A Sister Leaf
from a Miniature Latin Vulgate Bible:
Fragments at Princeton

2 columns in 47 lines
Measurements
Leaf maximum circa 121 mm high × 82 mm wide
<Written area circa 90 × 57 mm>

[Posted on 16 December 2025]

Poster 3 for 2025 Autumn Colloquium. Workshops on “Fragments at Princeton”

For the recent 2025 RGME Autumn Colloquium on Fragments, our Associate Eric M. White presented a pair of Workshops on “Fragments at Princeton”, with a focus on “Books in Fragments / Fragments in Books”. The workshops took place in Special Collections of the Princeton University Library, in two sittings.

With a few variations in each workshop, the selected specimens considered a range of manuscript and printed materials. They included, for example, single manuscript leaves (or fragments thereof) on their own or manuscript fragments (single leaves or conjoint bifolia) reused as part of bindings, pastedowns, or endleaves for other texts.

For many of these specimens, Eric demonstrated their characteristics with a riveting commentary about the processes of discovery which brought them to Princeton or which enriched understanding about them once the curator or scholar came across them in the stacks or within their secondary homes in the form of composite codices mixing layers from different dates and places of production and different genres of books.

He presented some specimens of individual leaves as curiosities about which little is known — in case they might be recognized. About one of them I said that I thought I knew of another similar leaf. The Princeton University Leaf  came from a set of three boxes of manuscript fragments, which had little or no information about their sources.

Now we introduce another leaf which I believe came from the same manuscript. Do you agree?

A Small-Format Vulgate Bible Leaf
Fragments at Princeton

1. The First Leaf of the Book of Isaiah
at the Princeton University Library

Brought to light at the recent RGME Workshops at Special Collections of the Princeton University Library (PUL), a single leaf from an unknown Latin Vulgate Bible manuscript in small format now has its own blogpost, showing images of both sides of the fragment.

• A Little Latin Vulgate Manuscript Leaf in Princeton:
  A Little Leaf at Princeton University Library
  from a Miniature Latin Vulgate Bible laid out in 2 columns in 47 lines

As a reminder, we show both sides of the PUL leaf.

Recto

Princeton, Princeton University Library, Taylor Collection of Manuscript Leaves, MS 132.23. Single Leaf from a Bible, recto. Photograph by Mildred Budny.

Verso

Princeton, Princeton University Library, Taylor Collection of Manuscript Leaves, MS 132.23. Single Leaf from a Bible, verso. Photograph by Mildred Budny.

A Sister Leaf from the Book of Wisdom
in a Private Collection at Princeton

With permission, we reveal the presence of another leaf apparently from the same original despoiled manuscript.

Recto

The recto carries a partial running title (-PE) in red and blue pigments; the Bible text in two columns with rubricated highlighting (with a wash of red pigment) for the initials of Bible verses and an inset 2-line blue initial opening the chapter. This initial has extended red pen-flourishing along the inner margin, which rises to curled foliate terminals in the upper margin and descends, with inset segments of blue pigment, into the lower margin. There, the trimmed lower margin has lost the bottom extent of the pen-flourishing, which reappears at the left in a rising, backwards-turned foliate terminal. The course of the amputated descent of the flourishing implies that it took a narrow U-turn to the left in the lost lower portion of the margin as the double pen-lines disappearing into the descent re-emerge as a single pen-line rise to the terminal.

Private Collection, Miniature Bible Leaf, recto. Photography by Mildred Budny.

Verso

The verso carries a partial running title (SA-) in red and blue pigments. The original openings of the book for which this leaf served as the recto opposite a lost verso from some leaf and as the verso opposite a lost recto of another leaf would have carried the running titles SA– / –PE to form the abbreviated title of the Old Testament Liber Sapentiae, or “Book of Wisdom”.

Private Collection, Miniature Bible Leaf, verso. Photography by Mildred Budny.

The Text

The leaf carries the text of consecutive chapters in the Book of Wisdom. At the top of the recto, the text starts mid-verse in Chapter 5:16 ([ . . . in perpetuum / ] vivent et apud), completing the chapter, opening Chapter 6 about two-thirds of the way down the first column (column a line 29), filling all of the second column (column b), turning the page to the verso to complete the chapter in line va2 and then begin Chapter 7 (line va3), which fills most of both columns a+b, then opens Chapter 8 in the last two lines on the page, to end mid-verse close to the end of Chapter 8:1 (disponit omnia [/ suaviter 2 hanc amavi . . .).

The Book

We examine these two specimens, at PUL and in a Private Collection, to consider their characteristics and the merits of their qualifications for identifying them as part of the same original manuscript. Our Workshop 9 in the series of “RGME Workshops on The Evidence of Manuscripts, Etc.” will look at these specimens as the launch of the quest to identify their former Vulgate Bible manuscript, or a pair of very similar small-format manuscripts.

• Workshop 9 on “Books as Thresholds and Communities”

What do you think? Do you know of other leaves perhaps from the same book? Do you recognize the work of the same scribes/artists?

We would be glad to learn.

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