13th C. Friars Illuminated Bible Leaf, on vellum

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Leaf is from a Friar's small portable Bible . 12 Lines of Latin script per inch in 2 columns of 48 lines ruled in plummet. Written on very fine vellum in dark brown ink in an Extremely Small & Elegant Gothic Book hand. Headings & capitals touched in red ; running titles, chapter numbers and 2-3 line tall initials are alternating in red and blue . A small catchword appears between the two columns near the bottom of the leaf. RECTO 2 columns of text with alternating colored initials in red and blue of 3 sizes. 1-line, 2-line and 4-line initials. The largest of these initials a blue 2-line M ornamented with red penwork introduces the letter M in the interpretation of Hebrew Names. VERSO, 2 columns of text with alternating colored red and blue initials all 1-line tall which is ornamented with red penwork. This leaf contains the letter "M" from the INTERPRETATION OF HEBREW NAMES. The version beginning "Aas apprehendes." Included with each leaf is a copy of an Essay written by Christopher DeHamel, which is a history and appreciation of the 13 th Century Bible Included in the description. More information on the provenance: Ex collection Herbert Fleishhaker (1872-1957), San Francisco (Banker & Philanthropist), Bought in Venice in 1929. Text block approximately: 100 x 75 mm (varies) Leaf size: 167 x 112 mm (varies) "Without possible parallel, the Latin Bible was the best known book of the Middle Ages. Our Protestant ancestors of the 19th Century delighted in looking back at Europe before the Reformation and claiming indignantly that the Bible was almost unknown to medieval people. This is not consistent with the facts. T are many medieval manuscript Bibles still surviving, and Bibles were certainly not uncommon in the Middle Ages. Let us consider (for example) the opening page of the catalogue of the library of St. Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, made in the 1450s: it begins with no less than 41 manuscript Bibles, one in French, 40 in Latin, most of them listed t with the names of the people who had owned them or had given them to the monastery, men like Hamo Doge (a lawyer and alderman in Canterbury, fl. 1266-72), Thomas Cirencestria (who supervised the building of the abbey kitchens in 1287), Richard Sholdon (recorded as a monk 1299-1334), William Sellyng (d. 1482), among others. Some owners were obviously important clergy - Abbot Thomas (d. 1310), Richard the dean, Alulphus the sub prior, and other - but most of these Bibles were owned by ordinary people or monks, including one which Robert Lovente had evidently left as a pledge with a pawnbroker and which had to be redeemed by John Lovell, rector of St. George's church in Canterbury (d. 1438), and another which was bought in Oxford from the bookseller Thomas Hunt in 1473 for the sum of one pound. Eight of these actual Bibles from St. Augustine's survive today, including the copy sold by Thomas Hunt. What is remarkable is that every one of these eight was made in the 13th Century. The 13th Century was the supreme period for the making of manuscript Bibles, and if we looked at similar lists of manuscripts from anyw in Europe - from Italy, or Bohemia, or the Netherlands, for example - we would find the same 13th century Bibles, owned by private people, and being bought and sold and left as pledges and being used and read for hundreds of years after they were made. Clearly 13th century Bibles were made efficiently, and were circulated so effectively that they supplied the needs of Bible readers for hundreds of years to come. Of course the text of the Old Testament goes back to the Jews in Palestine centuries before Christ, and the text of the New Testament was written and assembled in the course of the 1st century A.D. No "original" manuscripts survive, in the sense that t are no books of the Bible in the actual and recognizable handwriting of Moses or the Evangelists or St. Paul himself. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947, furnished many portions of the Hebrew Bible dating from about the time of Chri... read more

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