Monday, September 26, 2016

A tiny little catalogue of complete manuscripts: 4 codices and a booklet.

Hermann Ulner Hirsfeld’s
Copiosa Supellex
Elegantissimarum Germanicae
et Latinae Linguae Phrasium

(1615)
    
I suppose it will remain a long-term goal of mine to one day produce a catalogue offering nothing but complete medieval manuscripts for sale. In the meantime, this little catalogue of five Renaissance and post-Renaissance manuscript codices (and one booklet) will have to do.

I was delighted to find all of these items in the last several months. The most exciting may well be the 1615 copy of Hermann Ulner Hirsfeld's Phrases, interleaved and turned into a massive (mostly Latin) commonplace book by a Swedish scholar in the 1600s or 1700s. Few books, I think, can give such a fascinating glimpse into a scholar's mind--and his reading--in this period than a commonplace book like this; this scholar (and he does seem to have been a him), living on what some might think were the margins of Europe, nevertheless seems to have been at least trilingual and very active in compiling this book. It's a remarkable thing.


The left page is an inter-leaf; the right is also heavily annotated.
And the 22" tall choir book antiphonary for the Office of the Dead is pretty cool, too.

Beginning of the Office of the Dead, Italian,
early seventeenth-century manuscript
on paper.


Here's a link to the whole catalogue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9IYNw_bdJ9Mbkd2a1VDMHpma0U/view?usp=sharing

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