Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings Archives -

Vellum Bifolium from Augustine’s “Homilies on John”

November 27, 2018 in International Congress on Medieval Studies, Manuscript Studies, Uncategorized

Recycled and Reclaimed
Large-Format Vellum Bifolium
from a Discarded Medieval Copy
of Saint Augustine’s Sermons
on the Gospel of Saint John
In Double Columns of 47 Lines

Measuring at most circa 384 mm high × 523 mm wide
< text block circa 274 × 180 mm, with columns circa 80 mm wide and intercolumn circa 20 mm >

Now in a Private Collection

[Published on 28 November 2018, with updates, continuing our series of Blogposts on Manuscript Studies, for which see the Contents List]

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Tags: Augustine of Hippo, Büdingen, Homilies on John the Evangelist, Isenburg, manuscript fragments, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Medieval Writing Materials, Rotulus, Saint John the Evangelist
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A 12th-Century Fragment of Anselm’s ‘Cur Deus Homo’

January 31, 2017 in Manuscript Studies, Reports, Uncategorized

Verso of the Leaf and Interior of the Binding, Detail: Lower Right-Hand Corner, with the Mitered Flap Unfolde

Verso of the Leaf and Interior of the Binding, with the Mitered Flap Unfolded.

Tied Down

Fragmentary Leaf with Part of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo
Book II, Chapters 17–18 or

18a–b
(sumpsit eam . . . Nam cum uirg[/initatis melior])
in Latin on vellum
measuring at the most circa 307 mm tall × circa 182 mm
< written area (including ascenders and descenders)

circa 233 mm tall × 148 mm wide
with each column circa 65 mm wide

flanking the intercolumn of circa 18 mm wide >
laid out in double columns of 35 lines
written in brown ink in skilled ProtoGothic script
without embellishments

Continuing our series on Manuscript Studies, our Principal Blogger, Mildred Budny (see Her Page) reports the discovery of a reused fragmentary vellum Latin manuscript leaf extracted from a copy of Anselm’s masterwork Cur Deus Homo. Whether as a text on its own or in the company of other texts, it was made probably in about the third quarter of the 12th century, to judge by the script, perhaps in France. Norman, maybe? Identifying the text and its sequence makes it possible to recognize which side of the leaf was the original recto, and which the verso. The fragment joins the select known cast of 12th-century manuscript witnesses to this significant philosophical–theological text.

Anselm’s texts mostly took the forms of meditations or dialogues. Already our blog has showcased a manuscript with another text by Anselm: A New Leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 41’, which formerly contained a copy of the Prayers and Meditations. Now we focus upon one of his principal dialogues, cast between master and follower, as they debate the natures of divinity and necessity.

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Tags: Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, Archbishop Anselm, Bodleian Library Bodley MS 271, Bodleian Library MS Auct D 2 6, Budny Handlist, Canterbury Cathedral, Landscapes, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Medieval Manuscript Fragments, ProtoGothic Script, R W Southern, Theodore Phyffers, Thionville, Trinity College Cambridge MS B 1 37
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A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues Reused for Euthymius

December 24, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition, Uncategorized

A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues
Reused for Binding
A Copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus’s On the Psalms

Budny Handlist 3

In our blog on Manuscript Studies (see its Contents List), Mildred Budny (see Her Page) continues to report the results of research for her Illustrated Handlist.

Here, we focus upon a leaf plucked from its 12th-century manuscript and pressed into service, with trimmed edges and mitered folds, as the vellum covering for a binding for a different text of small format. Both texts, primary and secondary in the life of the leaf, concern religious subjects, but they emanate from authors of different dates, locations, and languages in the Latin West and the Orthodox East respectively. The primary text represents a remnant of a text and an author familiar in some other blogposts, which consider the Dialogues, the Sermons or Homilies, and other texts by Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 to 694 CE).

Reused Leaf from Gregory's Dialogues Book III viewed from recto (inside of reused book cover) with text upright and with guides. Photograph © Mildred Budny.

Handlist 3, Recto

Reused Leaf from Gregory's Dialogues Book III viewed from verso (outside of reused book cover) with text upright and with guides. Photograph © Mildred Budny.

