and is bound in 17th-century gilt armorial brown calf over pasteboard (the arms – a Katherine wheel surmounted by the barred helm of a Count below a lion rampant holding an ax or perhaps a cross – are as yet unidentified). It was purchased from Bromer Booksellers (Boston) in 1997 as Miami University of Ohio’s two millionth volume. The manuscript’s provenance prior to 1997 is unknown, and I can find no clear trace of it in the Schoenberg Database.

The Book of Hours is so lovely that I can’t bear to show just a few miniatures…here are all of them:

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The deep blue backgrounds and the brick-and-mortar structures, among other features, point to Flanders as the place of origin. Quite fortuitously, I have found another manuscript by the same workshop if not the same artist (Glasgow University Library Sp Coll MS Euing 3). The parallels are clear in this side-by-side of the Annunciation to the Shepherds (MUO at left, Glasgow at right): note the similarities in the treatment of the tiny lambs, the style of the rock cliff, trees, background, grass, and shrubs, as well as costumes and facial features.

Annunciation to the Shepherds (MUO BX2080/A2/1450, f. 47v)

Annunciation to the Shepherds (Glasgow Univ. Library, Sp Coll MS Euing 3, f. 73v)

If anyone has a more specific attribution, please let me know. Medieval artists are rarely known by name – instead, art historians give them descriptive epithets. Until we know otherwise, I’ll call this artist the Master of…well…how about The Master of the Tiny Lambs?

Before I flew back to Boston from Cincinnati, I had the opportunity to visit a private collector there. He had contacted me several weeks ago, saying that he had inherited several dozen leaves purchased from Otto Ege by his step-father’s first wife…would I be interested in seeing some images? By a wonderful co-incidence, I was already planning to be in Cincinnati just a few weeks later, and he invited me to see the leaves in person. And what a trove! In addition to several single leaves acquired from Ege (such as HL 13 and HL 150), he had an entire Ege portfolio, the set titled “Original Leaves from Famous Bibles/ Nine Centuries 1121 – 1935 AD” (if you want to get technical about it, this particular example is a combination of Series A (200 sets of 37 leaves, issued in 1936) and Series B (100 sets of 60 leaves, issued in 1938) (see Gwara, p. 36)). Series B typically begins with four manuscript leaves, as described in the accompanying Broadside:

Original Leaves from Famous Bibles: Nine Centuries 1121-1935 AD, typical Broadside

The Broadside in this private collection, however, has been altered. Not only that, but it was edited by the hand of Louise Ege herself. This particular portfolio was probably purchased before Otto’s death in 1951, since he had once claimed that Series A had sold out by around 1940 (Gwara, p. 42). This set was likely acquired shortly before 1940, then, because by the time this set was purchased, certain leaves were already no longer available and Otto and Louise were offering substitutions. On the Broadside for this set, Louise notes, for example, that of leaf no. 4 (usually HL 54) there are only “a few left.”  No. 2 (HL 59) was completely out of stock.

These substitutions are evident in the collection itself. No. 1 (HL 56, a leaf from an Armenian Bible) is present, but the second (and out-of-stock) leaf (HL 59) has been replaced by HL 76, an equally lovely but totally different specimen of a twelfth-century Bible, this one with marginal glossing. Even though the two manuscripts are completely different (a typical example of HL 59 shown below left, the replacement HL 76 below right), Otto and Louise didn’t change the label when they made the substitution, since the description was vague enough to suffice for either manuscript:

A typical example of HL 59

Ege HL 76 (substituted for HL 59), identified using the label for HL 59

The delicate thirteenth-century Italian Bible HL 58 serves as the third leaf, as expected.

HL 58 (Italy, thirteenth century)

The fourth leaf should be a small two-column Bible leaf from HL 54. According to the label on the matte, that manuscript is a “Dominican Manuscript written in Paris” in the unrealistically-precise year 1240 AD. In the present set, this was replaced with a leaf from HL 9, another small-format thirteenth-century Bible which Ege dated to the equally absurdly-precise year 1250 AD.* The date on the label has been edited accordingly:

After Otto’s death in 1951, Louise took over the leaf-marketing business. She had a gift for marketing and sales, reaching out to institutions and collectors throughout the country promoting the business. As correspondence preserved with this private collection demonstrates, after Otto’s death she kept up the relationships cultivated during Otto’s lifetime and gave the same time and attention to small private collections as to large cultural institutions:

4 – 17 – 56

Dear Mrs. ***,

Would you at present be interested in having a selection of leaves for choice or perhaps for sale. I could send you a selection of hand written Bible leaves. If you wish them unmounted I can give you a very special price, perhaps I can also find some mounted ones which are reasonable.

