Beschreibung:

LECTIONARY, a rubricated leaf from the Common of Saints, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [Germany (perhaps Weingarten Abbey), first third of the 12th century] Exceptionally elegant script from one of the great scriptoria of 12th-century Germany. A single leaf, c.315×240mm, blind-ruled for a single column of 26 lines written in brown ink in a very fine, regular, Romanesque book-hand, ruled space c.275×180mm, enlarged initials and chapter numbers in red (recovered from use in a binding resulting in a dirty verso, the outer margins slightly trimmed but not affecting the text, two small neat slits in the fore-edge margin, small holes from the sewing-bands, the recto clean and presentable). Bound in grey buckram at the Quaritch bindery. Provenance : (1) Perhaps written at Weingarten Abbey during the abbacy of Cuno von Waldburg (d.1132), whose obituary mentions ‘his successes in the construction of the monastery library, for which he also copied books himself’. The abbey was secularised in 1803. (2) Bernard Quaritch, 1989. (3) Schøyen Collection, MS 602. Script : The script is very regular and upright, the ‘r’ descending slightly lower than other minims, the letters ‘pp’ not kissing (e.g. ‘app(re)henderet’, recto line 8, ‘p(o)p(u)los’, line 9), but letters ending with an up-stroke (e, c, l, t, x) usually touching the next letter. Orthography is Germanic (e.g. ‘karitatem’ with a ‘k’). Dr Regina Hausmann of the Wurtemburgisches Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, has suggested that this leaf was written at Weingarten Abbey, based on its similarity to the handwriting of the scribe Udalricus Custos, who wrote Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Aa 35 (cf. H. Kollner (ed.), Illuminierten handschriften der Hessischen Landesbibliothek Fulda , I, Stuttgart, 1976, no 39. Text : The text comprises most of the third to seventh readings for the Birth of a Martyr in the Common of Saints; the text is printed in Homiliae sive conciones praestantissimorum Ecclesiae catholicae doctorum , Cologne, 1557, pp.643-44 (‘cuius sepulchrum intrare […] possim diligere. At[tendis]’); lessons IV-VII are edited from Caesarius of Arles’s Sermon 223, ‘In natale martyrum’, in Corpus Christianorum, series Latina , 104, 1953, no 837 pp.882–84.