Handlist 3, Verso

Part of Gregory’s Dialogues, Book III, Chapter 7

(on Andreas, Bishop of Fondi/Fundi):
Sections 2 (Hic namque uenerabilis uir) –
8 (uel quae in conuentu)

Present measurements:
Circa 357 × 237 mm
< written area circa 266 × 133 mm >
Single column of 28 lines
in revived Caroline minuscule
without embellishments
Germany, circa 1175

Reused for some time as the vellum cover for the binding of a copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus‘s Commentary on the Psalms
in Greek or in Latin translation?
(now lost or preserved elsewhere in a location unknown)

For this secondary use, the remnants of a set of titles on the outside of the spine of the cover (the original verso of the reused leaf) remain in place, albeit abraded and fragmented, as both a pasted, inscribed paper label (orientated along the ‘horizontal’ across the spine) and an ink inscription on the reused leaf itself in Capitals (‘vertical’, with the tops of those letters turned toward the ‘front cover’). Another, smaller and fragmentary pasted label with a broad rectangular border stands near the bottom of the broad spine of the cover and partly overlies the ‘vertical’ spine inscription.

Acquired, probably by purchase (according to the Owner’s recollections), in France in the past 15 years or so, but before 2007 when I first saw and began to photograph the leaf. This item and others in the Illustrated Handlist acquired in France at various times and by various means (purchase, gift, or exchange), came from a single source in the Département of Saône-et-Loire, from about 1999 onward. Because the leaf does not carry indications of its original place and time of production, apart from its materials, layout, design, script, orthography, and punctuation, those unknowns must depend upon evaluations of the style of the script, lacking any forms of embellishment, such as decorated initials, which might have provided possibly more closely datable symptoms than the letters “alone”.

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Tags: 'Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts', Binding History, Bishop Andrew of Fundi, Budny's Illustrated Catalogue, Ege Manuscript 41, Euthymius Zigabenos, Fondi, Gregory the Great, Gregory's Dialogues, manuscript fragments, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Manuscript studies, Psalter Commentary, Saki, Temple of Apollo
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A Reused Part-Leaf from Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels

October 30, 2016 in Abstracts of Conference Papers, Manuscript Studies

Bede on the Gospel of Mark

Recto of the Part-Leaf

A Part-Leaf from a 14th-Century Large-Format Copy
of Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels
(Perhaps Other Texts Too)
in Double Columns of 26 or More Lines
in Latin,
Perhaps Made in France,
Reused as a Part-Cover for Something Else, Now Discarded & Lost

Yes, we know. Don’t know much about this part-leaf. Why should we bother you?

You might know something, and/or, you might like to know something. (My Kind of Person.)

I’m going ahead on the principle that Something Is Better Than Nothing. (Ever the Optimist. Gotta Hope For Something Good.)

Here Goes.

[Continuing our series on Manuscript Studies, Mildred Budny reports the identification of a reused and cut-down vellum Latin manuscript leaf extracted from a copy of Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels, made probably in the first half of the 14th century, perhaps in France. Identifying the text makes it possible to recognize which side of the leaf was the original recto, and which the verso. And there’s more to tell.]

The extracted and reduced leaf was converted through reuse into part of the cover or wrapper for some volume or other, now unknown. At some point, at least by the year 2016, the part-leaf was removed from that interim position and offered for sale on its own online. It has come to its present owner recently, without record of the provenance of the leaf, or the nature and contents of its former volume, let alone of its original manuscript.

As characteristic for the problems presented by such discarded and commercially transferred medieval manuscript materials, we must resort to examining the evidence of the material itself. Good thing, it may be, that we and other colleagues have some experience with such tasks.

Have a look, for example, at the discoveries reported in our our blog on Manuscript Studies and our colleagues’ contributions to meeting the challenges which dismembered and dispersed fragments pose, as for our 2016 Symposium on Words & Deeds and its downloadable Program Booklet.

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Tags: Aquitaine, Bede, Bede's Homilies on the Gospels, Bede's Homily II Number 6, Bede's Homily XXXVIII, Gregory the Great, Holy Saturday, Lectionary, ledger, Lesquenn, Life of Saint Blaise, Maine-et-Loire, manuscript fragments, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Mark 7:31, Mios, Otto Ege MS 14, Terres de Losquonn
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It’s A Wrap

October 3, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition

Initial I of Idem for Justinian's Novel Number 134, with bearded human facing left at the top of the stem of the letter. Photography © Mildred Budny

Q for ‘Quem’

Laying Down the Law

A leaf from the Novellae Constitutiones (or Authenticum)
of the Emperor Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis
with Parts of ‘Novels’ Numbers 159.2 and 134.1–3
plus Embellishments
Reused as a Wrapper, with Added Vellum Tie,
for Some Other Material (now lost)

Still preserved in this folder form

**Budny Handlist Number 7**

Continuing our series of blogposts on Manuscript Studies, Mildred Budny reports on manuscripts and fragments dispersed in various ways. Now we unveil a leaf reused as an wrapper-style enclosure or tied folder, with its own story to tell.

