Manuscript Road Trip: Fragmentology under Quarantine

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

For the last few weeks, working from home as the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been Tweeting long threads about different manuscript-related subjects. But while following up on the latest thread, I made a discovery that is worth blogging about.

The thread was a brief tour of a fabulous  manuscript, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Theol. Lat. Qu. 140, written and illustrated by Gottschalk of Lambach in the late twelfth century.

Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Theol. Lat. Qu. 140 (Lambach, s. XII ex)

At the end of the thread, I showed one of my favorite types of material evidence in medieval manuscripts: offsets left by manuscript fragments that were adhered to the binding structure and were later peeled away. I promised to follow up, so here goes.

Corpus juris civilis: Institutiones Justiniani, with gloss (Oxford, Bodleian Library, A 1.11 Art. Seld.)

It was quite common in the late medieval and early modern period for binders to dismantle older or damaged manuscripts and recycle their parchment leaves for use as binding structures – covers, flyleaves, pastedowns, stays, or spine liners. These binding fragments can still be found hiding in their bindings, just waiting to be discovered. Sometimes they are  removed from the binding and circulated separately, still bearing the scars of that use. The binding from which the fragment is removed can also bear the scars.

When a fragment pasted into a binding (like this one shown at the left, from Oxford) is peeled off, it may leave behind an inverted ghost-text. We have just such a situation inside the front and back covers of the Berlin manuscript.

You really can’t help but wonder about the missing fragments. When were they written? What text did they preserve? When were they peeled off? Where are they now? These are the fundamental questions a Fragmentologist asks, and I didn’t know the answers until today.

 

Front and Back boards, Berlin Staatsbibliothek MS Theol. Lat. Qu. 140

When faced with offsets like these, the first step is to invert the image so you can actually read the text. Here’s the front offset, inverted and in detail:

It’s actually quite legible!

Question No. 1: When and where was the fragment written? The script appears to be late tenth or early eleventh century (key features include the pointed minims of [m] and a long-[s] that drops slightly below the line of writing). These are eleventh-century fragments in a fifteenth-century binding of a twelfth-century manuscript. The binding and the manuscript are both from Lambach. What about the fragments? They are Germanic in style, but because they predate the 1056 foundation of the Lambach Abbey they must have been written elsewhere, perhaps brought to the Abbey at its foundation to stock the library.

Question No. 2: What text does it preserve? A good bit of the text is legible in the above detail: “factum est iam in illo” on the first line, “hominum” below, “ideo sunt homines” on line 3, and more. If you have access to one of the subscription collections of Latin texts, you need only plug in a few words and see what happens. During the pandemic, I’m working from home (like the rest of you), so all I’ve got is whatever is open access. Google is usually a good place to start, and, in this case, I was immediately successful in identifying the text! The phrase “factum est iam in illo” followed soon after by “hominum” and “ideo sunt homines” comes from Book IV:i of Augustine’s De Trinitate (online here):

Questions no. 3 and 4: When were they removed, and where are they now? Because I spent five years cataloguing manuscript fragments at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, I happen to know that lots of binding fragments from Lambach ended up in that collection (including seventeen leaves of the Gottschalk Antiphonal, the subject of my dissertation and first book). The Beinecke is the first place to go for anything Lambach-related, so I started there by searching for keywords “Augustine” and “Trinitate.” Bingo! Three leaves from this same manuscript are now Beinecke MS 481.20, catalogued in part by yours truly thirty years ago!

The description of the leaves, completed by curator Robert G. Babcock after I had finished my PhD in 1993, notes 1996 correspondence from paleographer Hartmut Hoffmann in which he writes that these leaves do indeed come from the same manuscript as those that were removed from the Berlin binding. What Hoffmann couldn’t have known (because he didn’t have the images), and what I just discovered TODAY, is that MS 481.20.3 isn’t just from the same MANUSCRIPT as the missing leaves, it is in fact ONE OF THEM! Folio 481.20.3 can be shown to have been pasted down inside the front cover of the Berlin manuscript. The leaf and the offset are mirror images, and f. 3r matches the visible text offset on the front board:

