Heinrich Suso, L'horloge de sapience, the French translation of the Horologium Sapientiae, illuminated manuscript on vellum [France, mid-fifteenth century]

264 leaves (the first a modern title page), 230mm. by 160mm., wanting 3 leaves from beginning, else complete, collation: i^{4 (i and iv singletons), ii10, iii-xxxiii8, xxxiv2, single column, 30 lines in dark brown ink in lettre batârde with flourishes and cadels, names of interlocutors and other headings in red, capitals touched in yellow, paragraph marks in red, approximately} forty large illuminated initials (mostly 4- to 5-line) in burnished gold on red and blue grounds with white tracery, part of first line on first page overpainted, calligraphic title in florid and ornate modern calligraphic script at beginning, good condition on fine vellum with wide and clean margins, eighteenth-century mottled calf over pasteboards (probably German), gilt-tooled spine with remains of paper label with 'B 139'

A handsome manuscript of the most celebrated work of the mystic Heinrich Suso (c.1295-1366). The scope of the book is vast, and it sets out to present the author's mystical experiences to laymen through a dialogue between Sapientia and her disciple, echoing Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae. Simultaneously, the work details bitter criticisms of the deterioration within the Church and the universities, using the mechanics of a clock as a symbol for man's soul, which requires constant maintenance and regulation in order to function well.

The Latin text was composed c.1334, and was closely followed by this translation, itself made by an anonymous Franciscan master of theology, who was a member of the convent of the Observance in Neufchâtel. J. Ancelet-Hustache traces some 49 manuscripts of this text ('Quelques indications sur les mss. de l'Horloge de Sapience in Heinrich Seue' in Studien zum 600. Todestag (1366-1966), 1966, pp.163-65), none definitively older than the fifteenth century, and none in private hands. According to de Ricci, Census and Supplement, there are only two manuscripts of this text recorded in America (Yale and Harvard), and apart from the present copy the only one to come to the market recently was that of lot 470 of the Phillipps sale in our rooms, 25 November 1969.

Other related texts in French follow, including Une devote meditation de lame (fol.246r), claiming to be the work of a soul wanting to return from a state of sin to grace; Ihesus vray espoire de virginite (fol.249v), a meditation by the repentant soul; La premiere que on vest venu (fol.252v), eight mediations for the person who wants to reject the world and love God; and a sermon exhorting rejection of the world (fol.253r).