A Leaf in Dallas from “Otto Ege Manuscript 14” (Lectern Bible)
January 11, 2022 in Manuscript Studies
An Old Testament Leaf
from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’
with the end of Joshua
and the beginning of Judges
in the
Virginia Lazenby O’Hara
Fine Books Division
of the Dallas Public Library
City of Dallas, Texas
Large-format Latin Vulgate Lectern Bible
(“the Bible of ‘Mirmelus Arnandi’ “)
made in France, late 13th- or early 14th century
Single Leaf mounted behind glass within a matted frame
Double columns of 50 lines
Visible side of the leaf (‘Recto’):
Joshua 24:18 ([igitur Dominus quia /] ipse Dominus – 24:38 (end)
and Judges 1:1 –15 (ending the verse with inriguum inferius [/ Filii autem . . . beginning 1:16])
With rubricated and polchrome elements, running titles, concluding-and-opening titles,
decorated and historiated initials, border ornament,
embellished pen-line line-fillers, and added lection marks
[Posted on 10 January 2022, with updates]
Continuing the series of posts for our blog on Manuscript Studies, Mildred Budny describes another leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’, a large-format copy on vellum of the full Latin Bible in the Vulgate Version.
With thanks to Molly Tepera of the Dallas Public Library of the City of Dallas, Texas, I can report details of a single, framed Leaf in its Virginia Lazenby O’Hara Fine Books Division from one of the celebrated manuscripts owned by Otto F. Ege (1888–1951). Now fragmented, the book has become known as ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’. The Dallas Leaf can be cited thus:
Framed Leaf from Otto Ege Manuscript 14
Virginia Lazenby O’Hara Fine Books Division
Dallas Public Library.
From the Old Testament portion of the manuscript, the Leaf carries the end of the Book of Joshua and the beginning of the Book of Judges. A principal highlight is the framed illustration within its opening initial for Judges.
Many features of the Leaf correspond closely with other leaves from the same book. They include its representation of the Vulgate Version with some textual variants, its layout in double columns of 50 lines on the page, its Gothic script for the main text and for corrections inserted in the margins, its expansive decoration with foliate and zoomorphic ornament which often extends into the margins, its illustrated (or ‘historiated’) initial with a scene relating to the text, and its supplied lection marks in the margins (for reading aloud). Some features with the Leaf are unusual in the manuscript or specific to this Leaf, as with the full-line stretches of pen-line line-fillers on the one hand, and the present frame for the object on the other.
Some discoveries for the manuscript have been reported in our blog.
- A New Leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’
- More Discoveries for ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’
- A Leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 19’ and Ege’s Workshop Practices
- Updates for Some ‘Otto Ege Manuscripts’ (Ege MSS 8, 14, 41, and 61)
- Some Leaves in Set 1 of ‘Ege’s FOL Portfolio’ (Ege MSS 8, 14, 19, and 41)
See also The Illustrated Handlist (Number 4).
As more research and discoveries continue apace for Otto Ege’s dispersed manuscripts by various scholars, curators, owners, vendors, and others, it might suffice, for this report, to mention the publication in print recently of an account by Peter Kidd of a detached New Testament leaf from this manuscript in the McCarthy Collection, along with a list of known leaves having historiated initials.
Peter Kidd, The McCarthy Collection, Volume III: French Miniatures (London: Ad Ilissum, 2021), number 60, “Historiated initial on a leaf from the Bible of Mirmelus Arnandi” (pp. 199–202).
That leaf carries the end of one of the Pauline Epistles and the beginning of the next: the Epistle to the Colossians and the beginning of that to the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, with a historiated initial on its recto. The initial shows Saint Paul, traditionally regarded as the author, sitting and holding both sword and book.
Peter Kidd’s title for the manuscript derives from the purported name of a medieval owner, “Mirmelus Arnandi” (a lawyer and judge), recorded within its pages. The attribution is, however, subject to revision, because modern views of that name may represent a misreading. See, for example:
- MS 223: SEMI-QUADRATA BIBLE
- The last leaf of the Psalms, from a very large Bible, in Latin [France (Paris), c.1300]
- No. 6, From the so-called Bible of “Mirmelus Arnandi”
- McCarthy Catalogue Vol. III (French Illuminations), note for Catalogue no. 60, with Kidd’s update for its entry.
The continuing flow of publications, in print or online, of yet more leaves from Otto Ege’s dispersed manuscripts, including his ‘Manuscript 14’, bring their features into view. Images reproduced from the individual remnants, while always useful, vary greatly in degree, quality, and size of reproduction. Sometimes those publications include recognition — by images, descriptions, or mentions alone — of the frames, mats, or other accompaniments for the leaves. More often they do not.
In the case of the Leaf in the Dallas Public Library, the images supplied by Molly Tepera fortunately show and share some accompanying material evidence.
Thus, this Report might set the Leaf both into the context of the manuscript, as the dispersed book becomes better known from its remnants, and into the context of Otto Ege’s workshop practices in preparing individual leaves (or occasionally bifolia, in a pair of connected leaves) for distribution and sale. The Report builds upon, and advances, my earlier reports about parts of Ege Manuscript 14 itself (see above) and my cumulative observations recorded for
The Dallas Leaf and its Frame
Within its current mat and frame, the vellum leaf comes into view with one side facing forward through the inner window of the mat. That window overlies the outer edges of the leaf, imparting a cropped presentation. In this way, it is not readily obvious whether the side facing front represents the original recto or verso of the leaf. Let us call it the ‘Recto’.
Show-through from the opposite side of the leaf (the ‘Verso’) gives some indications of its own script and decoration. For example, they reveal some elements of supplied text (‘corrections’) which stand in both margins, as well as the vertical bar and frame (for a decorated initial) which extends alongside the first, or left-hand, column of that page (‘column a’).
The non-Ege frame and its mat represent additions to the leaf at some stage. To the back of the frame are affixed a pair of paper labels. The pair includes Ege’s standard printed label for the specimens from Leaf 14 as numbered in his Portfolio of Fifty Original Leaves (‘FOL’) from Medieval Manuscripts.
A standard reference-point for surviving copies of that Portfolio and remnants of Leaf 14 remains Scott Gwara, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts: A Study of Ege’s Manuscript Collections, Portfolios, and Retail Trade, with a Comprehensive Handlist of Manuscripts Collected or Sold (2013), Appendix VIII (pp. 106–107) and Appendix X, Handlist 14 (pp. 121–122).
The Contents List for the Portfolio provides a check-list for the specimen Leaves from different manuscripts. Each of the fifty specimens is presented within an individual framed mat, which carries an attached identifying Label. The different mats share the same size, so as to present a uniform set of items within the clamshell Portfolio box. The size of the windows varies according to the size of the individual specimens, which derive from a wide variety of formats.
Within the FOL Portfolio
Examples of the leaves in the FOL Portfolio are displayed online by various collections, as with
- Otto F. Ege Collection: The Manuscript Leaf Portfolios at Denison University (Set number 30) and eleven other institutions
- University of Massachusetts Amherst (Set 6 of 40 numbered sets)
- Stony Brook University (Set 19)
- Buffalo & Erie County Public Library (Set 11)
- Newark Public Library (Set 34)
- Case Western Reserve University (Set 37).
In the Portfolio, the presentation sets the specimens within individual windowed and hinged mats, to which the printed Label is attached at the lower left. The left-hand side of the Label folds around the mat, with a narrow ‘stub’ attached at the back. Thus, the loose front flap of the label can be lifted, sometimes to reveal more fully any annotations in pencil or other medium across or along the bottom front of the mat.
Here is the case for the specimen in the ‘Ege Family Portfolio’ (Set 3) now at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in the Otto Ege Collection, as it stands within its windowed Ege mat.
In that case, the leaf comes from the opening of the New Testament Book of Revelation (or Apocalypse of Saint John). Its text directly follows the conclusion of the previous Book and the rubricated opening title for this one. Starting with a rubricated number I in the margin, the chapters are numbered at one side. The chapters open with enlivened polychrome initials inset within the columns of text. Vertical bands extend from them alongside the full length of the columns with sprouts of foliage and zoomorphic elements. They produce further extensions also across the upper and lower margin. The Book opens with a 12-line initial inset within the text. Its frame encloses an illuminated illustration with human, architectural, and other features in a scene relating to the text (here, the saintly author at work on his text). More-or-less centered at the top of the page, the bichrome running title in Gothic Capitals proclaims the name of the Book in a partial form (APOCA-) which would have been matched by the completion of the word on the facing page.