Beinecke MS 481.20 3r and front board, Berlin Staatsbib. MS Theol. Lat. Qu. 140

The leaf that was pasted down inside the back board is NOT at Yale, though. Hoffmann’s letter (summarized here) records that another leaf of this manuscript is still in Lambach, where it is Fragment 8/11. No images of this fragment are available, so we can’t say for sure if that’s the other missing leaf. However, using the same technique as above the offset can be identified as De Trinitate IV:v-vi, and Hoffmann identifies the text on the Lambach fragment as preserving the same section. So it seems almost certain that the leaf removed from the lower board is indeed still in Lambach.

Beinecke MS 481.20.3r overlaid on the inner front board of Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Theol. Lat. Qu. 140 (inverted for legibility; image by Mike Toth)

As for WHEN the binding fragments were removed, I do know that part of the story because it played an important part in my dissertation research. In the 1930s, a scholar named Kurt Holter visited the Lambach library and made detailed and extensive notes about fragments in fifteenth-century bindings. When he returned to Lambach after WWII, the manuscripts were still there, but nearly all of the binding fragments were gone, most having been sold by the Abbey during the war to raise funds for necessary woodworking equipment. The Berlin manuscript was still in Lambach at that time, but the fragments had been removed and sold. From Lambach, the fragment collection made its way to Switzerland, where it was acquired in the 1950s by a dealer named Franz Zinniker. He sold the collection to NYC dealer Hans Kraus, who sold part of it to Yale in 1965 and donated the other half later that same year. By that time, the Lambach origin of the fragments had been forgotten. The story of how Robert Babcock, myself, and two other graduate students (Philip Rusche and Nancy Seybold) traced the fragments back to Lambach has been told elsewhere. This identification of 481.20.3 as having been removed from the Berlin manuscript is a poignant epilogue.

Stay safe, friends.

Bibliography:

Babcock, Robert Gary. Reconstructing a Medieval Library: Fragments from Lambach (New Haven, 1993)

Babcock, Robert Gary, Lisa Fagin Davis, and Philip Rusche. Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Volume IV, MSS 481-485 (Tempe, 2004)

Davis, Lisa Fagin. The Gottschalk Antiphonary: Music and Liturgy in Twelfth-Century Lambach (Cambridge, 2000)

Manuscript Road Trip: The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript

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

We can’t leave New Haven until I introduce you to The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript.

I won’t deny it. I have been captivated by Beinecke MS 408 since I first laid eyes on it in my “Introduction to Latin Paleography” class at Yale in the fall of 1988. It has been called “The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript,” “The Roger Bacon Cipher,” a Sphinx, a hoax, a conspiracy, the work of a madman, the work of a genius.

It is The Voynich Manuscript.

f. 75r detail

If you Google the words “Voynich Manuscript,” you will tumble down a rabbit hole into a dark scary corner of the internet full of alien abductions, seances, conspiracy theories, and secrets. You will stumble into heated debates between fellow obsessives who have devoted their lives to this codex. You will discover sub-specialties you didn’t know existed. Follow an innocuous-looking link and you may find yourself face-to-face with William Shatner or Noah Wyle’s Librarian. You will also find, if you sift through the static, complex linguistic studies, mathematically sophisticated cryptology, relatively conclusive carbon-dating analyses, and a surprisingly interesting bit of botany.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For those of you who aren’t already steeped in Voynich lore, here are the basics.

The Voynich Manuscript – a medieval codex named for its early twentieth-century owner Wilfrid Voynich – is written in an unknown alphabet apparently encoding an unidentified language, embellished with astonishing botanical, astronomical, and biological illustrations. Cryptologists and mathematicians and linguists worldwide have been studying this manuscript for hundreds of years, and no one has ever offered a satisfactory solution to the enigma that is the Voynich.

f. 70r detail

Measuring 225 x 160 mm, the manuscript currently comprises 102 leaves (at least a dozen are missing), including several multi-page fold-outs. The limp-vellum binding is early, but probably not original. For a complete description and details about accompanying ephemera, see Barbara Shailor’s description here.

