Medieval manuscripts – The Bodleian Conveyor

“The first bench on the side towards the sea”: the medieval provenance of MS. Lyell 70

Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts

Updating our online catalogue of medieval manuscripts is a key curatorial priority. The catalogue has entries for all of our medieval collections, but many of these records are only summaries which do not provide full information on a manuscript’s contents, codicology or history. One main task is to make all the information in the Bodleian’s printed catalogues fully available online; a second task, when time and resources permit, is to carry out additional research to ensure the record reflects the current state of knowledge and scholarship. When converting records from the Bodleian’s older printed catalogues, many of which were written in the 19th century, quite extensive intervention may be necessary. This is rarely the case with more recent texts, such as Albinia (‘Tilly’) de la Mare’s catalogue of the Lyell collection, published in 1971, but occasional opportunities do arise.

One such case is MS. Lyell 70, a 13th-century copy of Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica (a popular handbook of Biblical history) which has attracted attention for its glosses in Hungarian and its exuberant pen drawings.

Drawing of griffon breathing fire, on parchment page of a medieval manuscript — MS. Lyell 70 fol. 35r (detail)

De la Mare quoted two pressmarks at the end of the manuscript which she was unable to associate with an institution: “ex parte sinistra(?) de sexta banca – G-littere” (14th century) and “Iste liber debet esse in prima bancha ex parte maris” (15th century).

Manuscript note on a parchment page: Iste liber debet esse in prima bancha ex parte maris — MS. Lyell 70 fol 152v (detail)

The second of these in particular is sufficiently distinctive to hold out the possibility of being identifiable. An internet search for “banc(h)a ex parte maris” does indeed reveal that this pressmark was used by the Dominican convent of SS Giovanni e Paulo in Venice, on the northern edge of the city with the Mediterranean to its north. A similar pressmark is found, for example, in New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS. M. 1156 (https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/282464). A manuscript sold at Les Enluminures has the contrasting pressmark, referring to the side of the library facing the church rather than the sea: “hic liber debet esse in septima bancha ex parte ecclesie” (https://www.textmanuscripts.com/medieval/hugh-fouilloy-127696).

Our manuscript’s presence at SS. Giovanni e Paolo is confirmed by the catalogue published in the late 18th century by its librarian Domenico Maria Berardelli. The entry for our manuscript is not detailed but matches in date, size and, conclusively, number of leaves.

Printed catalogue entry: Cod. Membr. In Fol. Saec. / XIII. foll. 152. — [Google books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GXRlAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA4-PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false]

Berardelli’s catalogue records the library at probably its greatest extent, and (in common with other Venetian religious houses) it was to be dispersed during a period of crisis and instability in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1789 the prior of the friary complained to the civic authorities of Venice that books and manuscripts had been stolen due to the negligence of its librarian. Subsequent inquiries led to several hundred items being transferred to the Bibliotheca Marciana, in effect the state library of Venice. In 1797 Venice came under French rule, and some manuscripts were transferred to Paris. After a period (1798-1805) under Austrian control, Venice was part of the Napoleonic empire from 1806 to 1814. The libraries and archives of Venetian religious houses were in part transferred to local institutions such as the Marciana, but for the most part sold at public auction. Manuscripts from the library of SS. Giovanni e Paolo are now spread across libraries in Italy, Germany, England, the United States and elsewhere. A large number have been identified, notably by Riccardo Quinto, but MS. Lyell 70 is a new addition.

Book-bindings and the global middle ages

Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries, writes:

Last week I organized a show-and-tell for students from the Department of Continuing Education studying the undergraduate certificate in the History of Art. One of the difficulties in selecting material was responding to the course’s emphasis on what has been called the ‘global turn’ in art history with its shift away from an exclusive focus on artefacts from Christian Europe and an increased focus on cross-cultural connections.

This is a potential challenge for a library where curatorial expertise and responsibility is very much structured according to linguistic and geographical boundaries. Nevertheless, excellent examples of interactions between European and Islamic art can be found in fifteenth-century Italian book-bindings, of which the Bodleian has an important collection. Connections between Italy and the Islamic world were extensive, as a result both of trade and diplomacy, and manuscripts were among the items crossing the Mediterranean. Books in Arabic are recorded in a number of contemporary Italian inventories, and Islamic books from the Mamluk sultanate (centred on modern Egypt and Syria) provided the most important models for the development of decorated leather bindings in fifteenth-century Italy.

Bodleian MS. E. D. Clarke 28, right (lower) cover

Historians of bookbinding have identified two main phases of development. The first was centred in Florence from around the second quarter of the century and came to be recognized by contemporaries as ‘modo fiorentino’, ‘Florentine style’. It was characterized by borders of geometrically arranged ‘twisted rope’ patterns, in blind, with roundels punched in gilt, often with a centrepiece and four cornerpieces. Our example above (MS. E. D. Clarke 28) is on a manuscript of Terence copied in 1466 (the four clasps, on the other hand, are a typically Italian feature).