Legal Manuscript Leaf in Latin on Parchment
Made probably at Bologna, circa 1300 CE,
with Medieval Additions and Modern Alterations

Purchased in Florence, Italy, in June 1972

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Tags: Bolognese Legal Manuscript, Budny Handlist, David Immerman, Emperor Justinian I, Glossed Manuscripts, Justinian's Novellae Constitutiones, Legal Manuscripts, Libreria Leo S. Olschki, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Scott Gwara, Seminars on Manuscript Evidence, Susan L'Engle, Valerio Cappozzo, Vellum Wrapper
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Cover-Up

June 17, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition

The Medieval-Psalter-Covered French Notebook in course of photography, archivally-sensitive equipment in place. Vire from the front cover, with untied ties. Photography © Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

A Medieval Bifolium
From a Medium-Format Vulgate Latin Psalter
Reused as the Cover
of the Binding
of an 18th-Century Paper Notebook
With Receipts in French

Budny Handlist 5

Continuing our reports of discoveries about manuscripts and written materials in our blog on Manuscript Studies,
Mildred Budny examines a reused medieval fragment in its reused state, still attached to its modern notebook containing many receipts in French. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: Breviary, Dijon, French Notebooks, French Revolution, Fructidor, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Medieval manuscripts, Napoleonic Wars, Psalter Manuscripts
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Spoonful of Sugar

April 27, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition

A Reused Medieval Bifolium from a
Latin Treatise on Medicinal Substances

13th Century?

Double columns of 57 lines
with rubricated headings
and
initials and paraph marks
rendered in alternately red or blue pigment
and embellished with extended penline-flourishes in the contrasting pigment

Continuing our blog on Manuscript Studies, we illustrate a fragmentary medieval bifolium, much damaged, from a large-format manuscript retrieved (without recording the contextual information) from its long-term reuse as the vellum cover of an unknown book with a thick back. The reuse, at an unknown stage, presumably took advantage of an out-of-date medicinal textbook. Shame on the retrievers for not recording and letting us know the location from which the bifolium was removed.

Whereas many reused medieval manuscripts survive from discarded religious texts rendered obsolete by changes in liturgical practices and religious beliefs, for example during the Reformation, the French Revolution, or less catastrophic (r)evolutions, this case represents a relic, or battered fossil, of advances — or anyway transitions — in scientific, medical, pharmaceutical, and related spheres of knowledge in Western Europe. Some of our posts describe the former; now we turn to the latter. Here, we mainly allow the pictures to do the talking.

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Tags: Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Medieval Manuscript Fragments, medieval medicinal treatises
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A Part-Leaf from the ‘Life of Saint Blaise’

March 8, 2016 in Events, Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition

Part of a Leaf from the Saint’s ‘First’ Life
in a Lectionary
Reused as Binding Material

[First published on 8 March 2016, with updates.]

Here continues our blog by Mildred Budny on Manuscript Studies, for which the Contents List offers a guide to the series. Now we look at a fragment from a 12th-century manuscript containing, or partly containing, one or more saints’ lives intended for reading aloud.

A fragmentary vellum leaf in Latin now in a private collection represents a remnant of the Passio Sancti Blasii Episcopi et Martiris (‘The Suffering of Saint Blaise, Bishop and Martyr’) from a manuscript dismembered for recycled use. Laid out in double columns, the text is written in upright proto-Gothic script of circa 1170 CE from an as-yet unknown center.

Similarly, the medieval ownership of the leaf remains unknown, although the reuse as a limp vellum cover for an 18th-century paper notebook comprising a register of receipts in French presumably indicates the location of the leaf, if not the rest of its book, at least by the early modern period. Given the fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence, we’ll take all we can get.

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Tags: Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Medieval Manuscript Fragments, Passio Sancti Blasii
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Vellum Bifolium from Augustine’s “Homilies on John”

Recycled and Reclaimed
Large-Format Vellum Bifolium
from a Discarded Medieval Copy
of Saint Augustine’s Sermons
on the Gospel of Saint John
In Double Columns of 47 Lines

Now in a Private Collection

A 12th-Century Fragment of Anselm’s ‘Cur Deus Homo’

Tied Down

A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues Reused for Euthymius

A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues
Reused for Binding
A Copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus’s On the Psalms