The codex begins with with 66 folios of botanical illustrations and accompanying texts. The fantastic and impossibly elaborate plants have resisted any attempts to fully identify them.

f. 3r

f. 16v

The next section is comprised of a series of astrological and astronomical diagrams, including ten circular diagrams surrounding signs of the zodiac (two are missing). The miniature naked women standing in baskets who populate the rest of the manuscript make their first appearance in this section.

f. 67r (fold-out)

f. 68v (fold-out)

f. 70r (Pisces)

The next section of the manuscript is filled with what appear to be biological illustrations, such as this detail that seems to depict a uterus,  fallopian tubes, and ovaries:

f. 77v detail

f. 75r

f. 83r

A series of diagrams that resist characterization follow, including an elaborate (and fragile) fold-out of six leaves:

f. 86v (fold-out)

The remainder of the manuscript is traditionally thought to contain recipes or medicinal instructions, with additional botanical illustrations.

f. 88v (fold-out)

f. 106v detail

The cipher-text uses twenty-five distinct letterforms, some of which seem to have majuscule forms as well. There are no cross-outs or corrections, and each grapheme is always written using the same ductus, or sequence of penstrokes. Ligatures between particular graphemic pairs are consistent and even. This suggests that the codex was written by scribes who had written the script before or were copying an exemplar. In order to facilitate transcriptions and computer-aided linguistic analyses of the text, “Voynichologists” use a Voynich font and a not-entirely arbitrary substitution system of Roman letters known as the European Voynich Alphabet (EVA for short):

European Voynich Alphabet, showing accepted substitutions of Roman for “Voynichese” graphemes

For example, the following “Voynichese” word is a common root found throughout the astronomical section:

Using EVA, it transcribes to “okal.” The entire manuscript has been transcribed in this way and can be accessed here.

Over the years, some have suggested that the manuscript is a forgery perpetrated by Voynich himself, or that it is gibberish, an elaborate hoax. However, recent computational and statistical analyses of the text suggest that the manuscript is not comprised of random scribblings, and that it encodes a natural, rather than an invented, language. Linguists have identified prefixes and suffixes, and have zeroed in on what seem to be rootwords as well. It would certainly help if we knew exactly what language was being encoded, and to help answer that question, we turn to the topic of provenance.

Here’s what we know about the Voynich Manuscript. Most of this comes from Shailor’s description or from documents on file at the Beinecke.

Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, by Joseph Heintz the Elder

The first confirmed sighting of the Voynich occurs in the late sixteenth century. Emperor Rudolph II of Germany (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576-1612) purchased the manuscript for 600 gold ducats and believed that it was the work of the English scientist Roger Bacon. We know this based on a letter written by a seventeenth-century owner (see below). Rudolph may have purchased it from English astrologer John Dee (1527-1608), whose son noted that Dee, while in Bohemia, owned “a booke…containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks, which booke his father bestowed much time upon: but I could not heare that hee could make it out.” Emperor Rudolph seems to have given the manuscript to botanist Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (a.k.a. Jacobus Sinapius, d. 1622), who signed the first leaf of the manuscript. The signature has been  scraped away and is fully legible only under ultraviolet light.

f. 1r detail, under ultraviolet light

The next known owner was Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist from Prague. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as modern scientists about what he called a “Sphynx” that was “taking up space uselessly” in his library. On learning that Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar from Rome, had recently published a Egyptian dictionary in which he deciphered hieroglyphics, Baresch sent a sample of the script to Kircher in Rome in 1637, asking for his opinion. We don’t know if Kircher ever wrote back. But the next owner, Johannes Marcus Marci of Prague, who was friend and heir of Baresch, actually gave the book to Kircher as a gift in 1665 or  1666, accompanied by this Latin letter (translation from H. P. Kraus, A Rare Book Saga, p. 221):

[Autograph letter signed] 1666 [or 1665?] August 19, Prague [to Athanasius Kircher, Rome]