As often his practice, in placing the specimen leaf in its mat, here Ege turned the original verso to the front. It seems evident that this choice served to place the more elaborately decorated side to recto position for display in the mat.
Many of the features on this leaf of script, layout, decoration, illustration, rubrication, corrections of textual omissions supplied in the margins, and other marks appear also on the Dallas Leaf. It, too, shows the end of one Book and the beginning of another, with a framed initial illustrating its text.
Outside the FOL Portfolio, or ‘Rogue Leaves’ and ‘Strays’
Many leaves from the manuscript circulated outside the context of the FOL Portfolio with its mostly numbered Sets. The same fate or pattern pertains to many leaves from other manuscripts selected for dispersal in the same Portfolio, and in other of Ege’s Portfolios. Such ‘unattached’ cases have been called ‘Rogue Leaves’ and ‘Strays’.
Many of them circulate within Ege’s hinged and windowed mats in standard sizes, accompanied by Ege’s printed Label at the lower front — in the same style as the leaves assembled in the FOL Portfolio. Some of these ‘Strays’ could have been removed from a given Set of the Portfolio. Some Portfolio Sets currently incomplete may have been the sources for such rearrangements.
Other ‘Rogue Leaves’ appear to have circulated without mats by Ege, and/or without Ege’s printed Label. Some having no such Label did not have one as they were sent for sale (see below), although they might carry a pencil inscription in Ege’s marking system. Therefore it is difficult to know (say, without inside information) if some leaves now without printed Labels or Ege mats — or their remnants — in fact had them earlier.
Some ‘Stray’ Leaves were framed, or reframed, for display, presumably as hangings. Some of them retain those frames. See, for example, Another Leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 22’ (the Warburg Missal). Such is the case with the Dallas Leaf.
Some, like it, have managed to retain, through proximity in their current settings or structures, the printed Label and/or parts of the original Ege mat.
The Leaf
The form of the bichrome running title on the Dallas Leaf might imply that, like the Beinecke Leaf at the beginning of Revelation, this leaf has been turned, placing its original verso in recto position for its frame. Identifying the Book of Judges which opens halfway across this side of the leaf, the title proclaims the first part of the name IUDI-. The name is presumably to be completed in the running title on the facing page of a following leaf (now lost, or lost track of).
Top
An example of a ‘bipartite’ running title, spreading the two parts of a name across both pages of an opening of the book, shows the effect in another part of the Old Testament. Retaining both halves, or leaves, of the same animal skin, a bifolium in Cleveland has the full running title for the Book of Ezekiel across its opening between one verso and one recto. The bipartite title spaces the syllables between EZE- and –CHIEL. Because leaves are missing between these two conjoint leaves, their portions of the text do not run consecutively from the verso of the one to the recto of the other. Consequently, the view now of these facing pages only amounts to an approximation of how the bipartite running titles for a given Book would have appeared across an opening originally. A similar fate pertains to the running titles on the two sides of the Dallas Leaf, which lack their match on a facing leaf.
Top Right
The initial P (for Post) of Chapter 1 nests its bow of inset 11-line height within a gold-bordered frame. Around the bow are segments of a ‘sea’-like background of blue pigment filled with scrolling foliate ornament. Within the bow, a checquered ‘wall-paper’ or backdrop forms the background for the scene. At the lower right, there rises a foliate and mounded, perhaps rocky, formation indicating the landscape. At the lower left, a pair of kneeling male human figures look up to the right and reach their outstretched hands towards the bearded face of the haloed divinity emerging from the clouds. Thus, it would appear, they address or beseech their god.
Bottom
The rubricated title at the bottom of the left-hand column of text (column ‘a’) gives the closing title for one Book of the Old Testament and the opening title for the next. The transcription here expands its abbreviations by italics.
Explicit liber Josue. Incipit liber Judicum;
(“The Book of Joshua ends. The Book of Judges begins.”)
In this column, within the area of the skipped lines between the last line of text and the rubricated title there stretch two decorative line-fillers in undulating pen-line formations of frieze-like foliate ornament. The stems have backward-turned offshoots. Each stem adopts a uniform type of leaf, with rippled or smooth contours, along the full course of its run.
