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.

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: 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: 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

 

 

Manuscript Road Trip: The Promise of Digital Fragmentology

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

Last week, I traveled to the University of Leeds with 2,000 other medievalists from around the world to participate in the International Medieval Congress. This post is a somewhat-abbreviated version of the paper I gave on the last day of the Congress, titled “Fragments and Fragmentology in North America.”

The corpus of manuscript leaves in North America presents problems and opportunities distinct from those facing and offered to other national collections, due to both the content of the corpus and the historical circumstances of its development. And I’m primarily going to be referring to whole, single leaves; cuttings and binding fragments such as those at right tell a very different story than the one you are about to hear. Binding fragments result from medieval and early modern recycling of worn or outdated manuscripts, not from a collector’s destructive whim. Manuscripts were being cut up “for pleasure and profit” (in the words of Christopher de Hamel) as early as the eighteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, collectible illuminated initials and miniatures were cut out close to the borders, the remnant text thrown out.  This practice resulted in sales and collections of  free-standing tightly-cropped initials, arranged cuttings adhered to highly-acidic paper, and elaborate collages such as the one shown at the left.  Most collectors on both sides of the Atlantic were not particularly interested in text or context, only in the pictures.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, dealers began breaking books and selling them off page by page. Was this in response to demand from collectors or was it a profit-driven impulse? It’s unclear. What is clear is that during this period, dealers began to sell, and collectors began to buy, entire pages. The United States, with its new industry-fueled wealth, was a primary beneficiary of this flooded market. From Masters of Industry to small-town collectors, major museums to small colleges, bibliophiles in the United States were clamoring for matted and framed leaves, in particular leaves from Gothic Books of Hours and Italian choirbooks. Dealers saw no harm in destroying these manuscripts. It was an example of a market economy on one side, as demand drove prices up, and economies of scale on the other. Dealers knew they would make more money selling 250 leaves to 250 buyers than if they offered a whole codex to one buyer. As a result, today there are tens of thousands of single leaves in several hundred U.S. collections.

The publication of Seymour de Ricci’s 1935 Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, its 1962 Supplement, and the Directory of Institutions in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings (co-authored by Melissa Conway and myself) give us three data points with which to analyze the development of the corpus of single leaves in the United States. For additional information about the Directory, see Melissa Conway and Lisa Fagin Davis, “The Directory of Institutions in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings: From its Origins to the Present, and its Role in Tracking the Migration of Manuscripts in North American Repositories,” Manuscripta 2013, Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 165-181. The statistics and figures in the next few paragraphs are taken from that article.

In compiling our Directory, Melissa and I did not set out to produce a union catalogue of manuscripts, but rather a true census, a counting, with the goal of answering a question that many scholars have asked but no one had previously been able to answer, that is, just how many pre-1600 manuscripts ARE there in North America? And how has the landscape of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in North America changed since the publica­tion of the Census and the Supplement?

While a detailed history of the migration of early manuscripts to North America over the past two centuries has yet to be written, it is certain that by 1935, after the pub­lication of the de Ricci Census, about 7,900 codices and 5,000 individual manuscript leaves had made their way to the North American continent. In order to formulate a meaningful comparison with today’s holdings, however, it is necessary to remove from this total the number of manuscripts in private collections, because contemporary collectors are more hesitant than were collectors in the 1930s to publicize their collections. The number of manuscripts in public collections in 1935, then, was around 6,000 codices and 2,500 leaves. By 1962, the number of manuscripts in public collections totaled 8,000 codices and 3,000 leaves.

As for today’s holdings, the current count is approximately 20,000 codices and 25,000 indi­vidual leaves—a total increase of 400% in fifty years.  The total number of codices in public collections has gone up two and a half times; by contrast, the number of leaves has mushroomed nearly nine times. In addition, the number of public collections has grown from 195 to 207 to 499. Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts can now be found in every state in the Union except for Alaska and North Dakota. The collections holding manuscripts today that were not in­cluded in either the Census or the Supplement represent 60% of the total, 300 out of 499. Between them, these “new” collections hold about 1,800 co­dices and 9,000 leaves, a lopsided statistic when compared to the rest of the collections that demonstrates the dependence of “new” collections on the cheaper, more plentiful mar­ket in single leaves. These mostly small institutions with small acquisitions budgets were able to take ad­vantage of the burgeoning market in single leaves to grow their teaching collections.

This map above  shows the relative number of manuscripts in 2015 – that is, codices and leaves – in each state. Not surprisingly, the greatest holdings (the darkest shading) correspond with well-known repositories and academic institutions in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and California. The picture changes a bit when we look just at singles leaves (below).  Here we find in addition to the usual suspects leaf collections of distinction in the Midwestern states of Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, but especially Ohio, and if you go back and read this blogpost, you’ll understand why.

No story of manuscript leaves in the United States would be complete without a discussion of Otto Frederick Ege, bibliophile and self-proclaimed biblioclast. Ege spent most of his career as a professor of art history at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio. He was a collector of manuscripts, recorded in the Census, but he was also a bookdealer. He is best known for breaking apart manuscripts and early printed books in the 1930s and 1940s, selling them leaf by leaf at a massive profit. He wasn’t the first to do this of course; other dealers had figured out that economies of scale worked in their favor if they sold 250 leaves to 250 buyers instead of one manuscript to one buyer. Ege defended his “biblioclasm” with what he considered the noble goal of putting a little bit of the Middle Ages within the economic grasp of even the humblest collector or smallest institution.

In a 1938 article in a “hobbyist” journal called Avocations, Ege explained:

Otto F. Ege, “I am a Biblioclast,” Avocations vol. I (March, 1938), pp. 516-18

“Book-tearers have been cursed and condemned, but have they ever been praised or justified?…Surely to allow a thousand people ‘to have and to hold’ an original manuscript leaf, and to get the thrill and understanding that comes only from actual and frequent contact with these art heritages, is justification enough for the scattering of fragments.  Few, indeed, can hope to own a complete manuscript book; hundreds, however, may own a leaf.” His actions may have been misguided, but he was correct in one important respect; small collections throughout the United States that could never have purchased entire codices are the proud possessors of significant teaching collections of medieval manuscript leaves.

Thanks to the work of scholars such as A. S. G. Edwards, Barbara Shailor, Virginia Brown, Peter Kidd, William Stoneman and others, as well as a recent monograph by Scott Gwara, several thousand leaves from several hundred manuscripts that passed through Ege’s hands can now be identified in at least 115 North American collections in 25 states. In other words, more than 10% of the entire corpus of single leaves in the United States can be traced back to Otto Ege.

