Two Pages from a Roman Breviary in Gothic Script

November 26, 2022 in Manuscript Studies, Reports

Two Framed Pages
from a Roman Breviary
on Vellum in Latin in Gothic Script

containing
Hours for First Sunday after Easter
and
Vespers for Holy Trinity Sunday

Private Collection, Roman Breviary Leaf in Frame: Page with Part of Vespers for Holy Trinity Sunday. Photography By Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

Single-Column Pages
laid out in 27 lines of Gothic Script
with
Rubrications,
Minor Initials in Red or Blue Pigment,
and
Enlarged Initials
embellished with Pen-line Decoration

[Posted on 27 November 2022]

Two separate leaves, now in frames, in a Private Collection contain parts of a Latin Breviary for Roman Use, that is, the Church of Rome, or Breviarum Romanum. (See, for example, The Roman Breviary and Roman Breviary.)

Some earlier blogposts have considered fragments of Latin Breviaries or related liturgical books.

For example, from a different Private Collection, several leaves from a Roman Breviary:

Private Collection. Breviary Fragment, Folios IIv/Ir, with Revised Title and Penultimate Page of the Lections. Photography by Mildred Budny.

Private Collection. Breviary Fragment, Folios IIv/Ir, with Revised Title and Penultimate Page of the Lections. Photography by Mildred Budny.

The Pages from Two Leaves

Private Collection, Roman Breviary Leaf in Frame: Page in the Hours for First Sunday after Easter. Photography By Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

The visible sides of the vellum leaves, on one page per leaf, contain parts of the text from the Hours for the First Sunday after Easter (see Second Sunday of Easter) and from Vespers for Holy Trinity Sunday (see Trinity Sunday).  Let us call the  Leaves 1 and 2, taking them in the sequence of their seasonal occasions in the cycle of the liturgical year, which extends from Advent to Trinity.

In the Western liturgical calendar, Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost; it is intended to celebrate the doctrine of the Trinity, the three Persons of God, namely the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Easter (or Resurrection) Sunday commemorates Jesus’ resurrection from the dead; the event is reported in the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and some other sources.  As the start of Eastertide, or the Paschal season, Easter Sunday is followed by seven weeks to the fiftieth day on Pentecost Sunday.

The contents of the other sides of the leaves are unknown, apart from show-through onto the visible sides.  The text establishes that the two leaves were non-continuous in their former manuscript.

The vellum material of both leaves is evident in the texture of the visible surfaces as well as undulations across the expanse of the stretched animal skins. The smooth, whitish appearance makes it appear that both pages stand on the flesh sides of their skins.

Bringing the Leaves to light, we report the contents of the Pages, with descriptions and photographs.

The Pages and Frames

After purchasing the two leaves as a pair, their Collector had them framed for display as part of a group of carefully framed leaves from medieval manuscripts, selected for their features of script, text, and calligraphy.

Private Collection, Back of Frame. Photography by Mildred Budny. Reproduced by Permission.

Private Collection, Roman Breviary Leaf in Frame: Page with Part of Vespers for Holy Trinity Sunday. Photography By Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

The Collector entrusted this pair of leaves from one manuscript, and another pair from a different medieval liturgical manuscript, to the same firm for framing. Both pairs were given golden wooden frames and gold-rimmed windowed mats.

The pair of Roman Breviary leaves received separate frames, one for each leaf.

The pair of small-format leaves, from a Book of Hours in Latin, received a single frame, placing the two side by side, with individual windows, in the single mat.

The frames were made by “The House of Heydenryk / 417th E. 76th ST. / NEW YORK, N. Y. 10021”, as affirmed by the framer’s label affixed to the back of each frame.

The Companion Pair of Small-Format Vellum Leaves in a Heydenryk Frame

Private Collection, Pair of Small-Format Vellum Leaves within a single frame made by The House of Heydenryk, New York City. Front of Frame. Photography by Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

Private Collection, Pair of Small-Format Vellum Leaves within a single frame made by The House of Heydenryk, New York City. Front of Frame. Photography by Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

The Pair of Pages from a Roman Breviary

Each Page contains 27 lines of thirteenth-century Gothic minuscule script, in two sizes.  The text is written in brown ink with divisions and inscriptions in a vegetal red pigment.  There are decorated initials, inset in two indented lines at the start of capituli, in blue or red pigment, with pen-line decoration in the opposite color both within and outside the letter form.  Section-markers appear in blue pigment.