A second line of development is associated with humanists active around Padua in the 1460s. Again their decoration is characterized by ropework borders and a circular or vesical-shaped centrepiece: the crucial innovation is tooling in gilt. Although there are earlier Italian examples of gilt tooling the Paduan bindings, borrowing from Islamic influences, were the first to fully realize its artistic possibilities. An example in the Bodleian (MS. Auct. F. 4. 33) is on a copy of Martial’s Epigrams written by the famous scribe Bartolomeo Sanvito probably in Padua in the 1460s.

A final binding (MS. Canon. Ital. 78), on a manuscript of Petrarch written in Florence in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, shows even stronger Islamic influence. The previous two bindings have wooden boards; this has very thin pasteboards, flush with the text block, in common with most contemporary Islamic bindings. The insides of the covers have decorated leather pastedowns (known as doublures), again very typical of Islamic bindings.

MS. Canon. Ital. 78, right (lower) inside cover, showing doublure, and stained endleaf; traces of flap visible at the edge of the cover

A final Islamic feature is a right-to-left envelope flap [https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lob/concept/1343 ], now lost, but small traces remain. In fact Islamic characteristics are so marked that an Islamic origin for the binding has been suggested. The decoration is Ottoman in character, and although the manuscript has endleaves of Western paper, stained purple in an Italian style, Anthony Hobson’s intriguing suggestion was that ‘a Florentine merchant took the works of his favourite poet with him to Istanbul and had them bound there’. That suggestion needs to be reconsidered in the light of the substantial body of research on Islamic bindings that has appeared since Hobson wrote: but regardless of its exact origin, this binding is a powerful illustration of the influence of the Islamic world on Italian decorative arts.

— with thanks to Andrew Honey, Bodleian Conservation

Manuscripts: from skin to page

Rebecca Schleuss, MSt in Modern Languages at University of Oxford, on studying the materials of the book

When you mostly work with editions of texts, it is easy to detach them from their physical containers and forget about their materiality. During an afternoon with Andrew Honey, book conservator at Bodleian Libraries, and Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries, we learned that size, material, texture and quality – irrespective of content – can reveal a lot about a manuscript book.

Parchment was used as a writing surface in Europe since the 2nd century, being replaced by paper from the 13^th century onwards. To make parchment, the animal skin of calves, sheep or goats first need to be cleaned of hair and skin. For that the skin is soaked in lime solution to loosen the hair and then scraped first with a blunt knife, then with a sharp knife to remove the rest of the skin.

What differentiates parchment from leather, however, is the following step: the skin gets tensioned onto a frame, called a herse, while still wet and is left to dry. A half-circular lunar knife is used on the stretched skin for further smoothness. Afterwards, sheets are cut out of the parchment to utilise as much of the skin as possible – consequently we encounter some pages with irregular edges, cut from the sides of the skin. A careful observer can at times even detect from which part of the animal’s body the piece is from, making out the contours of the spine or darker coloured arm-pits and leg-pits.

As this is a manual process, accidents happen and the knife can pierce the skin during the production process. The animal also might have had wounds which then create round holes on the parchment, expanding as the skin is stretched; these are known as fly-bites. Their shape and how they are treated by parchment-makers and scribes can reveal when these holes appeared. If it happened during the processing of the skin, then it was mostly sewn together again and the ends are closely aligned.

Scribes wrote around or playfully ornamented extant holes, revealing the care taken to accommodate the various qualities of parchment. As Andrew pointed out, both the parchment-makers and later the scriptorium decided whether and how to hide the faults in the sheet of parchment.

MS. Laud Misc. 439, fols. 35v-36r. The structure of the columns accommodates the hole.

The manuscripts brought along for the session wonderfully illustrated this, containing some insightful examples of irregularities and the methods employed to adapt to them. It made apparent that there was a spectrum to how ‘perfect’ a sheet of parchment needed to be: some flaws were carefully erased, others were acceptable to remain and were incorporated into the layout of the page. The manuscripts also bore testimony to the fact that parchment was valuable.

A parchment manuscript could well contain the hides of a whole herd of animals, making them expensive and precious possessions. Consequently, parchment was reused – as seen in MS Laud. Misc. 306, fols. 72v-73r, where the wide margins are used as ‘quarries’ for small pieces of parchment – and could end up in the most wondrous places (in bindings, as covers of books, in hem of dresses, and saint’s crowns).

Even though paper became the main writing surface – surviving to this day (if we don’t count our Word-documents, which we surely don’t) – parchment continued to be utilised. In the MS Huntington 300 a mixed quire can be found that uses both paper and parchment.

This is written on paper… MS. Huntington 300, fol. 144r

… and this on parchment! MS. Huntington 300, fol. 143v

Re-blogged from the History of the Book blog: read more here….

Codicology in the Weston: A whodunit through the Ages – History of the Book (ox.ac.uk)