Leaf from a Glossed Bible in large format, with inscription recording

Leaf from a Glossed Bible in large format, with inscription recording that it was once in the library of Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex and son of King George III, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [France (probably Paris), second half of the thirteenth century], single leaf, with main text in single column of 22 lines of a professional early gothic bookhand (with parts of II Samuel 13-14), gloss in smaller script set within small blocks within the text column, capitals touched in red, paraph marks in alternate red and blue, running titles and versal numbers in capitals in same colours, one-line initials in same colours with contrasting penwork, folds, stains and wear showing that this was recovered from a later reuse on a book-binding, tears to edges, but overall in good condition, 367 x 240mm. *** A lengthy inscription, in a nineteenth-century hand, at the foot of this leaf, records that it was once in the collection of Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773-1843), one of the largest and most celebrated private book collections in nineteenth-century Britain, and housed in Kensington Palace. The catalogue of the Duke’s library (Bibliotheca Sussexiana: a descriptive catalogue, I, 1791) and the auction sale catalogues of his library (at Evans in 1844 and 1845), do not appear to list manuscript leaves or collections of them. The catalogue was by its author’s admission an incomplete snapshot of the library, and it has been noted that some items certainly from that collection do not appear there or in the sales at Evans. However, it seems most likely that this leaf was still on the binding of a folio-sized printed book while in the Duke’s ownership, and was removed by a later owner, who then added the inscription recording its provenance. The development of the glossa ordinaria in a specifically designed mise-en-page format in which it could accompany the text of the entire Bible was perhaps the greatest textual achievement of the twelfth century. Glosses on individual words and passages had existed since the Bible was written, and were associated with teaching of the text, and those of the Latin Bible were regularised by a group of scholars around Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), comprising a standard set of excerpts from the exegetical works of the Fathers and copying them between the lines for short notes, or in the margins of the Biblical text for longer extracts. These were then reorganised in the twelfth century in Paris into a series of complex formats of the layout. That seen here, with the gloss interacting fluidly with the irregular shaped blocks of main text, was extremely labour intensive for book producers and scribes to lay out, but maximised the space of the page and created a visually pleasing effect. The format here has been associated by C. de Hamel with Parisian Bible production after the 1160s (Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade, 1984, pp. 24-7).

Estimation:€955.54

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