“Reverend and Distinguished Sir, Father in Christ: This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into my possession, for I was convinced that it could be read by no one except yourself. The former owner of this book asked your opinion by letter, copying and sending you a portion of the book from which he believed you would be able to read the remainder, but he at that time refused to send the book itself. To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil, as is apparent from attempts of his which I send you herewith, and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as these obey no one but their master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as it is and long overdue though it be, of my affection for you, and burst through its bars, if there are any, with your wonted success. Dr. Raphael, a tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then King of Bohemia, told me the said book belonged to the Emperor Rudolph and that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman. On this point I suspend judgement; it is your place to define for us what view we should take thereon, to whose favor and kindness I unreservedly commit myself and remain,

Joannes Marcus Marci of Cronland Prague, 19th August, 1666″ [or 1665]

The manuscript doesn’t surface again for 250 years

We don’t know for certain what happened to the manuscript between the 17^th and early 20^th centuries, but it has been postulated that it was stored with the rest of Kircher’s correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University) in Rome. It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. Just before the confiscation was enacted, many books were transferred from the Collegio library to private faculty libraries to protect them, including Kircher’s correspondence and, presumably, the Voynich Manuscript, since among the material that accompanies the manuscript is the loose bookplate of Petrus Beckx, who was the head of the Jesuit order and the University rector.

Villa Mondragone (photo by Renato Clementi, 2006)

Beckx’s  library was eventually moved to the Villa Mondragone, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Jesuits four years earlier. In the early twentieth century, the Collegio Romano was short of money and decided to sell some of its valuables. London (later New York) collector/bookdealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865 – 1930) bought the manuscript along with about thirty others in 1912. The manuscript is No. 8 in Voynich’s collection as described in Seymour de Ricci’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (II:1846-7), where it is titled “Cipher ms.” During his lifetime, Voynich refused to reveal the collection from which he had acquired the manuscript, leaving some to speculate that he himself had written it.

Wilfrid Voynich

When Voynich died, the manuscript passed to his widow Ethel, who revealed that Voynich had purchased it from the Jesuits in Rome. After her death, she bequeathed it to her friend Ann Nill, who in turn sold it to bookdealer Hans P. Kraus in 1961 for $24,500. In his 1978 biography A Rare Book Saga, Kraus described his attempts to sell the manuscript:

H. P. Kraus Catalogue 100, in which the Voynich Manuscript was item no. 20.

“In [Catalogue 100] it was offered for $160,000, the same price Voynich had asked 50 years earlier. Miss Nill was to get one half of the amount above the price I had paid her. Many clients, mostly scholars, expressed great interest, but nobody bought…Dozens of scholars wanted to see it, others asked for photos. Institutions asked to have it on loan. I had to decline all such requests, to preserve its commercial value. There were no buyers. After seven years of happy ownership we felt that the right thing to do was to turn it over to an institution where it could be freely studied. We chose the Beinecke Library at Yale as the recipient.” (p. 222)

At Yale, it was given the shelfmark MS 408.

Since 1969, the Voynich Manuscript has lived in a vault at the Beinecke Library accompanied by a growing archive of documents and correspondence. The manuscript has been newly imaged in high-resolution color, and a full digital facsimile can be studied and downloaded here.

Over the years, scholars and cryptologists and conspiracy theorists have posed dozens of solutions. The first was that it was written by Roger Bacon, a thirteenth-century English Franciscan and scientist. Others have credited it to Leonardo da Vinci, or claimed that it is a modern forgery. Proposed solutions are as varied as an Egyptian sex manual, a message from outer space, a botanical and astrological treatise hiding radical ideas. Some think it’s a hoax, a forgery perpetrated by Voynich himself. But as of 2013, when the results of carbon dating tests at the University of Arizona were released, we know that the parchment dates from between 1404-1435. In addition, chemical analyses concluded that the inks and pigments were consistent with medieval recipes. That rules out modern forgery. That also rules out Roger Bacon, since he died around 1292, as well as da Vinci, who wasn’t born until 1452.

f. 78r

The best guess for a date and place of origin, then? Central Europe, early fifteenth century. This proposed origin, based on stylistic evidence as well as the manuscript’s first known location, suggests that the manuscript isn’t necessarily encoding a western European language such as Latin or Italian. It could be Hungarian, or Roma, or Bulgarian. We simply don’t know.