These line-fillers seem to be unusual in the repertoire of embellishment in surviving leaves of the book (insofar as I have seen), although various survivors have ornamental figural and foliate elements rendered in pen-line outline. An example emerges within, and interrupts the course of, a polychrome vertical bar on the leaf in Set 19 of the FOL Portfolio, seen here. A grotesque or caricatured human head facing left in profile, with a wide-opened mouth, rises from an extended foliate stem which includes both types of leaves employed in the line-fillers on the Dallas Leaf. The somewhat jarring position of this hybrid creature in the middle perhaps emulates, or combines, features of a caryatid or herm, in supporting or surmounting a pillar or another architectural structure. This one appears to perform both functions at once, as the upper portion of the bar/pillar seemingly squashes into the face, while the neck rises from a foliate collar.
In a way, the curious ‘intrusion’ of this pen-line hybrid creature, mixed with foliate elements (including both types of leaves employed in the line-fillers on the Dallas Leaf), into an otherwise fully-painted bar-border, offers a parallel of sorts to the inclusion, without much notice, of two lines of text perhaps not from the Vulgate at the end of the column of text of Joshua on the Dallas Leaf.
The Span of Text
The Vulgate text on this page extends at the top of the left-hand column a from mid-verse in one chapter to the end of a verse in another, with a change of Books along the way.
The Main Text and its Closing / Opening Titles
The left-hand column (column a) begins in line 1 within Joshua 24:19 ( . . . / ipse dominus). The preceding text of Joshua 24:19 would lead up to the phrase igitur Dominus quia. The transcription of both the observed and the implied text marks the turn of the page (or column) with a forward slash (/) and supplies the ‘missing’, but identifiable, text with square brackets ([ ]), thus:
([igitur Dominus quia /] ipse dominus).
The column completes the chapter, and the Book, at the end of line 42.
There follow, in the same script and hand, two full lines (lines 43–44) which might not appear in the Vulgate standard. The text appears to read:
munerum multi favorum numerorum
munuidus uimunda in mundum.
The source for this text is as yet unidentified. Its comment might sum up the Book of Joshua as a whole, with the concern therein for how lands were divided among the people. Presented as a continuous part of the main text, it may represent the incorporation without notice of a gloss or a summary placed at the end of the Book in the exemplar for this copy.
Skipping the last five ruled lines in the column, with space for the rubricated title, the scribe turned to the next column and its new Book.
Starting at the top of column b, Chapter I of the Book of Judges extends from its verse 1 through 16, completing the end of that verse in line 50 (inriguum inferius) at the end of the column. It would be followed by 1:16 at the top of the next page, starting with Filii autem. To the right of line 3 stands the rubricated numeral I for the first chapter.
Corrections and Annotations
Alongside the text of line 14 in column b, there stands a supplied phrase which the copying had omitted in verse 3, or which could be found by comparing its text with another version of the Vulgate than the exemplar.
Likewise, two entries in light brown ink above the rubricated title add the transliterated Hebrew names to be found in titles in the, or a, standard (for example, here and here). My transcription signals the additions in bold:
Lection marks in pale brown ink are entered in the margins opposite the rubricated title and the start of verse 8 in column b line 28: “A” at the bottom left and “b” at the middle right. An asymmetrical pair of smaller marks in the margin at the beginning and end of the intrusive text (lines 42–43) may signal its omission when reading aloud. Such signs show attention to the quality of the text and to its preparation for reading, as appropriate for a Lectern Bible in the keeping of an active religious community.
Show-Through from the Other Side
Glimpses of the text and ornament on the opposite side of the leaf can be seen in the shadows of their show-through onto the front. They emerge into view especially in the margins where the upper side does not have its own layers of ink and paint.
Here I offer two versions of the image of column b on the ‘Recto’ supplied by Molly Tepera.
The Front (‘Recto’)
One version presents the photograph as such, showing the ‘Recto’ as it faces us from within the frame.
The ‘Back’ Enhanced
The other version reverses and enhances the image. Turning the photograph back-to-front (or front-to-back) can emulate the effect of a direct view of the ‘Verso’, while enhancing it can emphasize the show-through.
It becomes clearer that column a on the hidden side of the leaf has a marginal insertion of three lines to the left of lines 3–5 of the text.