Ege leaf in its distinctive matte (from the collection at Rutgers University; the leaf has since been removed from the matte)

Ege used the leaves of several dozen manuscripts to create thematic “portfolios,” for sale. In other words, he would take one leaf of this manuscript, one leaf of that one, one leaf from a third, and so on, and pile them up into a deck of manuscript leaves, each of which was from a different codex.  The leaves in these portfolios are always sequenced the same way. Number 5 in one portfolio comes from the same manuscript as Number 5 in every other portfolio of the same name. The most common of these portfolios are titled Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts; Original Leaves from Famous Bibles; and Original Leaves from Famous Books. The leaves were taped into custom mattes with a distinctive red-fillet border and Ege’s handwritten notes across the bottom, identified with Ege’s letterpress label, and stored in custom buckram boxes.

The leaves of some dismembered manuscripts were never used in portfolios but were distributed individually or in small groups, as gifts to friends or in small sales. Many portfolios are lost or have been broken up, their leaves sold individually. It is, however, usually possible to identify Ege leaves that aren’t in their original portfolios anymore, because of the distinctive mattes, inscriptions, or tape residue. Some of the manuscripts are themselves quite distinctive and easily recognizable, such as the late thirteenth-century Beauvais Missal.

A Digital Selection of Beauvais Missal Leaves

This manuscript serves as a perfect example of just how great a loss is incurred when a codex is dismembered and its leaves scattered, but it also serves as a hopeful case study of the possibilities offered by recent developments in imaging and metadata standards, platforms, and interoperability. The Beauvais missal is a beauty, its numerous gilt initials with graceful, colorful tendrils extending into the margins easily recognizable. The manuscript was written in or near Beauvais, France around 1285 and was used early on at the cathedral there. We know this because of an inscription on a lost leaf, transcribed in a 1926 Sotheby’s auction catalogue. Peter Kidd recently discovered that the manuscript was purchased from Sotheby’s by none other than American industrialist William Randolph Hearst, who owned it until 1942 when he sold it through Gimbel Brothers to New York dealer Philip Duschnes, who cut it up and began selling leaves less than one month later. He passed the remnants on to Otto Ege, who scattered it through his usual means. The Beauvais Missal is number 15 in Ege’s “Fifty Original Leaves” set, but many leaves are known outside of his portfolios. I know of 92 leaves in permanent collections or that have come on the market recently, scattered across twenty-one states and five nations.

Unlike well-known leaves such as those from the Beauvais Missal, most of the 25,000 single leaves in North American collections are neither catalogued nor digitized. If metadata standards for the electronic cataloguing of manuscript codices are in flux, the standards for cataloguing leaves and fragments are truly in their infancy. It is not easy to catalogue manuscript leaves, as it requires expertise in multiple fields including paleography, codicology, liturgy, musicology, and art history, among others. But leaves are easy to digitize, much easier than complete codices. They’re flat, with no bindings to damage, no need to use weights to keep the book open during imaging. A digitized leaf can be put online with minimal metadata and made instantly available for crowd-sourced cataloguing and scholarly use. Many U.S. collections are beginning to do just that.

With this growing corpus of digitized leaves comes the potential to digitally reconstruct dismembered manuscripts such as the Beauvais Missal. I have heard skeptics ask why such reconstructions are worthwhile. Does the world really NEED another mediocre mid-fifteenth-century Book of Hours from Rouen? What do we gain from piecing Humpty Dumpty together again? It’s a reasonable question. Many of the books broken by Ege and his peers were not exactly of great art historical or textual import. Because they are manuscripts, however, every one is unique and worthy of study. I would argue that in many cases, such as the Beauvais Missal, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. A lone leaf of the Beauvais Missal that preserves the liturgy for the feasts of a few Roman Martyrs in late July isn’t going to tell us much that we don’t already know. But identify the immediately preceding leaf that preserves a rare liturgy for St. Ebrulf of Beauvais on July 26, and we’re starting to get somewhere. The liturgy of Beauvais begins to come into focus alongside the music and the art historical record. Even reconstructing those shabby fifteenth-century Books of Hours serves a valuable pedagogical purpose, on top of any textual and art historical gain there may be; there is no better way to teach your students about the structure and contents of a Book of Hours than by having them piece one back together.

I know of at least three incipient projects that hope to reverse the scourge of biblioclasm:

Manuscript-Link at the University of South Carolina is a repository of siloed images submitted by multiple collections that will be catalogued by the project’s Principal Investigators. Registered users will be able to form their own collections online and compare multiple leaves side-by-side in parallel windows. [update: as of 2020, this project is defunct]

The international and recently fully-funded Fragmentarium project (organized by the team that brought you the splendid e-Codices site) will focus on the massive collections of binding fragments found in European national libraries, the market in whole, single leaves having been in many ways a predominantly American phenomenon.

Most promising for the North American corpus, I think, is the Broken Books project at St. Louis University. Broken Books will use a highly sustainable model in which holding institutions will be responsible for data and image curation. The Broken Books platform, according to the project’s website, will “allow the canvases that hold the digital images of the relevant leaves or pages to be annotated and arranged, so that users can attach annotations, including cataloguing metadata, to individual images or to a whole leaf, with the goal of virtually reconstructing the original manuscript.” The Broken Books platform will use Shared Canvas technology compliant with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), in which structural and descriptive metadata about a digitized object can be standardized and made interoperable.

In other words, instead of storing images and data on a dedicated server (by definition of limited capacity), the Broken Books tool will use persistent URLs to retrieve images when called for into a IIIF-compliant viewer such as Mirador, where they can be annotated and arranged by the user. This model is particularly sustainable, as it puts the onus of image and data duration on the holding institution, where it should be. Such interoperability also carries with it an expectation of Creative Commons licensing, which is, after all, the wave of the future.

Imaging and data platforms are in development for all three projects and metadata standards are being established by teams of digital humanists, librarians, and manuscript scholars. For the purposes of such projects, the Ege leaves present a perfect test case. Working with the portfolios alone, it will be possible to easily reconstruct at least a portion several dozen Ege manuscripts. Using the Mirador viewer, Ben Albritton at Stanford University has just unveiled a case study that models how such digital reconstructions might work:

Reconstruction of Ege “Fifty Original Leaves” MS 1

Albritton has reconstructed a portion of Ege’s “Fifty Original Leaves” MS 1 (a twelfth-century glossed Bible from Switzerland), comprised of leaves at Stanford, the University of South Carolina, the University of Mississippi, and others. The viewer uses PURLs to retrieve the images in the correct order when called for, pulling them into a IIIF-compliant viewer, in this case, Mirador. As an added bonus, the primary text has been transcribed using the T-Pen annotator (let’s hear it for interoperability!). Click on the speech bubble in the lower left corner of the viewer to see the annotations.

The Broken Books platform will function along similar lines and will also  include metadata for each leaf. I’ve recently begun working with the Broken Books project, using the Beauvais Missal as a case study to help establish a metadata and authority structure. I hope to be able to debut the reconstruction using the Broken Books platform later this year.

