Lot 38

Jerome, Expositio super Psalmos Triginta, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [northern Italy, second quarter of the twelfth century]

Estimate

30,000 - 50,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

Vellum

108 leaves, 260mm. by 170mm., complete, collation: i-xiii^{8, xiv^{4, single column, fols.1-96 with 29 lines, fols.97-108 with 25 lines, in black ink in a single early gothic bookhand, rubrics in red ornamental capitals, numerous simple red initials (2- to 6-line),}}very large initial (12-line) on fol.1r, in variegated red with geometric panels within body of ascenders and loop, foliate infill with black ink flowers, with 4 lines of ornamental capitals, perhaps slightly trimmed at top (but with no loss to text, and with instructions to rubricator surviving in places, see fol.21v), else in breathtakingly fresh condition with wide and clean margins, modern brown morocco over bevelled wooden boards

Provenance

provenance

1. Written and decorated in Italy in the second quarter of the twelfth century, and annotated on fol.107v in the fourteenth century with a Latin poem on Jerome composed by Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), here alluding to his being crowned poet laureate in the Capitol in Rome on Easter Sunday 1341.

2. Baron Alexander Peckover of Wisbech (1830-1919), and by descent to his daughter, Elisabeth Peckover Penrose, and to her son, Professor Lionel Penrose; his sale in our rooms, 10 December 1962, lot 157, to Dawson's of Pall Mall.

3. Apparently Thomas E. Marston (1904-84): recorded in the Bergendal catalogue as part of Marston's deposit at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, later sold to Lawrence Witten.

4. Bergendal MS.11; bought by Joseph Pope from Witten in June 1981: Bergendal catalogue no.11; Stoneman, 'Guide', pp.169-70.

Catalogue Note

text

This fine and elegant Romanesque manuscript contains the commentary on thirty of the Psalms by Jerome (340-420). Perhaps more than any other medieval writer, Jerome towers over the Latin text of the Psalms, and by the time this text was composed, he had probably already revised the text twice, producing the Psalterium Romanum (surviving in use only in the Vatican, Venice and in Anglo-Saxon England) and the Psalterium Gallicanum (that used in the Vulgate) by 391. Then c.392 he retranslated it entirely from pre-Masoretic Hebrew witnesses, hoping to produce "an entirely pure spring" from the "turbulent river" of conflicting texts, from which his reader could drink.

This manuscript includes commentaries for Psalms 1, 5, 7, 14, 66, 67, 75-7, 81-2, 84, 89, 93, 103, 107, 109, 119, 127-8, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140-2, 148-9. The text has been recently re-edited by the Corpus Christianorum series (Latina, 78).