Would you also be interested in some leaves from Books of Hours. I am not sure just what all your special interests are.

Would you care for some inexpensive assortment of unmounted leaves? I’ll be glad to try. Are you connected with the University [of Cincinnati]?

Sincerely,

Mrs. Otto F. Ege

 

 

* On pp. 119 and 137 of Otto Ege’s Manuscripts, Gwara notes that in a different portfolio, “Original Leaves from Famous Books: Eight Centuries,” leaves of HL 54 are sometimes replaced by leaves of HL 9. The present set appears to be the only recorded example of the same substitution taking place in “Original Leaves from Famous Bibles, Nine Centuries,” but many examples of this portfolio have yet to be carefully catalogued and identified using Gwara’s handlist numbers. Peter Kidd has written about the marketing of the Bible sets and others here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fragmentarium: a Model for Digital Fragmentology

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

In the early 1990s, I was a graduate student at Yale working on a PhD in Medieval Studies. My dissertation focused on a fragmentology project, although that word would not be coined for decades. Seventeen leaves from a twelfth-century antiphonal from the Austrian Benedictine abbey of Lambach (on the Danube about halfway between Salzburg and Vienna) had made their way to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and for my thesis I reconstructed the manuscript as much as possible – adding to the seventeen Yale leaves four leaves still in Lambach, two in the abbey of St-Paul-im-Lavanttal, another that was hanging on the wall of an alpine resort in Badgastein, two at Harvard, and one at the St. Louis Public Library (I’ve blogged about that one here) – and studied the cumulative liturgy, music, and decoration of the manuscript in the context of the twelfth-century Lambach scriptorium. The manuscript is known as the Gottschalk Antiphonary (or Antiphonal), after the scribe/artist Gottschalk of Lambach who was primarily responsible for its creation. 

The Gottschalk Antiphonal

The Gottschalk Antiphonal has a very different post-medieval story than the leaves of manuscripts dismembered by Otto Ege about which I have frequently blogged. The Gottschalk Antiphonal was a victim of pre-modern recycling rather than twentieth-century biblioclasm. The manuscript – its music and liturgy hopelessly outdated by the late Middle Ages – was taken apart in the fifteenth century and its leaves were used as flyleaves and pastedowns for incunables bound at the Lambach bindery. These and dozens of other binding fragments were removed from the early bindings and sold to raise money for the Abbey’s woodshop during World War II. Eventually, the collection made its way to New York dealer Hans P. Kraus, and from there to the Beinecke Library at Yale in the 1960s along with hundreds of fragments collectively known as MS 481 and MS 482. By that time, the origin of the Lambach group had been forgotten.

As a graduate student in the 1990s, I had a job working for the Curator of Pre-1600 Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke and was assigned the task of cataloguing part of Yale’s enormous fragment collection, of which the then-unidentified leaves of the Gottschalk Antiphonal were part. The story of how the curator (Robert G. Babcock), fellow students Philip Rusche and Nancy Seybold, and I discovered the Lambach origin of the Antiphonal and dozens of other leaves has been told elsewhere. The Lambach project was the inspiration for my dissertation and first book and was the beginning of my thirty-year interest in medieval manuscript leaves and fragments.

Fragmentology, ca. 1992

Reconstructing the Gottschalk Antiphonal in 1992, sitting on the floor of my living room with scissors and paste and photocopies of the leaves, I was, without realizing it, “doing” fragmentology. Analog was the only option back then, of course. In the early years of the twenty-first century, scholars began to realize the potential of burgeoning digital technologies for the virtual reconstruction of dismembered manuscripts. The call to arms was issued by Barbara Shailor (who was at the time the Director of the Beinecke Library) in a 2003 article, “Otto Ege: His Manuscript Fragment Collection and the Opportunities Presented by Electronic Technology” (The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 60 (2003), 1-22). “For Otto Ege fragments now dispersed around the world,” she wrote, “the possibilities presented by modern technology are fascinating. It is only a matter of time, financial resources, and scholarly communication and perseverance before significant portions of Ege’s intriguing collection will be reassembled and made available electronically.” (p. 22)

After several fits and starts, “time, financial resources, and scholarly communication and perseverance” have finally, fifteen years later, made the vision of virtual reconstruction a reality. Technology has caught up with our dreams in the form of IIIF-compliant shared-canvas interoperability.

IIIF: the key to digital fragmentology!

All that tech-speak may be a little jarring, but it really is the key to the what fragmentology can accomplish. Let’s unpack it.

IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework) is a way of presenting digital images in an online environment that allows them to be shared via a permanent URL instead of by downloading and uploading into a silo (there’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the basic idea). In other words, if an online image is IIIF-compliant, it can be manifested in a workspace known as a “shared canvas” simply by pointing to the permanent IIIF URL. The image is drawn into the shared canvas when called for rather than being physically stored there. This interoperability has the advantage of enabling a user to apply their own metadata and annotations and sequence the images without transforming the actual imagefile. An image can be stored in one place while being used in multiple workspaces. The model is completely open-access and avoids siloing, and is thus in keeping with digital best practices. Even the code needed to set up a IIIF server is open-source. For more on IIIF and shared canvas, including technical specifications (which are WAY beyond my ken), see the IIIF site.

So what does all this have to do with digital fragmentology? To find out, we have to go to Switzerland.

The recently-launched Fragmentarium project (based in Fribourg) combines IIIF with a powerful mySQL database to allow for the cataloguing of individual fragments and leaves and the virtual reconstruction of parent manuscripts in a shared canvas workspace. Brought to you by the incredible team behind e-codices, Fragmentarium uses a flexible and well-designed data model that is fragment-centric and follows international standards of authority and data modeling. It is the culmination of decades of development on the technical side and of metadata design on the scholarly side. Several institutions are already working on Fragmentarium case studies, uploading images (if they don’t already have IIIF purls), cataloguing them, and creating virtual reconstructions. 

A leaf of FOL 30 (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts, no. 30)

Let’s head back to Boston now, to the Simmons School of Library and Information Science, where I teach an annual course titled “The Medieval Manuscript from Charlemagne to Gutenberg.” For the last three years, I have assigned my students an Ege manuscript to study and reconstruct as their final project. You can read about the 2015 and 2016 projects here. This year, my students participated in a Fragmentarium case study. Each student was assigned a leaf from the lovely early fifteenth-century Book of Hours known as “Fifty Original Leaves no. 30” (or FOL 30), because leaves from this manuscript are always no. 30 in Ege’s Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts portfolios. We found twenty-eight leaves in twenty-eight collections, and the first part of the assignment was for each student to catalogue their leaf in the Fragmentarium database. I am extremely grateful, by the way, to Fragmentarium’s William Duba and Christoph Flüeler for facilitating the project.

 

Simmons students creating the shared canvas sequence

Once the leaves had been catalogued, we worked as a class to assemble the known leaves in order in a IIIF shared canvas. Fragmentarium makes sequencing images simple with a drag-and-drop feature. Once the images are in order, one click creates the shared canvas reconstruction (click the “thumbnails” link at the bottom and the “metadata” link at the left for the full experience). The students were familiar with the basic structure of a Book of Hours, so once they had identified the contents of each leaf, it was fairly straightforward to put the leaves in order and create a record for the reconstructed manuscript (this work was made even easier by the survival of folio numbers on some of the leaves!).

The next step demonstrated why such reconstructions are worthwhile. Using the cumulative liturgical evidence of the reconstructed manuscript – much more evidence than survives on a single leaf – the students conducted original research to determine its origin and provenance. By analyzing the saints in the reconstructed Litany and the liturgy of the Office of the Dead, the students concluded that the manuscript was originally written for the Use of Paris (no other portions of the manuscript that might have provided supporting evidence – such as the Calendar or the Hours of the Virgin – survive). By searching the dimensions and known contents of the reconstructed manuscript in the Schoenberg Database, they were able to identify several early-twentieth-century sales of the whole manuscript and identify it as the manuscript purchased by collector C. L. Ricketts from dealer Bernard Quaritch in 1922 (see de Ricci, Census I:634, no. 116) and sold by Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1939. It was dismembered by Ege or his business partner Philip Duschnes soon thereafter. As a final step, I updated the Schoenberg Database to reflect these discoveries, creating a new manuscript record that links the provenance records. These discoveries by my students were completely original. Instead of considering these a scattered group of pretty leaves, we now know that this manuscript was made for the Use of Paris and, from details in the Parke-Bernet catalogue, we know it had 189 leaves and seven miniatures and that it had been bound by Rivière. We know it was offered by Quaritch several times before being bought by Ricketts in 1922. We know it was bought and broken sometime after 1939. And now we can see, at least in part, how it once looked.

When I remember sitting on my living room floor with scissors and paste, I am truly awed and inspired by the beauty, simplicity, and effectiveness of the Fragmentarium model. Next year, my students will use Fragmentarium to reconstruct and study FOL 29. Who knows what we’ll find? Stay tuned.

A leaf of “Fifty Original Leaves” no. 29 (Special Collections, Archives & Preservation, University of Colorado Boulder, Ege 29)

And I really do think it’s time for Gottschalk to go digital. 

