Bible, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [southern Netherlands (perhaps Tournai), middle of the second half of the thirteenth century]

provenance

The first leaf belonged to E.A. Lowe (1879-1969), palaeographer, his MS 8, framed on the wall of his office at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton; bought from his estate in October 1972 by Bernard Rosenthal; Quaritch, Bookhands III, cat.1088 (1988), no.71. The second leaf was Swann Galleries, New York, 22 March 1990, lot 75. Together, both leaves are Schøyen MS 82.

text

For other leaves from the same manuscript, see Manion, Vines and de Hamel, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in New Zealand Collections, 1989, p.93, all with text between Leviticus 14 and Judges 16. The source seems to have been Erik von Scherling, Rotulus, 7 (1954), no.2474, a bound fragment of leaves from Leviticus 3 to Judges 24. It must once have been volume I of a 4-volume Bible, of which volumes II-III appear to be Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS II.2523, and volume IV may be Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum MS Ludwig I.9. The Brussels volumes had belonged to Sir Thomas Phillipps, who bought them in the late 1820s with the residue of the library of St. Martin in Tournai, noting ruefully that the first volume had been sold in his absence and "destroyed by a Bookseller at Brussels" (Phillipps, Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum, 1837, entry for MS 2011; A.N.L. Munby, Phillipps Studies, III, 1954, p.22, n.1; and C. de Hamel in Migrations, Medieval Manuscripts in New Zealand, ed. Hollis and Barratt, 2007, pp.42-3). The first item in the catalogue of St. Martin's abbey in Tournai in 1615 was "Biblia 4. Voluminibus" (Sanderus, Bibliotheca Belgica Manuscripta, I, 1641, p.91).