Moreover, a decorative vertical bar extends most of the way down the column, with foliate offshoots along the way and extensions into both the upper margin and the lower outer margin. About five lines from the bottom of the column, the bar as such appears to close, as an offshoot extends outward, into the margin, and downward, leading to a foliate terminal with a downward-pointing tip.
We could expect that the vertical bar pertains to a decorated initial at some place in the column. There seems to be show-through of a painted structure extending into the column for an inset initial close to its bottom, approximately within lines 42–45 of the 50 lines. Into the margin alongside it, an enlarged extension of some kind, foliate and perhaps also zoomorphic, enhances the presence of that initial.
Conforming with the structure of the layout of the manuscript, such an initial with a decorative bar would open a chapter of the text, in a step down the hierarchy of initials headed by the initials of Books. At the top stand the historiated initials (as on the ‘Recto’ for Judges 1), which come in various sizes. Then come the chapter initials (as on the ‘Verso’).
Comparable decorative polychrome bars which reach most of the height of the column, or beyond, for a single inset chapter initial, some 3 or so lines in height, appear on various leaves of the manuscript.
Several examples, placing the bar-and-initial at the left-hand column, occur on various of the left-over leaves which remained for years, unmatted, in the Ege Collection. They now belong to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, in its Otto Ege Collection. Some are shown below.
The specimen on the ‘Verso’ of the Dallas Leaf seems to follow their model.
The Chapter Initial
Given the span of text on the visible ‘Recto’, candidates for that chapter initial would be either the preceding Joshua 24:1 (Congregavitque) or the following Judges 1:2 (Ascenditque). The latter would follow the full 36 verses of chapter 1, while the former would launch the 26 verses of the final chapter of Joshua, up to their entry partway through (within verse 18) onto column a of the ‘Recto’.
The show-through of only one decorative bar and initial would indicate that only one chapter opens on the ‘Verso’. The span of text within the columns could aid a conjecture regarding the probable contents. From a chapter initial in such a location, giving some 8 lines of text, plus a full column of text of 50 lines until the end of that ‘Verso’, a comparison between the standard rate of text-per-column in the manuscript and the coverage in a printed edition could allow for an educated guess as to which place in the Bible text, within Joshua or Judges, might be occupied by the ‘Verso’ — allowing for the use of abbreviations in the manuscript and the layout in paragraphs, rather than verses as in some customary approaches to the presentation. (Conjectured reconstructions for missing portions of text elsewhere in the manuscript are explored, for example, in Patch Work in ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’.)
And there’s more.
The Main Text and Corrections
Examining the show-through of text provides further clues. Ready candidates would be the insertions in the margins at the top of both columns of the ‘Verso’ and five lines of the main text at the bottom of its column b. Reversed and enhanced images aid the examination.
Let us consider the largest ‘sample’, in the lines of text visible around and through the line-fillers on the ‘Recto’.
Sufficient parts of those lines are decipherable. They pertain to Joshua 24:17, although their rendition does not exactly follow the standard Vulgate (as frequently in this manuscript).
[17 Dominus Deus noster, ipse eduxit nos et patres nostros de terra Ægypti, de do-/]
mo servitutis: fecitque videntibus nobis signa in[-]
gentia, et custodivit nos in omni via per
quam ambulavimus, et in cunctis populis per quos transivimus.
There is nothing in Judges that comes even close to that show-through text. The hidden side of the leaf is definitely the original recto, leading to the text on the visible page as the leaf is turned over.
The ‘Verso’ as Original Recto
The combination of evidence, textual and decorative, establish that Ege’s ‘Recto’, seen within the frame, is the original verso.
Supporting that conclusion (as we might expect), the running title gives the opening letters ‘IUDI’ of ‘IUDI/CIUM’, which would naturally fall on the , allowing the full name of the Book name to be read across the top of the opening. On s own, the partial form of the title could imply, but alone might not suffice to establish, that this page is one of the versos in the manuscript. Copying mistakes and inconsistencies in the manuscript are not uncommon, and not all of them have been corrected. Besides, the opening of the Book of Judges on this page, and halfway through it, at that, could mean that, were the end of Joshua to occupy a verso facing it, the verso might require its own title, or part thereof.
