Beschreibung:

Single large leaf from a monumental Glagolitic Breviary, with part of the reading for the Feast of St. Apollonia, from a decorated manuscript on parchment [Croatia, fifteenth century] Single leaf (trimmed down on vertical side to edge of column, but with full margins certainly at top and bottom, and perhaps at other vertical side), double column, 37 lines in upright Croatian-Glagolitic bookhand (translating the Latin Acta Sanctorum text for St. Apollonia, feast 9 February), capitals touched in red, one large ornate red initial formed of penwork acanthus leaves visible under torn paper ‘flap’ on inside of front board, reused on the binding of a sixteenth-century printed book (see below) and hence small scuffs, spots, cuts, folds and stains, overall in good and legible condition, total leaf: 365 by 255mm. in archival box A newly discovered and hitherto unrecorded Glagolitic leaf; and in fresher condition than any other such leaf on the market in living memory Provenance: 1. Written and decorated in fifteenth-century Croatia, and perhaps passing in the following century to nearby Venice. Reused in Venice on the binding of a printed copy of Antonio Donato ab Altomari, De Medendis Febribus ars medica, Venice, 1562. 2. By the late seventeenth century, this volume had passed to the Bibliotheca Windhagiana (their handwritten ex libris in pen at head of frontispiece, identical to the same in Vienna, University Library, I-259.182), the vast collection of books assembled by Graf Joachim Enzmilner in the Schloss Windhaag in 1656-70. After his death, the library was transferred into the keeping of the Dominican convent in Vienna, and a printed catalogue produced in 1733 by Dominik Ferdinand Edler von Gunrient und Raal (this book on p. 365 there under “Altomari (Donati Antoni) de Mannae Differentiis & Viribus, Venet. 1562, 4to”). A decree of Emperor Joseph II forced the removal of the collection to the university library of Vienna in 1777, perhaps as many books had been lost or given away (D. Rhodes traces some 30 books from this widely dispersed library in the Gutenberg Jahrbuch 2009, pp. 307-12). This volume passed to Karl Johann Altmann, and Greg. Fritz: their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century names on frontispiece. 3. Acquired by the present owner from old stock of Richard Doughty of Cinderella Books stored for many years in three disused greenhouses. Recognised and brought to light after perusing lot 35 of our inaugural sale of manuscripts, 8 July 2015. Text: The strange and angular Glagolitic script survives in only tiny numbers of manuscript witnesses, and correspondingly is one of the rarest to come to the market. The name is a later invention and comes from the verb glagoljati (‘to speak’). It was invented by SS. Cyril and Methodius, brothers from Thessaloniki, when they were sent in 862 by the Byzantine Emperor to Greater Moravia (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia) with the aim of weakening the dependence of Moravia on East Frankish missionaries and priests. In 886, the East Frankish bishop of Nitra banned the script and jailed and sold 200 of Methodius’ followers into slavery. Refugees reached Bulgaria and were commissioned by Boris I to instruct his clergy there in Slavic language worship. From there, these refugees spread to Croatia and established it as the heartland of the script. In 1248, Pope Innocent IV granted the Croats of southern Dalmatia the unique privilege of using a translation of the Roman Rite in their own script. Despite its small number of extant witnesses, Glagolitic has exerted a powerful fascination on mainland European readers since the sixteenth century, perhaps like Samaritan as a ‘curiosity script’ apparently unrelated to either Roman or Cyrillic scripts. The encyclopedist Guillaume Postel included a table of its letters (named “Alphabetum Hieronymianum seu Dalmaticum, aut Illiricum”) in his Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum (1538), and Giovanni Batista Palatino included th