{"id":17840,"date":"2023-08-13T04:56:38","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T04:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/?p=17840"},"modified":"2025-11-17T01:46:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T01:46:11","slug":"a-13th-century-pocket-vulgate-bible-at-smith-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/a-13th-century-pocket-vulgate-bible-at-smith-college\/","title":{"rendered":"A 13th-Century Pocket Vulgate Bible at Smith College"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Thirteenth-Century Pocket Vulgate Bible
\nat Smith College:
\n“The Dimock Bible”<\/span>
\n(Mortimer Rare Book Collection MS 240)<\/h2>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Hannah Goeselt
\nRGME Guestblogger<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

[Posted on 30 October 2023<\/em>]<\/p>\n

Note<\/em>:\u00a0 For this Blogpost, we welcome Guest Blogger, Hannah Goeselt<\/a>, who reports on a manuscript which first caught her attention when examining manuscripts at Smith College<\/a> in Northampton, Massachusetts, as part of her undergraduate studies.\u00a0 Now, having recently finished an MS at Simmons University in Library and Information Science<\/a> (Cultural Heritage Informatics), she offers a guided tour to this book deserving wider attention and further research.\u00a0 We thank her for her contribution and invite you to join this guided tour.<\/span><\/p>\n

As part of the tour, Hannah showcases the manuscript for its interest in its own right, and also, as she says, “to use it as an example of how one might go about using some of the online research tools out there to assist in manuscript studies”.\u00a0 Accordingly, she includes “everything from the De Ricci census, Conway\u2013Davis directory, Schoenberg database, and Digital Scriptorium (with Smith’s own consortium database)”, as well as the Grolier Club, “which played an important part in assessing the content of the auction catalogs mentioned in Schoenberg”. Brava!<\/p>\n

Over to you, Hannah . . .<\/p>\n

Our Guest Manuscript:
\nMortimer Rare Book Collection MS 240<\/h2>\n
\"\"

Smith College, MRBC MS 240, fol. 191v. Historiated initial for the Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians, with outward-looking male face. Photography by Hannah Goeselt.<\/p><\/div>\n

While taking survey of material pertaining to manuscripts from Otto F. Ege<\/a> (1888\u20131951)<\/span> in collections across the campus of Smith College<\/a>, I was drawn to this thirteenth-century Pocket Bible, with the pressmark “MRBC MS 240″<\/strong>, and thought it\u2019d be worth initiating a sort of \u201cmeet-and-greet\u201d with this codex. I have a fondness for 13th<\/sup><\/span>-century Latin Vulgate Bibles<\/a>, often noted for their similarities and their contribution to forming our current concept of the Bible\u2019s format.\u00a0 An<\/span>d yet within all that seemingly mass uniformity, on second glance they all contain their own unique qualities and histories.<\/p>\n

At the Mortimer Rare Book Collection<\/a> (MRBC) at Neilson Library, several jewels of medieval manuscripts among keep this book company, alongside a host of fragments.\u00a0 Notable examples are<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. a large-scale Vulgate Bible<\/strong> written in a single column layout,<\/li>\n
  2. a lovely mid-thirteenth-century French Psalter<\/strong> with early-modern devotional marginalia,<\/li>\n
  3. a Book of Hours<\/strong> associated with Philip the Good<\/a>, Duke Philip III of Burgundy (1306\u20141467, duke from 1419).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    All three of these have featured on posts in Peter Kidd\u2019s blog on Medieval Manuscripts Provenance<\/a>:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. \u201cA 13th<\/sup>-Century Bible from Beauvais<\/a> at Smith College\u201d
      \n      https:\/\/mssprovenance.blogspot.com\/2014\/12\/a-13th-century-bible-from-beauvais-at.html<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. \u201cA French 13th<\/sup>-Century Psalter at Smith College\u201d
      \n      https:\/\/mssprovenance.blogspot.com\/2015\/07\/a-french-13th-century-psalter-at-smith.html<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. \u201cAn Unrecognised Book of Hours Made for Philip the Good [Part I]\u201d
      \n      https:\/\/mssprovenance.blogspot.com\/2015\/12\/an-unrecognised-book-of-hours-made-for.html<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      They, along with many others, are available on the Digital Scriptorium<\/a> website.\u00a0 However<\/span> more recently the collections have also been added to the Five College Compass<\/a> website, where MS 240 has joined them with a full digitization:<\/span><\/p>\n