Needless to say, the Voynich Manuscript doesn’t come out of the vault very often. If you live in the DC area and would like to see the manuscript in person, however, you are in luck, because for the first time ever, the Voynich is on loan and on display. You can see it at The Folger Library until February 26 2015, where it is part of the exhibition Decoding the Renaissance. The Washington Post ran this feature on the manuscript in November 2014, focusing on attempts to decode it made by famed U.S. WWII cryptologist William Friedman in the years before his death.

If you still want to know more, the best places to start are the Beinecke site and the 1978 volume The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich “Roger Bacon” Cipher Manuscript by R. S. Brumbaugh. Online, René Zandbergen’s Voynich Manuscript site includes a detailed survey of every aspect of the manuscript, a lengthy and up-to-date bibliography, and lots of theories and proposed solutions. Cryptologist Nick Pelling’s blog includes current research and discussion. And of course there’s always the Wiki and the online Journal of Voynich Studies.

Paul Tobin and Ig Guara, Marvel Adventures: Black Widow and The Avengers, #18.

The manuscript continues to capture the public imagination in various formats and media, including comic books and video games. Try #Voynich on Twitter, or “Voynich Manuscript” on YouTube, just for starters. William Shatner devoted an episode of his “Weird or What?” TV series to the Voynich (yes, you can watch it online and thank me later). In one of Noah Wyle’s Librarian films, the Voynich makes a brief throw-away appearance when the title character is told, “Yale wants it decoded by Monday.” Search “Voynich Manuscript” on Amazon.com and you will discover an entire Voynich-fiction sub-genre. And now that you’re familiar with the manuscript, you can join the club of humans who understand these Voynich-inspired comics.

Of all of the works that have been inspired by the Voynich, only one is auditory. Recently, the Beinecke Library celebrated its 50th anniversary with a series of special lectures and events. Composer Stephen Gorbos was commissioned to write a piece inspired by the Voynich manuscript. “Such Sphinxes as These Obey No One but Their Master” premiered at the Beinecke in 2013 performed by the extraordinary vocal group, Roomful of Teeth. It is a haunting and evocative tribute.

I gave up trying to decipher the Voynich Manuscript a long time ago. But I keep the PDF on my tablet and visit it from time to time. I collect terrible and not-so-terrible Voynich fiction. I scour the internet for new, credible discoveries. I marvel at indecipherable words, tiny women in wicker baskets, unidentified plants, and uncharted constellations.

I kind of hope The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript stays that way.

Manuscript Road Trip: A New Year in New Haven

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

The history of medieval manuscripts in the United States begins in New Haven, Connecticut, at Yale University. Beinecke MS 27 is not only the  first medieval manuscript recorded in the Yale collection but is thought to have been the first illuminated manuscript brought to the New World. The manuscript – an illustrated copy of Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum humanae salvationis – was given to Yale in 1714 by none other than Eli Yale himself. In the three centuries since, the Yale collection has grown into one of the largest in the U.S. Today, the luminous Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds more than 1,500 pre-1600 manuscripts in four main collections: the Beinecke MS series (a growing collection currently comprising 1,162 manuscripts) and the Marston, Mellon, and Osborn collections (three private collections that were later acquired by the library). In addition, Japanese collector Toshiyuki Takamiya has recently deposited his important collection of Middle English manuscripts at the Beinecke. Keep an eye on curator Ray Clemens’ blog for news and updates.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, from the outside…

Many of the Beinecke manuscripts are described in detail in the four-volume Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Binghamton, N.Y. : Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1984-2004) by Barbara Shailor et al. Shailor’s work has served as a model for manuscript scholars world-wide. In much the same way, the Beinecke’s electronic records are models for institutions seeking to make their collections available in a digital format.

There are three access points for each manuscript on the Yale site, all of which are linked to one another:

…and inside.

1) Descriptions: Shailor’s descriptions can be keyword-searched here.

