Pauline Epistles with commentary

Accession number:

MS M.940

Title:

Created:

France or England, ca. 1250.

Binding:

Red pigskin by Katharine Adams, 1912.

Credit:

Gift of John M. Crawford, in honor of twenty years of service by the Director, Frederick B. Adams, Jr., 1969.

Description:

109 leaves (2 columns, 25 lines for Epistle and 50 for commentary), bound : vellum, ill. ; 375 x 265 mm

Provenance:

Marchese Linterno (ca. 1640?); Certosa of Garegnano, Lombardy (to 1779?); Duke C. Visconti di Modrone, Milan (to 1834); Giuseppe Bruschetti, Milan; Gaetano Schiepatti?, Milan; Louis Arrigoni, Milan; Jacques Rosenthal, Munich; Sotheby's sale (London, 12-14 April 1899, lot 534) to J. and J. Leighton; Sir Sydney Cockerell (his first manuscript); Sotheby's sale (London, 3 April 1957, lot 6) to Quaritch; Quaritch cat. 767, no. 5; purchased by Philip Duschnes in 1958; John M. Crawford; presented by John M. Crawford in honor of twenty years of service by the director, Frederick B. Adams, Jr., in 1969.

Notes:

Ms. Pauline Epistles (Ephesians to Hebrews only), with commentary by Petrus Lombardus; written and decorated in France or England around 1250.
On flyleaf, notes by Sir Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962) regarding the history of the manuscript and the notation "my first manuscript". Written in brown ink by several hands; collation: I⁹, II¹²-VIII¹², IX¹⁶, X².
The manuscript, as Cockerell originally purchased it, had 184 folios. Cockerell broke up the manuscript, had 49 leaves bound separately by the binder Katharine Adams, and sold them to John Charrington in April, 1913; this volume until recently belonged to van Heek at Huis Bergh, s'Heerenberg, in The Netherlands. Cockerell gave 9 further leaves to B.S. Cron on 20 January 1955; they were offered for sale by Quaritch, London, in 1985, Catalogue 1056. Cockerell also gave a bifolium to Siegfried Sasson, which was later purchased by Christopher De Hamel from Sasson's estate sale through Quaritch. 17 leaves of the original 184 are still missing.
M.940 is among the 25 manuscripts described by Louis Arrigoni in his Notice historique et bibliographique sur vingt-cinq manuscrits...ayant fait parti de la Bibliothèque de Francois Petrarque, Milan, 1883, including M.446 and M.447; this provenance has been discarded as false by scholars, since the supposed evidence, Petrarch's engraved coat of arms on the flyleaves, was only added to the manuscripts in the 17th century.
Decoration: 20 large red and blue penwork initials filled with green, rose, yellow, red, and blue foliate forms.

Script:

textura

Language:

Latin

Resources:

Description/Bibliography

Century:

Genres: