Pompeius Festus, De verborum significatione, Titus Livius of Ferrara, De Orthographia, a legal dictionary and other related texts, in Latin, decorated manuscript on paper [Germany (Wedderen near Dülmen), c.1500]

Estimate

6,000 - 8,000 GBP

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Description

Vellum

297 leaves (plus one endleaf at front), 285mm. by 210mm., complete, collation: i-vii¹², viii¹⁰, ix-xii¹², xiii⁶, xiv-xvii¹², xviii¹⁰, xix⁶ (last 4 leaves cut away and most probably cancelled blanks), xx-xxv¹², xxvi¹³ (last a singleton), double column, c.50 lines in dark brown ink in two late gothic German hands, capitals touched in red, rubrics in red, large simple iridescent red initials, some water damage to last few leaves, with losses to upper corner of last two, cut in upper part of fol.283, slightly trimmed at top, else good condition with wide and clean margins, pastedowns from fourteenth-century manuscript copies of a text listing the rogation days and Avicenna, Synonima (for letters E and parts of D and F), sixteenth-century stamped brown leather over wooden boards using 12 stamps within border enclosing chevrons containing the divine monograms “IHS”, “MA” and “IOHS”, emblems of evangelists within roundels and the symbols of the Passion within a shield: see E.P. Goldschmidt, ‘English and Renaissance Bookbinding’ I, pp.249-50 on origin of these at charterhouse at Dülmen), section torn from base of leather on backboard (modern restoration), leather split at spine exposing thongs, but solid in binding, remains of two clasps

Provenance

provenance

(1) From the medieval library of the charterhouse at Wedderen, near Dülmen in Westphalia: their fifteenth- or sixteenth-century ex libris on first endleaf, and their eighteenth-century catalogue number “M.39” in same place and on spine. An inscription on fol.93r records the finishing of the first text in three weeks and a day during Lent “per me fratrem ioh[annem] ket’oni in noua plantat’ dicta wedid”. The house was not founded until 1477, and only a handful of manuscripts survive from what, to judge by this shelfmark alone, must have been a substantial library. Apart from the present manuscript, Krämer lists only four others (Cambridge, University Library, Addit. MS.3837: Collationes; Edinburgh, University Library MS 98: Sermones; Copenhagen, Royal Library, NKS MS.2º1596: Henricus de Coesfeldia; Manchester, John Rylands library, MS. UL.120: Gallus de Aula Regia). All others are in institutional ownership and none is in any German library. This is the only Classical text to survive in manuscript from that library. The house was suppressed in 1803 and the library dispersed.

(2) B.S. Willoughby of Clifford’s Inn: his letter dated 23 February 1854/9 tipped in, recording his acquisition of it (“I met with this old MS at Lumleys the other day”), and its gift to the Law Society: their MS.8(106.f).

Literature

literature

N.R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, I, 1969, pp.121-22.

S. Krämer, Die Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands, I, pp.170-71.

Catalogue Note

text

Sextus Pompeius Festus was a Roman grammarian who lived in the second century AD., perhaps in Narbonne, and who produced this epitome (here fols.95r-145v) of Verrius Flaccus’ encyclopedic Latin dictionary, De verborum significatu. Festus gives both the etymology as well as the meaning of many words, and his work adds much to our knowledge of the language and mythology of ancient Roman culture. Only fragments of Flaccus’ original survive, and there is only one known early medieval manuscript of Festus’ epitome (the fragmentary eleventh-century Codex Farnesianus: Naples, MS.IV.a.3). The text was best known through early printings (the editio princeps made at Rome in 1475), and Ker suggested that this copy might descend from one of those. However, it was produced within a decade or so of that printing and there are features (such as the use of abbreviations) which might suggest independence, and this copy may well have an important part to play in the history of the transmission of this Classical work.

The volume also contains De verborum significatione, by the fifteenth-century Ferrarese scholar Titus Livius (fols.149r-212v), a vocabulary of legal terms (fols.1r-93r), and some related materials named here the Spiritualis explanatio verborum (fols.213r-97v), followed by an index.