The script and decoration on both Pages appear to be the work of the same scribal artist, or closely similar scribal hands.

The texts can be identified using (later) published breviaries. No freely-available text appears to reproduce the exact Offices on the Pages, but two come sufficiently close, while they contain versions following changes adopted by the Council of Trent (1545 and 1563).

  • Breviarium Romano-Monasticum, Pauli V et Urbani VIII PP. MM. jussu editum, oro omnibus sub Regula S. Patris Benedicti militantibus, praecipue nunc ad usum Congrationis Hispanae (1779), available online via
    https://books.google.com/books?id=4BMSqZQg2fgC
  • Breviarium Romanum ex decreto Sacrosancto Concilii Tridentini restitutum S. PII Pontificis Maximi, jussu editum Clementis VIII et Urbani VIII auctoritate regognitum, cum approbatione reverendissime et illustrissime domini dominii Ignati, episcopi Ratisbonensis (1862), available online via
    https://books.google.com/books?id=FC9HAAAAcAA

Page on ‘Leaf 1’: Hours for the First Sunday after Easter

Private Collection, Roman Breviary Leaf in Frame: Page with part of Hours for First Sunday after Easter. Photography By Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

The text on the Page begins with the abbreviated word noster in ink, then moves to the rubric in red:  Et reliquis sicut notata sunt in Dominica de psalmis. Et sic dicuntur prima cotidie usque ad ascensionem. 

The text extends to another rubric:  Item. hymnus. ℣. ℞ brevia. antiphona. laudum. et per horas diei exceptis. antiphona in vesperis dicuntur sili modo sicut predictem est tam in dominicas quam in feruo usque ad ascen[sionem].

There are no enlarged initials within the text.  There are two double-height decorated initials at the start of the two capituli:  Q of ‘Quis est autem’ (lines 7‒8); and S of ‘Si testimonium’ (lines 12‒13).  They are formed alternately in blue and red pigment, with the reverse color for decoration.  Five blue section-markers (¶) appear respectively on line 2, before ‘Ad tertiam’; line 6, before ‘Ad sextam’; line 12, before ‘Ad nonam’’ line 23, before ‘Notandum’; and line 25, before ‘Item’.

The text pertains to part of the Hours for the First Sunday after Easter.  This Sunday is known traditionally as“Dominica in Albis [deposuitis]’, that is, ‘The Sunday when white [clothes] are put away’. According to ancient practice, the newly baptized would wear a white tunic for Easter and the next seven days; this white tunic would be put away on the Sunday following Easter.

The text on the Page does not name the day explicitly, but the identification is confirmed by both the sequence of elements which uniquely occur on that day in the standard breviary, and the rubric for ‘Sundays until Ascension’, that is, the forty days following Easter Sunday.

Page on ‘Leaf 2’: Vespers for Trinity Sunday

Private Collection, Roman Breviary Leaf in Frame: Page with Part of Vespers for Holy Trinity Sunday. Photography By Mildred Budny. Reproduced by permission.

The text begins mid-word:

[Dixit Jesus: ut sciatis autem, quia Filius hominis habet postestatem in terra dimitten-/]
di peccata, ait paralytico: tibi dico, surge: tolle lectum tuum, et vade in domum tuam, alleluia.

The text extends to:

semper muniamur adversis. Qui uiuis [these two words cancelled and replaced by Per Dominum added in lower margin].  Et fit commemeratio Dominicae [/ primae post Pentecosten]

There are three enlarged initials within the text: P in blue, and C and G in red.  Four 2-line high decorated initials appear at the start of major sections, alternately in red and blue with pen-line decoration in the contrasting color:
D of ‘Da quaesumus’ (lines 2‒3); M of ‘Mentibis nostris’ (lines 12‒13); B of ‘Benedictus deus’ (lines 17‒18); and O of ‘Omnipotens sempiterne’ (lines 23‒24).  A blue section-marker (¶) occurs on line 6 before ‘Sabbato’.