A Reused Part-Leaf from Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels

Bede on the Gospel of Mark

A Part-Leaf from a 14th-Century Large-Format Copy
of Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels
(Perhaps Other Texts Too)
in Double Columns of 26 or More Lines
in Latin,
Perhaps Made in France,
Reused as a Part-Cover for Something Else, Now Discarded & Lost

It’s A Wrap

Laying Down the Law

A leaf from the Novellae Constitutiones (or Authenticum)
of the Emperor Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis
with Parts of ‘Novels’ Numbers 159.2 and 134.1–3
plus Embellishments
Reused as a Wrapper, with Added Vellum Tie,
for Some Other Material (now lost)

Still preserved in this folder form

**Budny Handlist Number 7**

Legal Manuscript Leaf in Latin on Parchment
Made probably at Bologna, circa 1300 CE,
with Medieval Additions and Modern Alterations

Cover-Up

A Medieval Bifolium
From a Medium-Format Vulgate Latin Psalter
Reused as the Cover
of the Binding
of an 18th-Century Paper Notebook
With Receipts in French

Budny Handlist 5

Spoonful of Sugar

A Reused Medieval Bifolium from a
Latin Treatise on Medicinal Substances

Double columns of 57 lines
with rubricated headings
and
initials and paraph marks
rendered in alternately red or blue pigment
and embellished with extended penline-flourishes in the contrasting pigment

A Part-Leaf from the ‘Life of Saint Blaise’

Part of a Leaf from the Saint’s ‘First’ Life
in a Lectionary
Reused as Binding Material

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Recycled and Reclaimed Large-Format Vellum Bifolium from a Discarded Medieval Copy of Saint Augustine’s Sermons on the Gospel of Saint John In Double Columns of 47 Lines

Now in a Private Collection

Tied Down

A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues Reused for Binding A Copy of Euthymius Zigabenus’s On the Psalms

Bede on the Gospel of Mark

A Part-Leaf from a 14th-Century Large-Format Copy of Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels (Perhaps Other Texts Too) in Double Columns of 26 or More Lines in Latin, Perhaps Made in France, Reused as a Part-Cover for Something Else, Now Discarded & Lost

Laying Down the Law

A leaf from the Novellae Constitutiones (or Authenticum) of the Emperor Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis with Parts of ‘Novels’ Numbers 159.2 and 134.1–3 plus Embellishments Reused as a Wrapper, with Added Vellum Tie, for Some Other Material (now lost)

Still preserved in this folder form

Budny Handlist Number 7

Legal Manuscript Leaf in Latin on Parchment Made probably at Bologna, circa 1300 CE, with Medieval Additions and Modern Alterations

A Medieval Bifolium From a Medium-Format Vulgate Latin Psalter Reused as the Cover of the Binding of an 18th-Century Paper Notebook With Receipts in French

Budny Handlist 5

A Reused Medieval Bifolium from a Latin Treatise on Medicinal Substances

Double columns of 57 lines with rubricated headings and initials and paraph marks rendered in alternately red or blue pigment and embellished with extended penline-flourishes in the contrasting pigment

Part of a Leaf from the Saint’s ‘First’ Life in a Lectionary Reused as Binding Material

Recycled and Reclaimed
Large-Format Vellum Bifolium
from a Discarded Medieval Copy
of Saint Augustine’s Sermons
on the Gospel of Saint John
In Double Columns of 47 Lines

A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues
Reused for Binding
A Copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus’s On the Psalms

A Part-Leaf from a 14th-Century Large-Format Copy
of Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels
(Perhaps Other Texts Too)
in Double Columns of 26 or More Lines
in Latin,
Perhaps Made in France,
Reused as a Part-Cover for Something Else, Now Discarded & Lost

A leaf from the Novellae Constitutiones (or Authenticum)
of the Emperor Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis
with Parts of ‘Novels’ Numbers 159.2 and 134.1–3
plus Embellishments
Reused as a Wrapper, with Added Vellum Tie,
for Some Other Material (now lost)

**Budny Handlist Number 7**

Legal Manuscript Leaf in Latin on Parchment
Made probably at Bologna, circa 1300 CE,
with Medieval Additions and Modern Alterations

A Medieval Bifolium
From a Medium-Format Vulgate Latin Psalter
Reused as the Cover
of the Binding
of an 18th-Century Paper Notebook
With Receipts in French

A Reused Medieval Bifolium from a
Latin Treatise on Medicinal Substances

Double columns of 57 lines
with rubricated headings
and
initials and paraph marks
rendered in alternately red or blue pigment
and embellished with extended penline-flourishes in the contrasting pigment

Part of a Leaf from the Saint’s ‘First’ Life
in a Lectionary
Reused as Binding Material