Alongside the characteristics and expectations of the running title, it seems worthwhile to look for corroborating evidence in other parts of the object. I have spelled out some details of the process of exploration, to show several forms of approach to the challenges presented by manuscript fragments which might be applied to different individual cases. An advantage is that various of these methods can come within reach without elaborate expense (aside from, say, years of study, training, and learning) or equipment.
In short, such methods, and others, help to cast light upon the other, hidden, side of the Dallas Leaf, without any recourse to removing the frame. The present state of the object itself constitutes an artifact comprised of layers, partly original to the medieval structure, and partly acquired or assembled in stages. Aided by techniques of manuscript and textual studies, the study of the opposite side of the Leaf can advance even at a distance, whether that distance is miles away or in person, while it remains masked by the frame and separated from the direct company of its many siblings between a single volume.
The Accompanying Labels:
Ege’s Printed Label for Leaf 14 and an Inscribed Strip
Ege’s printed Label for Leaf 14 is affixed to the back of the current frame, along with a trimmed horizontal Strip with hand-written inscriptions in pencil. Both evidently pertained to the Leaf as it left Ege’s workshop.
Standard for Ege’s mounted leaves, the Label comprises a rectangular paper slip with text on one side, including the Leaf Number 14 at the top right. An addition at the top in pencil in cursive script is partly decipherable, perhaps to be read as ‘library’. If so, that note might designate an intended direction or destination for the Leaf.
The annotation places this copy of the Label among a possibly rare group of Ege Labels which have annotations or revisions. A mysterious or puzzling example accompanies the Wagner Leaf from Ege MS 19. (See A Leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 19’ and Ege’s Workshop Practices.)
The long, irregularly trimmed Strip on the back of the Dallas frame carries pencil annotations by several implements of differing widths and strokes, and perhaps by different hands. Spaced at opposite ends of the remaining extent of the Strip, the inscriptions cite a number at the left and an identification of the text at the right. The former, “1300”, presumably offers a rounded date for the production of the leaf. The latter declares it to be the “Book of Judith” [sic].
That name presumably misreads the Latin of the opening title. The name is rendered in an overlapping, or retraced pair of annotations. A bolder version in disconnected letters overlies a faint version in cursive script. The form and outspread spacing of the numeral and the faint first version of “Book of Judith” resemble pencil annotations at the bottom of many other Ege Leaves and Ege Mats. The firmer retracing might have been the work of a librarian, vendor, binder, or owner.
Other detached leaves from the manuscript, and/or their mats, carry the date “1300” in pencil as part of an Ege inscription upon it or its mat. For example, an Ege note of this kind stands upon the recto of a leaf from part of the glossary (which follows the Bible portion). As its collector informed me, it was purchased ‘as is’, in late summer 1953 at the Cleveland Museum of Art shop. The inscription in Ege’s handwriting reads:
“$2.— French Bible 1300 – List of Hebrew names”
(See A New Leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’ .)
The printed Label for Leaf 14 in the specimen in Dallas could easily have been lifted from a windowed mat enclosing the Leaf. The unevenly trimmed Strip apparently derives from such a mat, bearing characteristic pencil notes. The pair of reclaimed paper attachments on the back of the frame would testify to that form of presentation as the prepared item departed from Ege’s workshop. Their ‘retrieval’ from the mat-plus-Label most probably occurred as part of the process of placing the Leaf within the present frame, with a different, colored mat.
The preservation of these pieces of evidence is helpful in allowing a glimpse of the history of the leaf in its travels away from its siblings towards its current location.
A similar glimpse is revealed in the trimmed strips from an Ege mat and a printed Ege sale label in another institutional collection. This evidence, and its interpretation in the context of Ege’s known habits in preparing and distributing leaves from books, is shown among specimens from Ege MS 61, a 32-Line Vulgate Pocket Bible from France. See More Discoveries for ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 61’.
Reconstruction for the Books of Joshua and Judges in Ege MS 14
Among known leaves of Ege MS 14, the Dallas Leaf represents a newly recognized survivor from the Book of Judges, which carries the historiated opening initial at the top of one column. Also carrying the end of the Book of Joshua, this leaf joins another survivor from that Book, also with a historiated initial.