Apart from the usual texual abbreviations (⁊ for ‘et’,  for ‘con’, p for per, etc.), the layout is compressed, implying that the manuscript was intended for an experienced officiant. The text has the expected abbreviations of ℣ (Versicle) and ℞ (Response), o for ‘oratio’ (Prayer), p̅s̅ for ‘psalmus’ (Psalm), and Cāp for ‘Capitulum’ (“Chapter”).  (See Liturgy of the Hours.)  It also contains:

  • ad M̓ a’ ad Magnificat, antiphona.
  • ad B̓ a’ ad Benedictus, antiphona

Similar abbreviated references within the text itself assume a fairly detailed knowledge of the Offices.  The reading from Ambrosius (the Church Father Ambrose) gives only the first line, with no indication of book or chapter.  The reading from the Gospel of Luke gives only the Gospel (‘secundum lucam’) and the first line.  There is a backward reference to an earlier Versicle and Response.  Psalm 109 is identified only as ‘Dixit dominus’ (“The Lord Said”).  The abbreviation Laudate. d.o.g. serves for ‘Laudate dominum omnes gentes’ (“Praise the Lord, all ye nations”).

The last line of text contains two words from the longer version of the prayer:  “. . . semper muniamur aduersis. Qui uiuis [et regnas Deus, per omnia secula seculorum]”.  The phrase “Qui uiuis” is struck through with a horizontal stroke in brown ink.  In the margin below, the words “Per Dominum” replacing it is entered (with similar ink) in a later hand, perhaps sixteenth-century.  The longer form is found in the Ceremonies and processions of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury, edited by Christopher Wordsworth and published in 1901.

Comparison with the two breviary sources cited above shows that the text on this Page comprises the end of the Offices for Saturday, followed by the start of Vespers for Holy Trinity Sunday.

Report Booklet:  Two Pages from a Roman Breviary

A detailed Research Report is now available, in print and as a downloadable pdf.

  • Leslie J. French, Two Pages from a Roman Breviary containing Vespers for Holy Trinity Sunday and Hours for First Sunday after Easter (Princeton, New Jersey:  Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, 2022)

We offer the printable file of the Report Booklet in two versions, or ‘flavors’, according with printing facilities and preferences.

  • Consecutive Pages (quarto size, or 8 1/2″ × 11″ sheets)
    consecutive pages
  • Foldable Booklet (11″ × 17″ sheets), to be folded in half, producing a nested group of bifolia
    foldable booklet

The Report provides Photographs (by Mildred Budny) and Transcriptions and Translations of the texts on the pages (by Leslie J. French), with descriptions and analysis by both authors.

An account of the testimony of the Pages identifies the form of liturgical Use to which their text corresponds (that of Rome), specifies the nature or genre of that liturgical book (a Breviary), and suggests a preliminary Reconstruction of their place within its former span.

With the aim of bringing these leaves to light, we leave to further research the discovery of other leaves from their manuscript, a fuller conjectured reconstruction of its original extent, a detailed analysis of its features of script, decoration, text, and other evidence, and evaluations of its probable original date and location of production, its history of use, and any indications of its provenance before its dismemberment and dispersal, presumably some time in the later twentieth century, after which the two leaves came into their present collection.

We thank the owner for generous permission to photography, study, and publish the Pages.

Report Booklets on Liturgical and other Fragments of Books

Although some of our blogposts (for our Blog on Manuscript Studies) report materials of such kind, this Research Report stands among several which the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence has prepared from manuscript or early printed fragments belonging to liturgical books in Latin, on vellum or paper, including Missals and Breviaries. Available in printed form and as downloadable pdfs on the RGME website, they are:

and

  • Missal Bifolium Printed on Vellum by Wolfgang Hopyl (forthcoming).

An early version of the Report for the pair of framed Leaves from a Roman Breviary was one of the first of them.

We began the Report in 2019 when the collection first came to our attention

https://augmentin-buy.online

, and shared it in a preliminary form with the Collector, but we had to put aside for other tasks before its completion for publication.  This blogpost describes the discoveries about the pair more fully, to prepare the publication of the Report, to take its place among the series of RGME Report Booklets.

The quarto-sized Booklet will soon be available for download in two formats, depending upon preference and printing facility.  When the Booklet is ready, it can be downloaded here.  Please watch this space.

Suggestion Box

Do you know of other leaves from this manuscript?  Do you recognize the hands of the scribe(s) or scribal artist(s) in other works?  Do you know or surmise when or where the manuscript would have been made?

We welcome your questions, comments, and suggestions.

Please leave your Comments here, Contact Us, or visit

Please watch our blog for more discoveries, including reports of materials from the same Private Collection.

We look forward to hearing from you.

*****

Verso of a Leaf from a 35-Line, Double-Column Breviary. Circa 1300. Private Collection, reproduced by permission.

Private Collection. Verso of a Leaf from a 35-Line, Double-Column Breviary. Circa 1300. Reproduced by permission.

*****

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