In the meantime, there are several tools already in existence that can be used for this kind of work. I’m using an Omeka exhibit site as a workspace while the Broken Books platform is in development. The Omeka environment allows me to associate Dublin Core metadata with images of recto and verso in a single record and then easily put the leaves in their correct order. While this is a workable temporary solution, the Dublin Core metadata structure is somewhat inflexible and doesn’t really have room for all of the fields one would want in a full-scale Fragmentology project.

This is not a public site, by the way, because I do not yet have the rights to use some of these images for anything other than personal research.

I’m using a different tool to recreate the original bifoliate quire structure of the manuscript. Even though the Beauvais Missal has no foliation, reconstructing the signatures is possible because there are catchwords at the end of each quire. The gathering shown below was reconstructed using the Collation Visualization generator developed by Dot Porter at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reconstructed Quire of the Beauvais Missal

This brilliant tool combines a manuscript’s collation statement with PURLs of digital images to generate conjoint bifolia, as if the manuscript had been virtually disbound. I’m using the tool to reverse the process; once I know the order of leaves in a particular quire, I can use the Generator to digitally reunite formerly-conjoint leaves from disparate collections. For example, let’s look more closely at the second bifolium, outlined in yellow above. These leaves were originally conjoint, but are not consecutive.

The leaf on the left belongs to a private collector in Monaco, while its formerly conjoint leaf belongs to Smith College in Massachusetts. These two leaves haven’t seen each other since they were sliced apart in 1942.

So this is the situation in North America. We have more than 25,000 single leaves in several hundred collections. Some are beautifully digitized and skillfully catalogued. Others are catalogued incorrectly; some turn out to be printed facsimiles; others sit in a drawer, unknown and waiting. Digitization and metadata standards are still being established. We have our work cut out for us. But the promise of these projects is great. Historical circumstance has deposited a well-defined and cohesive corpus of leaves in the United States and Canada. Multiple leaves from dozens – perhaps hundreds – of manuscripts can easily be identified for reconstruction. We just need images and data, and a place to put them.

Manuscript Road Trip: Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal

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

If you’ve been travelling with me on this virtual road trip around the United States, you have almost certainly come to know the dismembered beauty known as The Beauvais Missal. I’ve mentioned it many times and shown you several different leaves found in various collections. And I’ve ruminated about the possibility of digitally reassembling this masterpiece of thirteenth-century illumination. Well, it’s time to stop dreaming and start doing.

Cleveland Museum of Art, Acc. 1982.141 verso

Working with the “Broken Books” project at St. Louis University, I have begun a digital reconstruction of the Beauvais Missal. The “Broken Books” project will result in the development of a platform for reconstructing broken books as well as the establishment of a metadata structure designed specifically for manuscript fragments and leaves. My Beauvais Missal project will serve as one of several case studies in the project’s early stages.

The Beauvais Missal (also known as the Hangest Missal) has been much studied, by scholars such as Barbara Shailor, Christopher de Hamel, Anthony Edwards, Alison Stones, and Peter Kidd, among others. You’d think there couldn’t possibly be anything more to discover about it. But for all the times it’s been mentioned in print or online (try Googling “Beauvais Missal”), there is still much to learn about its contents and history. I’m working on the former, and Peter Kidd has recently filled in some of the missing pieces of the latter, allowing us to reconstruct much of the manuscript’s pre-biblioclastic journey; see his recent blogposts here and here.

To sum up:

1. The manuscript was written for the use of Beauvais in the late thirteenth century and is said to have originally been the third of a three-volume set. The codex originally comprised 309 leaves. No one has ever identified the other volumes of the set.
2. Given to the Beauvais Cathedral in 1356 by Robert de Hangest, a former canon, to ensure that his death would be commemorated every year. We only know this because the donation inscription was transcribed by later catalogues; the leaf preserving the inscription was lost when the manuscript was dismembered.
3. The manuscript is recorded in the Beauvais Cathedral library as late as the seventeenth century. It is unclear when the Beauvais Cathedral library was dispersed, but, like many early French libraries, the collection was probably broken up soon after the French Revolution.
4. Owned by Didier Petit de Meurville (1793-1873), of Lyon; his sale, 1843, lot 354;
5. Owned by four generations of the Brölemann family: Henry-Auguste Brölemann (1775-1854) of Lyon; his son Emile-Thierry Brölemann (1800-1869); his son Arthur-Auguste Brölemann (1826-1904); his sister Albertine Brölemann (1831-1920); her daughter Blanche Bontoux (1859-1955), sold by her at Sotheby’s, 4 May 1926, lot 161, to;
6. William Permain, as agent for;
7. William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951);
8. Sold from his collection in October 1942 through Gimbel’s NY, to;
9. NY bookdealer Philip Duschnes (1897-1970), who cut it up and sold many of its leaves to;
10. Otto F. Ege (1888-1951). Ege went to on give away or sell many leaves of the manuscript. Single leaves of the Beauvais Missal are best known as No. 15 in the “Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts” portfolios, of which forty were issued.

Harvard Univ., Houghton Library MS Typ 956 2 verso (left) reunited with its originally consecutive leaf, sold at Christie’s on 4 Sept. 2013, lot 262 1 (at right). Note the gold offset in the upper right corner of the Houghton leaf, matching the decoration in the upper left corner of the Christie’s leaf.

I’ve made a lot of progress already, identifying the contents of more than 80 known leaves, pairing up consecutive leaves, reconstructing quire structure. There are no folio numbers, but the contents are in liturgical (calendrical) order. The trick is identifying the feastday if there are no rubrics. Liturgy, it turns out, is quite Google-able. In addition, the gold decoration sometimes leaves mirror-image offsets on formerly-consecutive leaves, where the leaves were pressed together during the centuries when the book lay closed (example above).

I’m not quite ready to share all of my observations about the manuscript, but one thing is clear from the work I’ve already done on the contents of each leaf: the Beauvais Missal was a summer volume, preserving Mass texts and chant for feasts falling between the week after Easter and the end of November. The manuscript also included a calendar, a section of special masses, and the Canon of the Mass (whose leaves have only fifteen lines of text as opposed to the twenty-one lines elsewhere in the manuscript; see the Cleveland Museum of Art leaf above).

The virtual reconstruction of this manuscript is of course only possible because of recent advances in the field of digital humanities, in particular database structure, image annotation, and the encoding and interoperability of both.

Priest praying over the Host (Oberlin College, Allen Memorial Art Gallery, Acc. 1993.16 recto, detail)

But it is the very materiality of medieval manuscripts that makes them so magical. As anyone who has touched a 1,000-year-old manuscript can attest, knowing that you are reading a page written, held, read, and passed on by generations of humans is an extraordinary experience. As manuscript scholars and digital humanists, we should never lose sight of the ultimate, essential reality: these are books, meant to be touched and read and handled (unless, of course, a curator or conservator decides otherwise). A digital surrogate can only take us so far.

