Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [Germany (perhaps Cologne), early fourteenth century]

Estimate

40,000 - 60,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

Vellum

381 leaves, 200mm. by 140mm., tightly bound and collation impracticable, wanting 3 leaves (before fols.2, 3 and 79), else apparently complete, double column, 31-33 lines in dark brown and black inks in a number of gothic bookhands, capitals touched in red, chapter and running titles (giving saints' names) in red, numerous 2- to 3-line initials in red or blue, larger initials in same on fols1r and 3r (the latter with contrasting penwork), some scuffs, spots and wear to first leaf, with small hole in middle of leaf with modern repair, a few other leaves with stains, early binding of tooled half-vellum over wooden boards, reusing strips of a fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript to strengthen spine, perhaps with skilful restoration

Provenance

provenance

1. Written in the lower Rhineland, perhaps in Cologne: note the two paper tags which mark the pages for the local saints, Martin and the Eleven Thousand Virgins (fols.311 and 331); the scribe asking at the end of the text for the work to cease ("Penna, precor, cessa, quoniam manus est mihi fessa") and warning potential book-thieves in vivid blue ink ("Qui te furetur, in culum percucietur", 'The one who steals you, may he be beaten on the bottom').

2. Albert Krauss Melchniginsi (perhaps of Melk, Austria): his calligraphic ex libris dated 1515 on front pastedown.

3. L'Art Ancien, Haus der Bücher, 25 September 1963, lot 36.

Catalogue Note

text

Jacobus de Voragine (c.1230-98) was a Dominican preacher and archbishop of Genoa, who compiled this work c.1260. It contains nearly two hundred lives of Christian saints and martyrs, with etymologies of their names and episodes from the life of Christ and the Virgin, all ordered according to the liturgical calendar. The author took great interest in fantastical tales of miracles and relics, and set the work in simplistic Latin. It was promoted by the Church as a powerful sermonising tool, and approximately 1000 manuscripts survive (Fleith in Legenda Aurea: sept siècles de diffusion, 1986). It was the iconographical source of countless scenes of saints' lives in the book-arts of the Middle Ages, as well as panel paintings, sculpture, stained glass and tapestries. Indeed, no understanding of this great swathe of medieval art and literature would be complete without this text.

The present manuscript contains the original Latin text of the Legenda Aurea, without the additions commonly found in later manuscripts. It includes the legends of St. Julian the Hospitalier (fol.64v), who had a spell cast on him when he was a child ensuring he would kill his parents. He discovered the secret as he grew up, and took an oath that it would never happen and withdrew into the forest to live in isolation. There he met and married a woodsman's daughter. Twenty years passed and his parents began to search for him, and arrived at his house by accident one day when he was out hunting, and while waiting there fell asleep. In the forest a devil appeared to him, and told him to run home as his wife was in bed with another man. Enraged, he burst into his house and killed the two occupants of the bed – his parents. Overcome by sorrow, he used their wealth for acts of charity.