 

 

 

 

 

Manuscript Road Trip: Back to Lima

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

I’ve written about Ohio dealer/biblioclast Otto F. Ege in several blogposts (here and here in particular), but there is one chapter of his story that I haven’t written about in detail: his decades-long relationship with the Lima Public Library.

The Lima Public Library is a small but bustling center for reading and communing in the center of Lima, Ohio, about halfway between Toledo and Cincinnati in the western part of the state. It’s a small town in the middle of farm country. It’s a place where you would never expect to find an important collection of medieval manuscript fragments…but you’d be wrong. What follows is a unusual and fascinating chapter in the story of medieval manuscript connoisseurship in the United States.

In 1930, Lima librarian Georgie McAfee wrote to Ege after hearing him lecture, to propose an unusual scheme: the Lima Public Library would sell manuscript leaves as an agent for Ege, retaining a portion of the proceeds to benefit their Staff Loan Fund.  The arrangement lasted for decades, continuing under the direction of Ege’s widow Louise after his death in 1951. Thousands of leaves were sold, and thousands of dollars were raised.

Lima Librarian Mary Lathrop holds a page (now lost) of this gorgeous Flemish antiphonal  (Gwara Handlist 82) (Lima News, 12 March 1939, p. 7).

An extensive archive at the Library preserves decades of correspondence between McAfee and Ege in which she would write to request leaves of particular manuscripts to sell, and he would reply with notes about what was available. When she once wrote to insist that, because of slowing sales, the Library would voluntarily reduce their commission, Ege responded by insisting that they continue to retain one-third of the proceeds. He also wrote to promote new acquisitions: in early October, 1942, he told McAfee about “nine new leaves, the FINEST, Beauvais France, 1285 (will be sent shortly).” This was a reference to the Beauvais Missal, which his business partner, NY dealer Philip Duschnes, would purchase and dismember several weeks later.

Over the course of this partnership between business associates who became friends, McAfee and her staff occasionally purchased leaves themselves, some to keep at home and others for the Library’s collection. As a result, the Lima Public Library currently owns more than 75 manuscript leaves, including one of Ege’s “Fifty Original Leaves” portfolios, making it one of the largest leaf collections in a U.S. public library.

The Lima Public Library’s “Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts” portfolio, open to no. 15, a leaf of the Beauvais Missal.

Scholars have known about the Lima Public Library’s collection for years (see, e.g.,  S. Gwara, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts (2013), p. 22 and note 54). But I’m here to tell you a previously unknown part of the story.

In November of 2016, I heard a lecture at the Beinecke Library delivered by retired Yale University chemistry professor and Lima native Michael McBride in which he reminisced about his personal connection with the Lima Public Library and its leaf-selling business. The fact that Prof. McBride and his siblings own more than a dozen Ege-sourced leaves suggested that other Limans might have some of this material hanging on walls, stored in attics, or resting in trunks. With Prof. McBride’s help, I reached out to Gary Fraser, director of the Lima Public Library, and to their public relations director, Karen Sommer, who helped me arrange a two-day “antiques road show” event at the Library. In exchange for allowing me to photograph their leaves for my own records, I would happily provide information to owners about their material.

My visit to the Lima Public Library on May 30-31 was publicized on the Library’s website and Facebook page, through flyers distributed at a local church, and via this brief spot on the local TV news (“The hunt is on for illuminated manuscripts!”). Overall, the response was fantastic. Ten attendees brought in a total of thirty previously-unknown Ege leaves, including some from well-known manuscripts (at least to those of us who study Ege and his legacy). Here are a few of them (hover over or click on each image to see its caption):

Three small Book of Hours leaves and an important leaf of the Wilton Processional!

Three leaves from a well-known and important late-thirteenth-century French Bible (FOL 14) hang on the wall of a church in Lima

These two friends hadn’t realized that their Gradual leaves came from the same manuscript

A detail of a leaf from a thirteenth-century English manuscript known as the Cambridge Bible (FOL 6, private collection)

Many of the owners had connections to the Lima Public Library, such as a
great-aunt or family friend who had worked there in the 1940s. Some spoke fondly of Miss McAfee’s “Closet Shop,” an antique store she ran for many years where, among other things, she continued to sell manuscript leaves. Even if they didn’t

97-year-old Miss Evelyn with her Book of Hours leaf (probably Gwara Handlist 151)

know very much about their leaves, they knew they were precious, and they all appreciated learning more about them. 97-year-old Miss Evelyn (shown at left) brought in three leaves, including a lovely leaf from a mid-fifteenth-century Book of Hours (probably Gwara Handlist 151) that happened to include the feminine Latin phrase “famulae tuae” in the text of the Marian prayer “Obsecro Te.” She was very moved when I told her that that meant the book had been made for a woman.