Priest saying Mass (Cleveland Museum of Art, ACC. 1982.141 verso, detail)

A digital image can’t tell you how each side of the parchment feels, it can’t show you how to definitively distinguish the hair side from the flesh side, a distinction of critical importance for understanding the structure of a medieval manuscript. Sometimes images are cropped, because the photographer doesn’t know that the margins of the leaf may be just as important as the text; in the case of the Beauvais Missal, uncropped edges may include important physical clues about the binding structure, such as sewing holes or evidence of repairs. Effaced inscriptions or annotations often can’t be read in a standard image and need to be examined in situ, using multi-spectral imaging techniques if you’re lucky enough to have access to such equipment. These are just a few examples of the kind of evidence that only a physical examination can uncover. In order to completely understand the original structure and binding and sequence of the leaves in the Beauvais Missal, I need to study as many leaves as possible in person.

And so a few weeks ago I embarked on an actual – rather than a virtual – road trip, visiting twelve of the fifteen Beauvais Missal leaves currently residing in Ohio. It was a whirlwind tour as I visiting eleven collections in four days, but I didn’t need much time with each leaf. I put a thousand miles on my rental car, driving from Cleveland to Columbus to Toledo before getting back to my day job and heading for the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at the University of Notre Dame. All of that driving was well worth it. I saw several leaves I hadn’t known about, took high-resolution images of leaves for which I didn’t have good images already, saw old friends, and got to know collections that were new to me.

Ecclesia and Synagoga (Cleveland Museum of Art, ACC. 1982.141 verso, detail)

I saw the highlights of the manuscript on my first day. The 1926 Sotheby’s catalogue describes the Missal as having four historiated initials. Three are in north-east Ohio: two on a leaf at the Cleveland Museum of Art (above and at right) and one on a leaf at the Allen Art Gallery at Oberlin. The fourth, probably from the Te Igitur section of the Canon, is lost. It is no co-incidence that so many leaves of the manuscript, including both surviving historiated leaves, can today be found in Ohio, since that state was Otto Ege’s home turf.

Over the next few days, I visited Kenyon College, the Cleveland Public Library, a private collection in Oberlin, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Ohio State University, the University of Ohio, and the Toledo Museum of Art. I had to skip a few Ohio collections for want of time, so I chose not to visit collections whose leaves had already been photographed at high-resolution: Case Western Reserve University, Denison University, and the Cincinnati Public Library. My thanks to all of the librarians and curators who so generously shared their material with me.

Two Ohio collections with Ege material are particularly noteworthy: The Rowfant Club in Cleveland and the Lima Public Library. These collections could not be more different – an urban bibliophilic men’s club and a small public library in the middle of farm country – and yet both institutions were important to Ege.

Beauvais Missal leaf, Rowfant Club, Cleveland

In 1940, Ege was elected an honorary member of the Rowfant Club, and he probably donated their Beauvais Missal leaf at some point in the 1940s. The leaf at the Rowfant Club has been hiding in plain sight for decades, prominently displayed in a custom pivoting wall-mount in the doorway of the main meeting room (at left). The bookcases along the walls are filled with tall candlesticks, of great significance to the members. When a gentleman joins the Rowfant Club, he selects a candlestick to serve as his totem throughout his life at the club. It serves as his placecard at dinner and represents him in absentia. When he dies, the members gather to memorialize their departed friend, lighting and snuffing his candle before setting it upon a high shelf in perpetual remembrance.

Otto F. Ege’s Rowfant Club candlestick, as reproduced in the Club’s Candlestick Book.

Ege’s candlestick, of his own design, is shown at right.

Ege’s relationship with the Lima Public Library was of a fiscal nature. He worked out an arrangement with the Library whereby they would act as his local agent, selling medieval manuscript leaves on his behalf and keeping a portion of the proceeds to benefit their Staff Loan Fund. This arrangement lasted for several decades, to the benefit of all parties. During my morning in Lima, the librarian very kindly showed me several thick folders of correspondence between Ege and the Library stretching across decades. I was very excited to find this very early reference to the Beauvais Missal, a letter to the Lima librarian dated 1 October 1942 in which Ege writes, “You may have expected nine new items, the FINEST, Beauvais, France 1285 (will be sent shortly)…”

Lima Public Library, 1 Oct. 1942 correspondence between Otto F. Ege and the Lima librarian.

This letter (shown at left) was written several weeks BEFORE Duschnes bought and dismembered the manuscript, suggesting that he and Ege decided in advance to buy, and to break, the Beauvais Missal. And now, seventy-three years later, it’s time to put it back together.

[note: the following paragraph and the list below have been updated as of 15 July 2015]

So far, I’ve assembled images and metadata for 93 leaves (some now lost), representing twenty-two states and six countries. Several of the leaves in private hands were brought to my attention by Peter Kidd, to whom I am most grateful. I’m happy to share my handlist here – the largest list of Beauvais Missal leaves ever compiled:

Beauvais Missal Leaves in the United States

United States

AZ           Phoenix                  Phoenix Public Library

CA           Los Angeles          [private collection]

CO          Boulder                  Univ. of Colorado

CT           Hartford                 Wadsworth Athenaeum

CT           New Haven            Yale University (2 leaves)

FL                                          [private collection] (2 leaves)

FL            St. Petersburg       Museum of Fine Arts

IN           Bloomington           Lilly Library, Indiana University

IN           Indianapolis            Indianapolis Museum of Art

KY           Louisville                The University of Louisville

MA         Amherst                 Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

MA         Boston                   Boston Public Library (2 leaves)

MA         Cambridge             Houghton Library, Harvard Univ. (2 leaves)

MA         Northampton         Smith College

MA         Northampton        Smith College Museum of Art

MA         Wellesley             Wellesley College (2 leaves)

MD         Bethesda             Private Collection

MI          East Lansing        Michigan State Univ.

MI          Kalamazoo          Western Michigan Univ.

MN        Minneapolis         Univ. of Minnesota

NC          Greensboro       UNC-Greensboro

NH          Hanover             Dartmouth College

NJ           New Brunswick  Rutgers University

NJ           Newark               Newark Public Library

NY          Albany                 State Library of New York

NY          Buffalo                 Buffalo and Erie County Public Library

NY          Hamilton              Colgate Univ., Picker Art Gallery

NY          New York            Metropolitan Museum of Art

NY          New York            Morgan Library

NY          Rochester           Rochester Institute of Technology

NY          Rochester           Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music (2 leaves)

NY          Stony Brook        SUNY Stony Brook

OH          Athens                 Ohio University

OH          Bath                     Private Collection

OH          Cincinnati            Cincinnati Public Library

OH          Cleveland            Case Western Reserve University

OH          Cleveland            Cleveland Museum of Art

OH          Cleveland            Cleveland Public Library (2 leaves)

OH          Cleveland            Rowfant Club

OH          Columbus            The Ohio State Univ.

