Lot 45

Augustine, Tractatus in Johannem, commentary on the Gospel of John, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [northern Italy (perhaps Emilia), first half of the twelfth century]

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

Vellum

two large leaves, 436mm. by 309mm., two columns, 44 lines, from tractati 21 and 22 (R. Willems, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 36, 1954, pp.214-7 and 222-4, two almost adjacent but not consecutive leaves), two sizes of a late Carolingian minuscule (praegothica textualis), explicits and opening words in uncials, running-titles and incipits in red uncials, 4-line red initial, large decorated initial, 6-line, in yellow entangled with white-vine decoration infilled with colours, some added nota marks in the margins, marginal flaws (repaired in lower margins of second leaf), hessian binding

Provenance

provenance

One leaf was bought in April 1975 by Bernard Rosenthal from Antiquariat Wölfe, Munich; Quaritch, Bookhands V, cat.1147 (1991), no.89; both leaves, Schøyen MS 211.

Catalogue Note

text

From a fragmentary manuscript dispersed in the late 1960s. Other leaves are now in the University of Colorado at Boulder (J. Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, Medieval Manuscripts in the Norlin Library, 2002, citing the present leaf on p.31) and at Keio University, Stanford University Library, and the State Library of South Australia (cf. R.A. Linenthal in The Book Collector, 54, 2005, p.560, item Misc.3). The decorated initial is of the kind which fifteenth-century humanists mistook for late classical designs and imitated as renaissance 'white vine' illumination (cf. A.J. Fairbank and R.W. Hunt, Humanistic Script, 1960, pl.1b; and Pächt and Alexander, II, 1970, no.36, pl.IV).