Early gothic

at least 355mm x 500mm

A bifolium used to re-back the spine of a book published in France in the sixteenth century. 

Bifolium from an office lectionary (sanctorale), or from the lectionary part of a breviary. Early gothic script in black ink with red rubrics. Five initials in red ink and four in green, with three further green initials showing through from the fragment’s underside. The green initial introducing the Feast of Saint Stephen has pen flourishes in red ink. The black majuscules for responses and verses are rubricated. The text runs continuously from the verso of the first leaf to the recto of the second, suggesting that the bifolium sat at the top of its quire.

Late 12th to early 13th century, probably France. 

As the rubric indicates, the fragment’s Matins for the Feast of Saint Thomas includes twelve lessons (rather than the ten lessons read for a major feast in the Roman Office or cursus which was observed in “secular” settings like cathedral chapters). This suggests that our text was written for a religious community following the Rule of Saint Benedict – e.g. a Cistercian community. Although the foundation of the mendicant orders is roughly contemporary with our fragment, the Franciscans (1209), Dominicans (1215) and Augustinian Friars (1244) observed the Roman cursus.^[1]

The fragment’s scribal hand most closely resembles what Derolez describes as “pregothic” - i.e. a script in transition between the well-spaced, rounded Carolingian hands of the early twelfth century and the more angular and crowded hands of the later thirteenth century, such as the northern textualis.^[2] For example, serifs on the ascenders in our fragment are triangular rather than forked or diamond-shaped. However, as Derolez notes, scribes were rarely consistent, and this scribe does not consistently follow the tendencies he attributes to pregothic scripts. For example, the text makes apparently indiscriminate use of both the vertical minuscule d found in Carolingian hands and the newer uncial d found in later gothic hands. In general, the text also observes the later gothic distinction between a long or straight letter s at the beginning or middle of a word and the round or uncial s at the end, but the scribe sometimes ends words with a long s, even where the line leaves ample room for a round one.

As Derolez notes, the heterogeneity of pregothic scripts makes it difficult to ascribe a national or regional origin with any certainty.^[3] However, the closest analogues for our fragment in Thomson’s Latin Bookhands come from France and Britain rather than Germany, Italy or the Iberian peninsula.^[4] Further close analogues can be found in two French Cistercian lectionaries from the late 12th century.^[5]

^[1] Collamore, 3.
^[2] Derolez, 56-71.
^[3] Derolez, 71.
^[4] Thomson, no. 5, 9, 85.
^[5] See e.g. Lectionarium ad usum Cisterciense, sanctorale (before 1175), BNF Ms. Latin 3800, https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc61762t,  Lectionarium ad usum Cisterciense, sanctorale (c1190), BNF Ms. Latin 3808, https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc617721. Cf. BNF Ms. Latin 790, an Italian office lectionary from the same period https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc622484

References

Cantus Index. https://cantusindex.org/

Collamore, Lila. “Prelude: Charting the Divine Office.” In The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, edited by Rebecca A. Baltzer and Margot E. Fassler. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Derolez, Albert. The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Hughes, Andrew. Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organisation and Terminology. Toronto University Press, 1995.

Edmond Eugène Moeller et al. eds. Corpus orationum. CCSL 160 A–M. Brepols, 1993— Stiennon, Jacques. Paléographie du moyen âge. Paris: Armand Colin, 1973.

Stoneman, William P. “Medieval Manuscript Fragments at Princeton.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 51, no. 1 (1989): 91–101.

Thomson, S. Harrison. Latin Bookhands of the Later Middle Ages, 100-1500. Cambridge: University Press, 1969.

Usuarium: A Digital Library and Database for the Study of Latin Liturgical History in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. https://usuarium.elte.hu/.

Waddell, Chrysogonus, ed. The Primitive Cistercian Breviary (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Lat. Oct. 402) with Variants from the “Bernardine” Cistercian Breviary. Spicilegium Friburgense 44. Aschendorff for the Academic Press Fribourg, 2007.

Incunable fragments visible through tears in calf on boards are ff. b3 (upper board) and i8 (lower board) from Justinianus. Novellae constitutiones; Codicis libri X-XII; Libri feudorum; Extravagantes (Comm: Bartolus de Saxoferrato) (with the Glossa ordinaria of Accursius). Venice: Baptista de Tortis, 7 May 1489 (ISTC ij00596000). 

Host volume given to the University of Auckland Library in 1985 by alumna Barbara Bancroft (nee Bell). Purchased by Bancroft from a Paris bookseller in the early 1950s.