OH          Granville              Denison University

OH          Kent                      Kent State University

OH          Kenyon                 Kenyon College

OH          Lima                     Lima Public Library

OH          Oberlin                 Allen Memorial Art Museum

OH          Oberlin                 Robert and Gina Lodge

OH          Toledo                  Toledo Museum of Art

PA          Bryn Athyn            Glencairn Museum (2 leaves)

RI            Providence           Rhode Island School of Design

SC           Columbia             Univ. of South Carolina

TN          Memphis               Rhodes College (2 leaves)

VA           Great Falls            Private Collection (formerly Charles Edwin Puckett, Bookseller)

VA          Roanoke               Hollins Univ. (2 leaves)

WA         Seattle                  Univ. of Washington

Canada

ONT       Toronto                Art Gallery of Ontario

ONT       Toronto                Ontario College of Art and Design

ONT       Toronto                Univ. of Toronto

SASK      Saskatchewan   Univ. of Saskatchewan

England

Christopher de Hamel

[Private collection outside of London] (sold Sotheby’s London 7/10/2012, lot 2a)

[Private collection in Yorkshire, RMGYMss]

[Private collection]

Japan

[Private collection]

Monaco

[Private collection] (three leaves, bought at: Christie’s 09/04/2013, lot 262, no. 3; PBA Galleries, Auction 540, lot 200; and Mackus Company)

Norway

Oslo       Schoyen MS 222 (2 leaves)

As many as thirty leaves are known but untraced, including:

Christie’s 01/30/1980, lot 212

Christie’s, 06/25/1997, lot 16

Christie’s 09/04/2013, lot 262, nos. 1 and 2 (ex-Vershbow, later Pirages)

Bauman Rare Books

Bruce Ferrini Rare Books, Akron, Ohio, Catalogue 1 (1987), nos. 48-49 (2 leaves)

Endowment for Biblical Research, Boston University

Mackus Company, bookseller (1 leaf)

Maggs, London, Bulletin 11 (1982), no. 43 

Quaritch, cat. 1270 (2000), nr. 79

Sotheby’s London, 11/26/1985, lot 61 (calendar leaf)

Sotheby’s London 12/5/1994, lot 4

Sotheby’s London 6/19/2001, lot 9

Also lost are Beauvais Missal leaves from twelve of Ege’s “50 Original Leaves” portfolios, numbered sets 1, 3, 4 (this set belongs to the Cleveland Institute of Art but is lacking its Beauvais Missal leaf), 7, 14, 18, 20, 21, 26, 31, 33, and 39.

I don’t have images of all of these untraced leaves, so it’s possible that some of these references are to the same leaf sold again. It’s been said that there is a leaf on the wall at the University Club in Chicago, but the staff of the Club assures me that even if there once was a leaf in their art collection, it is no longer there.

I hope to have a working online prototype of the digital surrogate by year’s end. I now appeal to my readers to help me find additional leaves. Here’s how to recognize them:

Typical Missal page (Case Western Reserve University, Ege MS 15 verso)

Typical Canon page (Cleveland Public Library MS Ege 15 verso)

Typical Missal page with music (Michigan State Univ., Mapcase MSS 325, no. 2 recto)

In addition to the stylistic elements, which are certainly distinctive (in particular the leafy, pointed extensions into the margins), you can identify leaves of the Beauvais Missal by their dimensions. The leaves are written in two columns of 15 or 21 lines (or ten staves of music) per page, and the dimensions are around 290 x 200 mm (if untrimmed) with a written space of 200 x 135 mm. I am certain there are more leaves out there. If you think (or know) you’ve got one, or know of any I’ve missed, please contact me at LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org!

Manuscript Road Trip: The Jersey Turnpike

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

Remember last time when I said we’d go to the Jersey Shore? I lied. There are no medieval manuscripts on the Jersey Shore. If you’re a Bruce Springsteen fan, I highly recommend a visit to Asbury Park. But if you want manuscripts? Stay on the New Jersey Turnpike, the well-travelled and beloved thoroughfare that runs up the middle of the state. It just wouldn’t be a roadtrip without it.

We’ll start by getting off at Exit 8 and heading west into Princeton, where we will find one of the largest collections of medieval manuscripts in the U.S. at Princeton University. According to their website, the Manuscripts Division of the Rare Book and Special Collections Library holds “172 [medieval and Renaissance manuscripts] in the Robert Garrett Collection, 58 in the Grenville Kane Collection, 19 in the Robert Taylor Collection, and 201 in the growing Princeton Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. In addition, there are a number of manuscripts in the Cotsen Library, other manuscripts in other manuscript series or bound with printed books; more than 250 separate miniatures, leaves, and cuttings; and about 100 manuscripts in the Scheide Library.” (the Scheide Library is a private collection housed on the Princeton campus; the collector, William H. Scheide, passed away in November 2014)

Le roman de la rose (Garrett MS. 126, f. 1) (Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

Curator Don Skemer’s detailed and gorgeous catalogue of the Princeton collection reminds us why print catalogues are still worth publishing, especially when augmented by a significant online presence. Many of these manuscripts have been at least partially digitized, with images and metadata available through the Index of  Christian Art and ARTstor (both paywalled, but many major research libraries are subscribers to one or the other). If you don’t have access to either of these subscription databases, you can find links to a growing collection of digitized manuscripts in Princeton’s Digital Library. Best of all (and here I may be accused of burying the lead), the Checklist of Western Medieval, Byzantine, and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library and the Scheide Library includes links to thousands of images.

Charlemagne and Alcuin, drawn by Gottschalk of Lambach (Princeton Univ. MS 51, f. 61 (Lambach, s. XII 3/4), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

The miniature below, from Garrett MS. 48, struck me not only because of the elaborate diapered backgrounds in each of the four miniatures but in particular because of the lovely image in the lower margin of Christ learning to walk, toddling towards his mother’s outstretched arms (detail below).

Book of Hours, Use of Paris, ca. 1420–1430, France (Paris) (Garrett MS. 48, f. 1) (Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

Garrett MS. 48, f. 1 (detail, lower margin)

Here are a few other highlights:

Garrett MS. 125 (Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion and other French texts) (NW France, s. XIIIex)

Garrett MS. 158 (Giovanni Marcanova [ Collectio antiquitatum ]) (Italy (probably Bologna), 1471 (?) or after 1473)

Garrett MS. 43 (Benedictional written in late Carolingian minuscule and illuminated, probably at Lorsch Abbey, in the second quarter of the eleventh century)

Garrett MS. 126  (Le Roman de la rose, Paris, mid-14th century)

Keep an eye on Don Skemer’s blog for additional information about the collection. Manuscripts are held by other collections in Princeton, including the Princeton Theological Seminary (an institution independent of the University which holds, among other items, several examples of Oxyrhynchus papyri) and the Princeton University Art Museum (which holds, among other items, one of the scrolls edited in my forthcoming book). An Advanced Search in the Museum collection for “Classification = Manuscripts” and “Department = Prints and Drawings” will bring up most of the manuscripts and cuttings.

East to the shore or West to the manuscripts? Decisions, decisions…

Now it’s back to the Turnpike, continuing north to Exit 9. If you need a beach break, turn right and go through East Brunswick towards Asbury Park. If you want some more manuscripts, turn westward and stop off at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

Rutgers University is home to several dozen leaves from manuscripts dismembered by our old friend Otto Ege. These leaves were the inspiration for one of the first, and still seminal, studies of Ege and his biblioclastic ways, Barbara Shailor’s “Otto Ege: his manuscript fragment collection and the opportunities presented by electronic technology” in The Book as Art, Literature and History (New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers Universities Libraries, c2003), available online here. The manuscripts are all accessible on Digital Scriptorium.

Beauvais Missal (Rutgers Univ., Special Collections, ND3375.F889, verso)

Just 1.5 miles up George St. is the New Brunswick Theological Seminary.  Among the printed books in the Gardner A. Sage library is a three-volume hybrid set of the works of St. Ambrose, the first (and probably the second) volume from 1516. The third volume is an incunable printed in Basel by Johann Amerbach in 1492. Conservation of the books yielded three binding fragments, since removed and housed separately. The first was from Giraldus Cremonensis’ Latin translation of Aristotle’s Meteora (Book II). The second volume contained a scrap of an Old French translation of the Book of Judges (20:23 – 21:7) and the third volume around 200 lines of a unique Old French Life of St. Andrew.  Both Old French fragments date from the early thirteenth century. For more, see Gerald A. Bertin and Alfred Foulet, “The Acts of Andrew in Old French Verse: The Gardner A. Sage Library Fragment (PMLA 81 (1966), 451-454) and Gerald A. Bertin, “The Book of Judges in Old French prose : the Gardner A. Sage Library fragment” (Romania 90 (1969), 121-131).

Next time, we’ll visit the Big Apple. Take the Turnpike to Exit 18W, cross the Hudson River, and meet me in Manhattan. But you’ll want to make one last stop before you get stuck in Bridge traffic…

 

 

 

 

Manuscript Road Trip: Carolina on my Mind

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

Thanks to the sleuthing and expertise of University of South Carolina English professor Scott Gwara, every manuscript in the state of South Carolina has been catalogued and imaged, and all of the resulting metadata has been gathered into a very useful and comprehensive website titled Pages from the Past. In addition to publishing A Census of Medieval Manuscripts in South Carolina Collections, Gwara has also worked to bring scholars together at the University for an annual seminar on the history of book, making South Carolina an important center of manuscript studies in the United States. I urge you to explore the website; you will find leaves from manuscripts that should be familiar to you by now (such as the Llangattock Breviary and the Beauvais Missal), but you will also encounter manuscripts that will certainly be new to you.

After you’ve spent some time exploring manuscripts in South Carolina, join me in North Carolina where we’ll visit UNC and Duke University.

Some of the most picturesque campuses in the United States are in North Carolina. Let’s start at UNC-Chapel Hill, where medieval manuscripts can be found in the Rare Book Collection and in the Ackland Art Museum. My thanks to Claudia Funke (Curator of Rare Books at UNC-Chapel Hill) and Daphne Bissette for arranging for me to have access to images of several of the University’s manuscripts.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

UNC Chapel Hill, MS 92, f. 1r

The Wilson Special Collections Library is home to several hundred manuscripts, many of which were included in the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada and its Supplement (Census II:1907-1909 and Supplement pp. 415-420). I’ve picked a few highlights, starting with this late fifteenth-century Aristotle from Italy (perhaps Florence). The “white-vine” border on the first page is typical of manuscript illumination in Italy during this period.

Next up, a ca. 1475 Book of Hours said to have been produced in Bruges, with fifteen full-page miniatures and numerous richly illuminated borders as well as coats of arms that identify it as having been made for François de la Tour and his wife Hélène de Bussy. Known as The Hanes Hours, it was given to the University by the widow of Frederick Hanes in 1946:

The Annunciation (UNC Chapel Hill, MS 10, f. 29v)

The Nativity (UNC Chapel Hill, MS 10, f. 50v)

Annunciation to the Shepherds (UNC Chapel Hill, MS 10, f. 54v)

The Annunciation miniature is particularly endearing, with a simplicity of execution that simultaneously incorporates rich iconographic detail: Mary, in her usual blue gown, sits at prayer, reading from a Book of Hours much like the very book in which she is depicted. The white lilies in the vase behind her represent her physical and spiritual purity. The Angel kneels before her, holding a scroll on which are written the words he speaks, “Ave, gratia plena, dominus tecum” (Hail [Mary], full of grace, the Lord is with you). The face of God can be seen in the upper left corner of the starry sky, and the Holy Spirit, as a small dove, descends in the center of the scene.

The Nativity scene also depicts the standard iconographic elements, with some details (the radiant Child, Joseph’s candle) indirectly inspired by the vision of the Nativity recorded by the fourteenth-century mystic St. Bridget of Sweden: “…[Mary]’s son, from whom radiated such an ineffable light and splendour, that the sun was not comparable to it, nor did the candle that St. Joseph had put there, give any light at all, the divine light totally annihilating the material light of the candle…. I saw the glorious infant lying on the ground naked and shining.” (see Hendrik Cornell. The Iconography of the Nativity of Christ. Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift. Uppsala, Sweden, 1924, pp. 11-13).

The angel who reveals the Good News to the startled men in this Annunciation to the Shepherds also holds a scroll. The text, “Gloria in excelsis deo,” is written upside-down, legible only to the angel as he reads it aloud.

Psalter, Use of St-Denis (Paris, s. XIII 1/2) (UNC, Chapel Hill, MS 11, f. 96v)

Next up is this gorgeous thirteenth-century Psalter. The calendar of Saints in this manuscript identifies is as having been made for the use of the monks of St-Denis in Paris. The historiated initials preserve an uncommon, though not unknown, illustrative cycle that includes The Annointing of King David (Psalm 26), The Judgement of King Solomon (Psalm 38), Jonah and the Whale (Psalm 68), and the Nativity (Psalm 97).

Annointing of King David (UNC Chapel Hill, MS 11, f. 27r)

The Judgement of Solomon (UNC Chapel Hill, MS 11, f. 40v)

Jonah and the Whale (UNC Chapel Hill, MS 11, f. 66r)

The Nativity (UNC Chapel Hill, MS 11, f. 96v)

 

UNC Chapel Hill, MS 98, f. 1r

This theological miscellany from Spain is notable for the zoomorphic initials on the first page (spelling the first word, “Historia”) and the colophon on the last. Initially, I interpreted the inscription as recording that the manuscript was written in the year 1211, referencing a conflict that year between Alphonse VIII of Castile and the King of Navarre. It wasn’t at all clear to me what event was being referenced, however, since by 1211 Alphonse and Sancho, King of Navarre, were teaming up and undertaking the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. Mark Mersiowsky has since pointed out (in a comment below) that the phrase “in era 1211” is a Spanish dating system that in fact translates to the year 1173.

