Lot 30

Carolingian glossed Psalter in the Gallican version, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [northern Italy (probably region of Milan), second half of ninth century]

Estimate

30,000 - 50,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

Vellum

a bifolium (with consecutive leaves and thus the innermost of a gathering), the most complete leaf 270mm. by 195mm., single column, with remains of 19 lines in dark brown ink in a stately Carolingian minuscule, gloss in smaller script in right-hand margin arranged in rectangular blocks or downward facing triangles, small initials touched in green, larger initials in red uncials, a 6-line rubric in same, trimmed at outer edges with some losses to text from second leaf, bottom few centimetres of bifolium cut away with loss of 9 lines of text, stains, scuffs and small holes from reuse in binding, else fair and presentable, hessian binding

Provenance

provenance

A collector named Neuss from the vicinity of Dillingen (seen there by Bischoff); acquired in 1979 by Bernard Rosenthal from Antiquariat Wöfle, Munich; Quaritch, cat.1088 (1988), no.56; Schøyen MS.74.

Catalogue Note

text

In 1986, Bernhard Bischoff recognised this as a long-lost bifolium from the Dillingen illustrated Psalter (which survives as two fragments with illustrations of the Virgin and Child and Christ healing: Dillingen, Kreis und Studien Bibliothek, XV Fragm. 26; cf. Bischoff, Katalog, p.108 and Wunderle, Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften, p.451). The manuscript was evidently a sumptuous production. Following Charlemagne's educational reforms, Psalters were the principal texts read by the educated Frankish aristocracy, and were more-or-less the earliest manuscripts made for secular patrons in the Middle Ages. Fragments of some two dozen Carolingian glossed Psalters survive, and the genre cast a long shadow on the layout of the medieval Bible. These volumes served as the prototypes for Anglo-Saxon glossed Psalters (M. Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform, 2004, p.32) and in the twelfth century for the Glossa Ordinaria on the whole Bible (L.J. Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria, 2009).

Bischoff also identified the hand of the manuscript as characterisitic of Milan. The leaves were planned from their inception to incorporate the gloss within their wide outer margins. In fact, the width of the page must have made the original volume almost square, bringing to mind the luxurious copies of late antique papyrus codices made for the Carolingian elite, such as the Leiden Aratea (Leiden, Universiteitsbibl. Voss.lat.Q79, an early ninth-century book probably commissioned by Emperor Louis the Pious copying an exemplar perhaps made for Nero). The text of the gloss is unrecorded and apparently unique.

literature

R. McKitterick, 'Carolingian Book Production', The Library, 6 series, 12 (1990), pp.23-24; M. Gibson, 'Carolingian Glossed Psalters', in The Early Medieval Bible, 1993, p.89, n.38. B. Bischoff, Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts I, 1998, p.108; E. Wunderle, Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Studienbibliothek Dillingen, 2006, p.451