2) Digital surrogates: Complete digital surrogates can be accessed here and downloaded as PDFs.

3) MARC records: a complete list of MARC records for early manuscripts can be retrieved in ORBIS, Yale’s library database, by using the subject heading “Manuscripts, Medieval–Connecticut–New Haven.”

Finally, most of the manuscripts can be found in Digital Scriptorium, with more being added to the database regularly.

A note about the MARC records (feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if MARC-speak puts you to sleep). If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that I have strong opinions about how best to use MARC for early manuscripts, and how NOT to. In my virtual travels around the country, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring local OPACs and have learned a lot about best-practices. Yale’s MARC records have been carefully crafted by database specialists, MARC technicians, and manuscript scholars working together to design modified AMREMM records that are clear, thorough, discoverable, and exportable. The 650 field “|a Manuscripts, Medieval  |z Connecticut  |z New Haven,” a custom field whose use in this way may be anathema to some MARC cataloguers, is in fact the key to discoverability, as it allows users to easily retrieve a complete list of early manuscripts. I highly recommend using something similar for your own records.

At the same time, Yale’s MARC records have been designed to cross-walk smoothly into Digital Scriptorium’s hierarchically-structured database, allowing Yale (and others following this model) to export records to Digital Scriptorium with minimal re-keying. In addition to a 1-to-1 relationship between certain MARC and DS fields (e.g. MARC 245 = DS “Title”), the real key to this process is the consistent use and formatting of MARC’s catch-all 500 fields. Working with Digital Scriptorium, Yale’s database gurus have established a closed set of trigger-words (Binding, Watermark, Ownership, Script, etc.) that, when used in a 500 field and immediately followed by a colon, tell the Digital Scriptorium cross-walk algorithm what to do with the metadata that follows. If you are interested in learning more about synching your MARC records and images with the DS database and becoming part of Digital Scriptorium, read these guidelines and contact Digital Scriptorium Executive Director Consuelo Dutschke.

Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University

But back to New Haven. It wouldn’t be right to sing the praises of the Beinecke’s collection without sharing some of its treasures. I was a graduate student at Yale from 1988 – 1993 in the Medieval Studies program and worked for several years as the Assistant to the Curator of Pre-1600 Manuscripts, at the time Robert G. Babcock. This is where I developed my love for manuscript fragments, as I was given the job of cataloguing and conserving several hundred of these little wanderers. The project turned into Volume IV of the Beinecke Catalogue and led to the discovery with Dr. Babcock that many of the leaves in the collection had originally come from the Benedictine Abbey of St. Kilian in Lambach, Austria.

Lambach Abbey

This discovery provided me with a dissertation topic as well as the opportunity to assist with an exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. Needless to say, I feel very fortunate to have had such a splendid introduction to the world of medieval manuscripts. The Beinecke collection is varied and extraordinary, with ancient fragments perfect for teaching paleography, mysterious codices whose secrets are yet to be unraveled, important and rare literary exempla, and stunning works of art.

BRBL MS 404, f. 7r

Here are a few highlights from the Beinecke collection. I have to lead with MS 404, otherwise known as The Rothschild Canticles.

BRBL MS 404, f. 44r

This spectacular manuscript, written in France at the turn of the fourteenth century, illustrates the Song of Songs and other texts with mystical and complex full-page illustrations. It has been reproduced in facsimile and studied by several scholars, most notably Jeffrey Hamburger.

Another notable late thirteenth-century French manuscript is BRBL MS 229, an Arthurian romance in Old French. In the detail below, we see Sir Lancelot riding off with “The Damsel” in the upper compartment of the miniature, while the Knights of the Round Table do battle below.

BRBL MS 229, f. 75r

Lancelot and the damsel leave the hermitage; the knights of the Round Table in battle with the knights of Baudemagus (BRBL MS 229, f. 75 detail)

MS 425 is a gorgeously illustrated Missal from France, ca. 1470. It was illuminated, at least in part, by the great Jean Colombe and three other artists. After the calendar, the manuscript opens with the Masses for Advent, illustrated by a half-page miniature of The Entry into Jerusalem with smaller miniatures in the margins depicting a priest saying Mass and various scenes from the life of Christ.