UNC Chapel Hill, MS 98, f. 271r (detail)

UNC Chapel Hill, MS 526, f. 1v

Before we head over the Ackland Art Museum, I want to share with you what is almost certainly the earliest western manuscript in North Carolina. The Bible fragment above dates from the first half of the ninth century and was produced in the scriptorium at Tours, where the letter-forms we still use today were first developed. This fragment and another just like it were found pasted inside the cover of an incunable binding by a sharp-eyed UNC cataloguer and were carefully removed from the binding by University conservators in 1985. Note to curators: check your early bindings! You never know what treasures may be hiding in plain sight.

The Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill has several manuscript fragments, discoverable on their website by searching “manuscript.” Here are a few that caught my eye:

Christ with Saints within the letter [R] (France, s. XIII) (Ackland Art Museum Acq. 65.6.1)

 Below, two leaves from an early fifteenth-century Book of Hours from northern France: King David at prayer in the wilderness (the beginning of the Seven Penitential Psalms) and the Coronation of the Virgin (illustrating Compline of the Hours of the Virgin).

Ackland Art Museum, Acq. 69.7.1

Ackland Art Museum, Acq. 69.7.2

Moving on to the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina, we find a boxed set of Ege’s “Fifty Original leaves,” all of which have been digitized here. Ege originally put together forty numbered portfolios with this particular collection of leaves; the Greensboro set is number 38.

Duke University, Durham, NC

Duke University owns several dozen medieval manuscripts (Census II:1910-1911 and 2342), including those once owned by Chicago collector Berthold Louis Ullman (Census I:667-668 and Supplement pp. 421-425). Most have not been catalogued and are not available online. The Greek manuscripts in the collection, however, are catalogued here. The Nasher Collection, Duke’s art gallery, owns a beautiful late fifteenth-century Book of Hours that has been attributed to the great artist Jean Bourdichon, or at least to his workshop. Another image is here. The gallery also owns several leaves from Books of Hours, including a sumptuous miniature of The Last Judgement from a manuscript attributed to a group of illuminators known as the Masters of the Gold Scrolls (named for their swirling gold-on-scarlet backgrounds).

We visited western Tennessee a few months ago. Next time, we’ll cross the Appalachian Mountains to visit the eastern half of the state before heading into Kentucky.

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

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

This week, I’m going to get off the virtual superhighway to share a discovery. Digital publication seems appropriate given that most of this work was conducted using online resources and images, making this a great case study for digital humanities research and the newly-christened field of “digital fragmentology.”

I wear many hats at the moment: Acting Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America, blogger, professor of library science, and medieval manuscript consultant. In the latter role, I have for some months been cataloguing the manuscripts belonging to the Five Colleges consortium of Western Massachusetts (Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts – Amherst). Smith and U. Mass. each happen to own one of the leaf collections compiled by Otto Ege titled “Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts”  (if you need to be brought up to speed, take a look at my Ege post from Ohio).

These portfolios are comprised of leaves from fifty different manuscripts owned and dismembered by Otto Ege in the 1940s. You may remember that in each portfolio the leaves are numbered from 1 – 50, and Leaf 1 (for example) in one portfolio comes from the same manuscript as Leaf 1 in every other portfolio. I finished cataloguing the Smith College portfolio last month and have been working on the U. Mass. portfolio for the last few weeks. Today, we’re going to take a close look at “Fifty Original Leaves” leaf nr. 48 (a.k.a. FOL 48).

Otto Ege, “Fifty Original Leaves” portfolio, Leaf 48v (Lilly Library)

The leaves known as FOL 48 were cut from a rather innocuous Book of Hours from France, twenty lines per page, around 17 x 12 cm. In other words, fairly typical for the late fifteenth century. Books like this one were mass-produced in professional workshops, with custom features added for local use. There are, quite literally, thousands of these floating around. One of the cataloguing tasks for a leaf such as this is to identify not only the date of origin (third quarter of the fifteenth century) and general place of origin (northern France), but also the particular section of the Book of Hours from which the leaf was taken. This isn’t as difficult as it seems, especially these days when there are numerous very useful online resources for working with Books of Hours (I highly recommend the Book of Hours Tutorial and the Hypertext Book of Hours).

Using these resources, I was able to identify FOL 48 in the Smith College portfolio (at right) as having come from Matins of the Office of the Dead.

Smith College, Ege MS 48v

Most people who work with Books of Hours know that in order to determine the liturgical Use (the location for which the book was made) you have to locate the Antiphon and Chapter Reading for Prime and None of the Hours of the Virgin and compare the incipits to the lists originally published by Falconer Madan in 1923 and since expanded by others (here). This is an imperfect system, but it’s a start. But, as Knud Ottosen first discovered, you can also identify Use by looking at the Responsories and Versicles of the Office of the Dead (Ottosen’s work is online here).

Usually, when you only have a leaf or two to work with you’re not going to have enough text to allow a determination of liturgical Use. This is the case with Smith’s FOL 48; only one responsory is preserved on the leaf, not enough to make a determination.

Smith College, Ege MS 48r

By looking through the examples of FOL 48 siloed by Fred Porcheddu here, however, I was able to find additional Responsories from the Office of the Dead, enough to determine that the Office in this manuscript is for the Use of Chalons-sur-Marne (now Chalons-sur-Champagne), near Reims in NE France, in the Champagne-Ardenne region. This may not seem like an important piece of information, but hold on to it, because it turns out that it is.

Now let’s turn our attention to U. Mass. Amherst’s FOL 48 (below). This leaf – which comes from the very same late fifteenth-century Book of Hours as the leaf at Smith – is in Middle French verse instead of the expected Latin liturgical prose, preserving forty lines of a previously-unidentified vernacular poem: the abridged version of Wace’s French verse Life of St. Margaret known as “Apres la sainte passion.”

Returning to the online collection of Ege leaves, I found two consecutive leaves from this section of the manuscript that preserve more of the text: at Kenyon College (here and here) and at the Cleveland Institute of Art. These three leaves from FOL 48 preserve lines 25 through 159 of the 661-line poem. Wace’s text has been edited several times, and A. Joly’s edition of 1879 is available online (see pp. 99 – 118).

St. Margaret of Antioch, like most early Christian martyrs, had a difficult life. Born the daughter of a pagan priest, her mother died soon after she was born and she was nursed by a Christian woman. She converted to Christianity and vowed to remain ever a virgin, whereupon her father disowned her and she was formally adopted by her nurse. When she was a teenager, the local Roman governor (Olybrius) insisted that she renounce Christianity and marry him. She refused and was subjected to various tortures. In the midst of her suffering, she was swallowed by Satan in the guise of a dragon and used the crucifix she always carried with her to escape intact from the belly of the beast. In the end, Olybrius in his fury had her beheaded.

