Beschreibung:

St. Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, with substantial quotations from the original text, leaf from a notably early copy of the text, in Latin, on parchment [probably Low Countries or northern Germany, last decades of eighth century or perhaps opening decades of ninth century] Single leaf from a large codex, with single column, 30 lines in a refined early Carolingian minuscule (with parts of book XI, chapter 40) with some vestigial early features such as an ‘a’ with looping strokes curving its ascender backwards to the next letter, a tall uncial initial letter ‘E’ with two compartments and its midpoint at the median height of the letters, the upper comprtment only just closing by meeting the midbar on some occasions, a ‘z’ whose lower left hand apex extends out and down from it body or is set high up above the baseline (compare the ‘e’ with those of an eighth-century French copy of Augustine: Fuldische Handschriften aus Hessen, 1994, no. 5, as well as a Regensburg Gloss text of the opening years of the ninth: ibid., no. 8), two small initials (opening “Vox clamantis indeserto …” and “Vox dicentis clama …”) set in margin and touched with bands of terracotta red (now oxidised), three apparently thirteenth-century words added in a small hand to lower part of front at side of text (“wiecklichyt”, “wiecklich”, “prestiglich”, recovered from a binding and hence with some areas of scuffing, stains, old water damage to lower half (thus faded in places, but still mostly legible), cuts, but now in stable and presentable condition, 275 by 220 mm. The script of the original text as well as the language of the later glosses point towards the Carolingian heartlands of the Low Countries or the adjacent regions of Germany for the origin of this leaf. The prominence of some early letter forms, such as the tall two-compartmented ‘E’ would suggest a late eighth century date, especially if the scribe can be located close to the centre of Carolingian activity. The text of Isaiah was of fundamental importance for medieval Christianity, and played its part in filling in missing details on some aspects of medieval theology, such as the cult of the Virgin and appropriate Christian reactions to Jews. Jerome (c. 342-420) calls Isaiah “an evangelist rather than a prophet because he describes the mysteries of Christ and the Church so clearly that you would think he is composing a history of what has happened rather than prophesying what is to come”. Copies survived the Dark Ages in monasteries such as Corbie (note BnF., ms. lat.11627; probably Corbie, end of eighth century; illustrated Trésors carolingiens, 2007, pp. 120 and 125), and experienced a boom of interest during the early years of Carolingian theological study (a lost copy of the Commentary is referred to by Joseph ‘the Irishman’, who was a pupil of Alcuin at York, who states in a letter that he had produced a shortened version of it, perhaps by implication for Alcuin and the Carolingian court). This leaf is from the very dawn of that resurgence of interest in learning, and is by far the earliest manuscript of the text to come to the market.