BRBL MS 425, f. 6r

MS 375, an early sixteenth-century Book of Hours, is also sumptuously illustrated, with full gilt borders on every page, fifteen full-page miniatures, and twelve calendrical illustrations. The letters E, F and G appear in the margins throughout, presumably initials related to the original (and still unidentified) owner. The manuscript has a noble provenance, having passed through the hands of Marie-Caroline de Bourbon, Duchesse de Berry (1798-1870) as well as Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845 – 1934). 

BRBL MS 375, f. 51v/52

The Beinecke also holds hundreds of single leaves and fragments. I’ve written quite a lot in this blog about the practice of twentieth-century American bookdealers breaking manuscripts apart to increase their profit margins. But thousands of manuscripts were broken up centuries ago in Europe, not for resale but for reuse. Parchment was a valuable resource, requiring the slaughter of livestock and the subsequent loss of future income and resources. When possible, bookbinders would repurpose old, obsolete, or imperfect manuscripts by taking them apart to use their leaves as binding structures (palimpsests as well, but that’s another story). These stowaways traveled across the Atlantic tucked safely inside their new homes. Many of these binding fragments were later removed to be preserved as worthy collectibles in their own right. Untold numbers are still hiding in early bindings.

The story of Beinecke MS 481.51 and its journey to the United States is the story of North American manuscript fragments in microcosm. These seventeen leaves belong to the Gottschalk Antiphonal, the subject of my dissertation. Gottschalk, whom we met a few weeks ago at Princeton, wrote and illustrated his eponymous antiphonal at the Lambach abbey in the fourth quarter of the twelfth century. By the fifteenth century, the musical notation and liturgy were centuries out-of-date, and, along with many other manuscripts, the obsolete antiphonal was dismembered to be used as binding scrap. During World War II, the monks found themselves in need of a new wood lathe. To raise money for the purchase, they removed the antiphonal leaves and dozens of other fragments from the later bindings in which they had been repurposed, and sold them.

The Gottschalk Antiphonal (BRBL MS 481.51 8r, detail)

The fragments made their way en masse via a Swiss bookdealer to the New York firm of Hans P. Kraus, and from there to Yale in 1965. By the time the leaves had been acquired by Kraus, however, the original provenance of the group had been lost. Fortunately, a scholar by the name of Kurt Holter had studied and described the fragments in situ at Lambach before the war. It was thanks to his published descriptions of the leaves that Babcock and I were able to identify the Beinecke collection as having originated at Lambach. In addition to the seventeen Gottschalk Antiphonal leaves at Yale, there are two at Harvard’s Houghton Library (MS Typ 704 5 and 704 6). We have already seen the leaf that toured the midwestern United States in an aluminum trailer before settling down at the St. Louis Public Library, and a few others leaves can be found in Austrian collections. Altogether, I know of about two dozen leaves of the Gottschalk Antiphonal.

But the story doesn’t end there. Currently, Liz Hebbard, a PhD student at Yale, is working at the Beinecke conducting a survey of its incunable binding fragments. She has already found dozens of early leaves being used as covers, pastedowns, and binding stays. Other bindings show evidence of early leaves having been  removed, as in the image below from incunable Zi +1525 in which a leaf was pasted inside the back cover to secure the leather cover’s turn-ins. The leaf was peeled off at a later date, leaving behind an upside-down inverted offset. Based on my recent examination of the offset, I have identified the missing fragment as a previously unknown (and currently untraced) leaf of the Gottschalk Antiphonal. It is an extraordinary co-incidence that this incunable should have once housed a paste-down Antiphonal leaf, as it arrived at Yale by a completely different path than did the other leaves.

BRBL Zi +1525 (inner back cover)

The same image, inverted and rotated

Detail, inverted and rotated. Compare this script with Gottschalk’s, above.

Those of you who are familiar with the Beinecke collection may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned what is perhaps the most (in)famous manuscript of all. Just wait ’til next week…

See you next time…