St. Margaret of Antioch (Toulouse? ca. 1475) (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. 2000.641)

The episode with the dragon evolved into the seminal iconographic episode of St. Margaret’s life, and, as one who emerged safely from the dragon’s belly, she became in the late Middle Ages the patroness of pregnant women. The inclusion of her life in this Book of Hours likely implies that the book was made for the use of a woman. Don Skemer, in his monograph Binding Words, notes that “In late medieval France, far more than in the British Isles, St. Margaret attained cult status in the popular religious imagination as a Christian martyr whose legend offered the hope of divine aid. Pregnant women sought divine aid in reading, contemplating, or hearing of her passion, and one could always place a copy on a parturient woman’s abdomen or chest to prevent difficult pregnancies, ease labor pains, and facilitate safe childbirth.” (p. 241). It is quite possible that this version of the Life of St. Margaret functioned as what Skemer calls a “textual amulet”; recitation of the poem, holding the book, even placing the book on the pregnant abdomen, was thought to facilitate a safe and easy childbirth through the intercession of the Saint. 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.” (Joly, p. 114) In a world where childbirth was one of the greatest threats to a woman’s life, these words would have been a powerful source of comfort.

The three leaves preserve lines 25 through 159 of the 661-line poem. With forty lines per leaf (some lines are skipped, which is why the math doesn’t work out perfectly), the  text would have taken up around seventeen leaves if it had been given in its entirety. I’ve written to every collection known to own this Ege portfolio to ask if their Leaf 48 is in French verse (or rather, I’ve written to every collection that hasn’t posted images of their Ege leaves). I’ve heard  from most of them and have identified only one additional leaf of the text: FOL 48 at the New State Library in Albany preserves lines 461-507. These high line-numbers suggest that the poem was indeed recorded in its entirety and that there are more leaves waiting to be identified.

I was particularly struck by the fact that the leaf at U. Mass. begins with line 25, as this suggested that the preceding leaf might have had the expected 20 lines on the verso and only four lines on the recto, leaving plenty of room above (3/4 of the page, in fact) for a miniature of St. Margaret. So I asked the internet to find me a leaf from a late fifteenth-century French Book of Hours with an illustration of St. Margaret and lines 1-24 of “Apres la sainte passion.” It did:

This leaf, illustrated by a miniature of St. Margaret holding her crucifix as she emerges from the dragon, sold at Sotheby’s London on 3 December 2013 (lot 21b) to a private collector in New Zealand. It preserves lines 1-24 of the Vie de Sainte Marguerite, making it consecutive with the U. Mass. leaf; the dimensions are the same as Ege’s FOL 48; the script is the same; the illumination is by the same hand. Even the square  bits of white tape used to attach the leaf to a matte in years past are identical to those on the U. Mass. leaf. There can be no doubt: this miniature is from the same manuscript as FOL 48 and it was Otto Ege himself who cut out the miniature when he dismembered the manuscript and sold the leaves piecemeal, probably in the 1940s, and certainly at a massive profit. (my thanks to Sotheby’s Mara Hofmann for the images and to the owner for permission to reproduce them here)

These leaves – scattered across five collections on two continents – together preserve a beautiful miniature of St. Margaret and 200 lines of the Vie de Sainte Marguerite. That’s pretty cool in and of itself. It’s always satisfying and worthwhile to piece dismembered manuscripts back together, since the whole is so much more important and interesting than the individual parts. This is in fact the primary axiom of the newly-christened field of “Digital Fragmentology”: the book is greater than the sum of its pages. When you start to look at manuscript leaves in their original context, a deeper understanding of the parent manuscript emerges which itself adds to the corpus of knowledge about medieval texts, liturgy, literacy, and art. Last week, the leaves of FOL 48 came from just another fifteenth-century Book of Hours from northern France. Now they’re from a Book of Hours written for a woman in or near Chalons-sur-Marne that includes a French verse Life of St. Margaret. It is not hard to imagine the owner of the book, frightened and in the midst of labor, turning these pages as she looked to St. Margaret for comfort. Suddenly, the manuscript has an origin, an owner, a reader, a history.

There are two other reasons why this identification is important:

1) The leaves in the Ege portfolios do not include miniatures. The Sotheby’s leaf is the only identified miniature from this manuscript, and its identification suggests that there may be more illustrated leaves from this Book of Hours out there waiting to be recognized. Scott Gwara has posited in Otto Ege’s Manuscripts (pp. 74-5) that Ege usually bought defective Books of Hours, codices whose miniatures had already been excised, allowing him to buy the books at a discount and increase his profit margin when he sold the leaves individually. In general, the evidence supports that hypothesis. The St. Margaret miniature,  however, presents evidence to the contrary in the form of the identical squares of white tape, the same white tape used by Ege to matte leaves from other manuscripts. In this case, we can safely conclude that it was Otto Ege himself who sliced the St. Margaret miniature from the Book of Hours, selling it apart from the text leaves that became no. 48 in the “Fifty Original Leaves” portfolio.

The First Four Leaves of the Vie de Sainte Marguerite

2) This French verse Life of St. Margaret appears in numerous manuscripts, some of which are Books of Hours (Blacker believes there are more than one hundred examples of the text in various contexts; for a list of a few of these, see Blacker, p. 165 n. 43 and Keller, p. 14, type 4). Of the late fifteenth-century Books of Hours that contain the text, there seems to be a cluster made for the use of Reims or Chalons-sur-Marne (for example, here, here, and here, in addition to the present manuscript). This points to a pattern that has been hidden until now: a particular and unexplained devotion to St. Margaret and her midwifery in the Champagne-Ardenne region of NE France in the late fifteenth century.

And that is where I leave you, convinced, I hope, of the possibilities for scholarship made possible when scattered leaves are reunited. There are currently at least three Digital Fragmentology projects in the works in the United States and in Europe that are being designed and implemented by teams of programmers and scholars, some of whom have been thinking about this subject for decades (including myself). It’s thrilling to see the development of metadata standards and image platforms that will allow us to digitally reunite these membra disiecta, opening up numerous new avenues for research, teaching and scholarship.

And now, back to the highway.

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Bibliography:

J. Blacker, G. Burgess and A. Ogden, Wace: The Hagiographical Works (Brill, 2013).

E. A. Francis, “A Hitherto Unprinted Version of the Passio Sanctae Margaritae with Some Observations on Vernacular Derivatives” in Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 42 (1927), pp. 87-105.

S. Gwara, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts (De Brailes, 2013).

A. Joly, La Vie de Sainte Marguerite (Paris, 1879).

H.-E. Keller and M. A. Stones, La Vie de Sainte Marguerite (Tubingen, 1990).

D. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (Penn. State Press, 2006).