13th C. Illuminated Sion Abbey Bible Leaf, on Vellum

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Leaf is from a bible written in Paris in the Middle of the 13th Century . 4th Book of KINGS (KJV: 2nd Kings) 21-23: the abominations of Manasseh, Amons reign; Josiah's temple repairs, the book of the law is found, the reforms of Josiah, Josiah is slain at Megiddo. The silverpoint inscriptions were made by a reader of this text. These remarks must have been written in the Bible after it has been purchased by Sion Abbey and becomes a study Bible. For the first hundred years or more of the Bibles existance it probably travelled with a French Preacher as his portable Bible. 50 lines ruled in plummet. Written on very fine vellum in dark brown ink in an Extremely Small & Elegant Gothic Book hand. Text block approximately: 110 x 75 mm (varies) Leaf size: 148 x 98 mm (varies) (1) The Calendar is of Augustinian use, including the feast of St. Augustine (29 August) as totum duplex, with its octave. St. Denis of Paris is entered in red. The manuscript was apparently acquired in 1347 by the church in Sion (Seten), Switzerland, probably from dominus P. Grande, canon of Sion, to judge from two faint inscriptions, "iste liber est domino p. grande can. seduñ" (second leaf) and "Anno domini M° ccc° xlvii° iste liber est sedunis" within the manuscript. Sion is in the Alps in the canton of Valais. (2) J. Pearson, London bookseller; his sale at Sotheby's London, 8 December 1924, lot 55; re-sold at Sotheby's London, 8 December 1944, lot 25; afterwards in a Maggs catalogue, item 38. (3) William Foyle (1885-1963), his daughter's sale, Christie's, 11 July 2000, lot 13. (18800 Pounds) Included with each of these leaves is a Xerox copy of the following essay. Pictured is a cover of the BOUND version of this Essay. The essay for the Paris Bible leaves have been bound. The bound versions, with a sleeve to keep the leaf in are available for $25 a piece. They are great conservation and explanation pieces. "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... read more

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