Some of the owners mentioned that they had family members with leaves who had left Lima, and I hope to be in touch with some of those ex-pats in the coming weeks.

On the first line of Miss Evelyn’s Book of Hours leaf: “famulae tuae”

Ege’s relationship with the Lima Public Library created a pocket of manuscript aficionados in the middle of farm-country Ohio. It was a joy getting to know them.

 

Manuscript Road Trip: An Otto Ege Treasure Trove in Maine

The Flight into Egypt, Walters Art Museum, MS W.188, f.112r

About two months ago, I received an email with the subject line “Beauvais Missal.” My interest piqued, I opened the message to find Maine bookseller Seth Thayer writing to report that he had found a leaf of the Missal “in a trunk in a client’s house in Maine.”

Indeed he had.

This leaf-in-a-box turned out to be the 100th identified folio of the Beauvais Missal. But there was much more.

For several days, Seth continued to send images of additional leaves he found in the trunk, eleven in all. The client believed them to have been purchased in New York in the 1950s and stored in the trunk since the 1970s. They hadn’t seen the light of day in forty years.

Several of the leaves looked very familiar to me, and after some research I was able to identify nearly all of them as having passed through the hands of our old friend Otto F. Ege or his close associate Philip Duschnes.

The Beauvais Missal

This Beauvais Missal leaf preserves liturgy for the Office of St. Lawrence (10 August) and is consecutive with a leaf belonging to a collector in Bath, Ohio. The leaf is unusual in that it provides complete choral pieces instead of the incipits found elsewhere in the manuscript, because of St. Lawrence’s status as an Apostle. For example, in this image of the verso, the versicle and offertory are given in full on multiple staves of music.

The Wilton Processional

Another exciting find: two leaves from a thirteenth-century processional made for the nuns of Wilton Abbey. The manuscript is the subject of important work being done by  University of Northern Iowa musicologist Alison Altstatt. Leaves of this processional were used by Ege as no. 8 in his “Fifty Original Leaves” portfolio; some images of those leaves can be found here, but to really learn about this important manuscript, spend some time with this video and watch for Prof. Altstatt’s forthcoming article, “Re-membering the Wilton Processional” in Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, 72:4 (June 2016), 590-632.

Leaf of the Wilton Processional

 

The Processional leaf above was housed in a red-fillet matte of the style typically used by New York dealer Philip Duschnes and his associate Otto Ege. The Processional leaf below was found in a custom frame and includes the label of the seller, Livingston Galleries in New York. This suggests that the two leaves may have been purchased from different sources at different times, begging the question as to whether the owner realized they were from the same manuscript and purchased one because he already owned the other.

Another Leaf of the Wilton Processional

 

Damn Yankees                                   (remember, I live in Boston)

When Thayer removed the framed leaf from its glass, he found that it, too, was housed in the same style matte. But there was another surprise in the frame: a New York newspaper from June 5, 1946. This is actually a really important piece of evidence, as it helps to establish the date when the leaf was framed (soon after June 5, 1946), which in turn helps establish when the Wilton Processional was broken (before then). This pushes back by at least two years the possible date of Ege and Duschnes’ acquisition of this manuscript as recorded by Gwara (Otto Ege’s Manuscripts, p. 346). It is likely they acquired and broke up the manuscript before June of 1946 [n.b. Peter Kidd’s comment below].

There are several layers of provenance to be read in this particular leaf. First, its origin: part of a processional made for the nuns of Wilton Abbey in the thirteenth century. Then, the red fillet matte, into which it was secured before June 1946, probably by Philip Duschnes (given the New York provenance, as opposed to Ege in Ohio). Then, the frame, into which it was placed by Livingston Galleries in June 1946. Then, the trunk, in which it was stored in the 1970s.

Most of the other leaves can be definitively identified as having passed through the hands of Philip Duschnes and Otto Ege; again, given the New York connection, it is likely that these particular leaves were sold by Duschnes rather than Ege. In the montage below, clockwise from the upper left and with reference to Scott Gwara’s Otto Ege’s Manuscripts, these leaves are found in his handlist as numbers 115, 73 (two leaves), 65, 82, 99, and 100.

 

The final leaf (shown to the right), from a large choirbook, cannot be positively identified in Gwara’s handlist, but it may be lurking in there somewhere.

Thayer was committed to finding an institutional home for the leaves, where they could be used for study and teaching. He was successful; the entire group has just been acquired by Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

A Happy Ending: Students and faculty from Colby College examining the new leaves