For these two Old Testament Books, my earlier provisional Reconstruction of the manuscript (see More Discoveries for ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’) can now be adjusted. The publication of the Dallas Leaf in this blogpost provides and illustrates its entry into the list of known parts from the Books of Joshua and Judges. Also, Peter Kidd’s publication of the leaf with part of the Pauline Epistles in the McCarthy Collection (see above) identifies the present location of a historiated Joshua leaf, previously known through a citation by its folio number, while the manuscript was intact, in the Sotheby’s catalogue of 6–7 July 1931, lot 389. (See A New Leaf from ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’, with a detailed examination of that source.)
The updates to my previous Reconstruction (see More Discoveries for ‘Otto Ege Manuscript 14’ ) are signaled in red, with their links in blue.
1) Location unknown
> Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, Naito Collection. Kidd, French Miniatures, p. 199.
-
- Joshua initial = folio *73v, as known from the Sotheby’s catalogue of 1931.
Historiated initial with “Joshua kneeling, addressed by God” (Kidd, p. 199)
On recto: “Quire signature ‘viius’ ” [i. e. septimus] (ibid.)
- Joshua initial = folio *73v, as known from the Sotheby’s catalogue of 1931.
2) New York, New York. Rogue Leaf (2 of 3) = Gwara Handlist 14.9. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1994.539
= Wixom et al. (1999), no. 141, Leaf ‘3’ with plate on page 119, column b
-
- Joshua 8:32 ([la-]/pides] – 10:1 (sicut enim fecerat) on verso
3) Location unknown
> Dallas, Texas. Rogue Leaf? Dallas Public Library, Virginia Lazenby O’Hara Fine Books Division, Framed Leaf from Otto Ege Manuscript 14: one side is visible
(the original verso, now turned to the recto in the frame)
-
- Judges > Joshua 24:18 ([igitur Dominus quia]/ ipse Dominus] – 33 (end)
and
Judges 1:1 – 15 (/ [filii autem] of 1:16) on one side (original verso?)
- Judges > Joshua 24:18 ([igitur Dominus quia]/ ipse Dominus] – 33 (end)
As the word and recognition spread, more leaves from these (and other) Books in the manuscript might come to light.
The Sum and the Parts
Some students, admirers, and scholars might have interest in this manuscript only in the leaves with art-historical interest, on account of the presence of historiated initials or other forms of illustration. However, others, like Yours Truly, are keen to learn more of all its leaves, as the combination of all their evidence can amount to a fuller form of understanding of the monument that might be greater than the sum of some of its parts.
This view is not a complaint against special interests of such kinds. Specialization and expertise can illuminate the different aspects of the subject wonderfully. This process of discovery gives cause to celebrate the fortuitous combination of interests and the sharing of information more widely.
In this voyage, it is worth celebrating the path by which Molly Tepera, examining materials in the Virginia Lazenby O’Hara Rare and Fine Books Division of the Dallas Public Library, came upon this Framed Leaf, explored resources for its research, discovered my blogposts about other parts of its manuscript, and wrote to tell me about it. It took a while, as other tasks claimed attention.
When the time came to write up my research about it for presentation here, it called forth attention to traces of stages in its own voyage. That story is rendered all the more poignant when told in the company, albeit virtually, of the ‘voices’ of some other leaves from the same monumental book, which it has been a privilege to see and study. That privilege, both individual and collective, is due not least to the preservation and recovery of many parts of the book in collections, both private and institutional, far and wide, and to the permission to examine them.
*****
I thank Molly Tepera for bringing the leaf to our attention, sending images, answering questions, and giving the opportunity to study it and publish it. We are grateful for the permission from the Dallas Public Library and the photographer to reproduce the images here. We continue to thank the librarians, scholars, owners, and others, who have helped the continuing research in many ways.
Do you know of more leaves from this manuscript? Do you recognize the hands of these scribes, artists, and annotators in other manuscripts?
Do you recognize the source of the brief ‘intrusive’ text which follows the end of the Book of Joshua (‘Recto’, column a, lines 43–44)?
Do you have a suggestion about the text of the corrections in several lines seen in show-through from the ‘Verso’ in the upper margins on both sides (seen here in reversed and enhanced views)? Hint: the main text beside them evidently belongs to the last verses of Joshua 23 in the left-hand column and the first part of Joshua 24 in the right hand column. The marginal corrections would, as characteristic for this book, supply portions of verses which had been omitted in the column or which deserved to be incorporated.
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Coming soon: The report of another leaf from this same manuscript, also from the Old Testament.
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