- 19
The Gospel of Saint Luke, glossed, in Latin, manuscript on vellum
Description
Provenance
provenance
(1) Saint Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, the oldest monastery in southern England, founded outside the walls of the city c. 598-605, suppressed in 1538. The manuscript was doubtless made locally, for it is written in the distinctive local 'prickly' script of Canterbury (see below). The purple paint (used in the initial on fol. 11, for example) is characteristic of Kentish manuscripts, and was believed by M. R. James to be unique to Canterbury. On the flyleaf are the fourteenth-century inscriptions of Saint Augustine's: "Lib[er] S[an]c[t]i Aug[ustini] Cant[uariensis]", the title with identifying letter "Lucas. glo. cu[m] .A." and the abbey's pressmark "Di[stinctio]. III. G[radus] I" (the 'I' over an erasure, probably 'III', exactly as in the companion volume of Matthew glossed, now Canterbury Cathedral Lit. D. 6, and all in the same hands (R. Gameson, The Earliest Books of Canterbury Cathedral, 2008, p. 263 and plate on p. 259). Both books were shelved together in the abbey library in the third distinctio – which is a piece of furniture, either a bookcase or a desk – and on the top shelf, to which they were moved up from shelf 3 in the course of the Middle Ages, perhaps as they became out-of-date. The present manuscript is listed in the successively-upgraded medieval catalogue of Saint Augustine's as "Lucas glo cum A. 2o fo. In prohemio. Qui p[er] David. D.3a. Ga. Io" (Barker-Benfield, p. 435). The second leaf of the prologue does indeed begin "qi p[er] david" (fol. 4r).
Saint Augustine's Abbey was closed in 1540. Almost immediately antiquaries and others began picking over the books in the library. This process of dispersal took almost eighty years, as the vast collection was gradually weeded away to nothing. One by one, then, those freed manuscripts came back again into public possession, into collections such as the British Library, the Bodleian, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Even now, this process is not quite over. Today, only a couple of fragments and two volumes from Saint Augustine's still remain in private hands: the present book and a manuscript at Longleat. Not until those two pass into institutional libraries will this particular chapter of the English Reformation finally be complete.
(2) Signature on flyleaf of "H:h Price, 1800", presumably Hugh Price. The manuscript was later owned by the bookseller W. H. Bohn who has written and initialled a brief description in pencil inside the upper cover
(3) Sale in our rooms, 17 March 1903, lot 383.
(4) George Dunn (1864-1912), with his initials in pencil on the flyleaf; bought in January 1905; his sale in our rooms, 5 February 1914, lot 1335.
(4) Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875-1968), W. MS. 27; his sale in these rooms, 3 December 1968, lot 8.
(5) Bought in 1968 by a private collector, and by descent to the present owner.
Literature
literature
M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover, Cambridge, 1903, p. 516.
E. G. Millar, The Library of A. Chester Beatty, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts, I, Oxford and London, 1927, pp. 98, no. 27
N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, A List of Surviving Books, London, 1941, p. 29; 2 ed., 1964, p. 42; A. G. Watson, Supplement, 1987, p. 12.
B. Barker-Benfield, St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, London, 2008 (Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 13), pp. 436 and 2043.
Condition
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."
Catalogue Note
script and text
Monks from Normandy were brought after 1066 to both the Benedictine monasteries in Canterbury, Saint Augustine's and Christ Church Cathedral Priory, and they introduced Norman texts and scripts into south-east England. The new monks at Saint Augustine's were recruited especially from Mont St-Michel in southern Normandy, but those at Christ Church came mainly from Bec and probably Jumièges in the north. Each house developed a slightly different style of script, based on their local practices in France. The present volume, rather unexpectedly, is in the Christ Church script. It was almost certainly made by the scribe of Trinity College, Cambridge, B.2.34, written at Christ Church, c. 1120, or by a hand so similar as to be more-or-less indistinguishable (cf. C. R. Dodwell, The Canterbury School of Illumination, 1066-1200, 1954, pls. 18a and 45g). This is the characteristic 'prickly script' of Canterbury, associated originally with Anselm and Eadmer. Notable features include the angular upturned tops of the ascenders of 'd', 'b', 'l', etc., and the similar upward flick of the feet of 'i', long 's', etc.; the 'n' or 'm' contraction, commonly an almost horizontal line, is sharply curved; and 'a' has a short top stroke, markedly downturned to the left. These are typical of a tight group of Christ Church manuscripts around 1120-30, also including Trinity College R.15.22 and B.3.32 (Dodwell, pls. 206b and 11d; T. Webber, 'Script and Manuscript Production at Christ Church', Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. R. Eales and R. Sharpe, 1995, p. 157; and Webber in The Cambridge Illuminations, 2005, pp. 78 and 88).
Christ Church was probably more attuned to the new scholastic learning than Saint Augustine's. Lanfranc (c. 1005-1089) and Anselm (1033-1109) had both been members of the Cathedral Priory. The Gloss on the Bible was the latest scholastic innovation, disseminated from the cathedral schools of Laon and Auxerre and (probably by 1137) from Paris. It was composed by Anselm of Laon and his school, and it was still being developed and formed until the early 1120s; cf. C. de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible, 1982, esp. chapter 1. The text is F. Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi, IX, 1977, pp. 525-6, no. 11829. The present manuscript shows the oldest and most primitive form of page layout. It is the oldest known English manuscript of the Gloss on Luke's Gospel (at least, no other copy is listed in R. Gameson, The Manuscripts of Early Norman England, c.1066-1130, 1999). It is part of a set of early glossed books of the Bible at Saint Augustine's Abbey marked as "cum A". Later acquisitions of glossed books were distinguished from this primary set by the names of their donors. "If this book were indeed made in Canterbury, it would demonstrate up-to-date links with the developments in biblical scholarship across the channel" (Barker-Benfield, p. 436).
The manuscript opens with the prologue on folio 1r, "Lucas sirus natione & antiocensis ..."; folio 4v, "Quoniam quidem multi conati ...", with the first glosses beginning "Conatur qui incipit ..." and "Multi: non tam numerositate ..."; folio 5r, "Fuit in diebus herodis ..."; ending on fol. 154v, "... & benedicentes dominum amen."
binding This is a superbly-preserved example of an English romanesque binding, unrestored and intact, of the type described by G. Pollard, 'The Construction of English Twelfth-Century Bindings', The Library, 5 ser., XVII, 1962, pp. 1-22, and C. Clarkson, 'English Monastic Bookbinding in the Twelfth Century', Ancient and Medieval Book Materials and Techniques, ed. M. Maniaci and P. Munafò, 1992 (Studi e Testi, 358), pp. 181-200. It may owe its survival and condition to having once been protected by a chemise cover. It is, as far as we know, the oldest English bookbinding in private hands.