30 August 2013
Guess the Manuscript VI
In honour of our recent uploads to Digitised Manuscripts, the latest installment of our universally-acclaimed Guess the Manuscript series is going Greek. There's your first and only clue; as always, the manuscript is part of our medieval collections, and can be found somewhere on the Digitised Manuscripts site. Happy hunting!
If you haven't already had a go at this engrossing game, please check out our previous posts, Guess the Manuscript I, II, III, IV and V.
You can leave your guesses here in the comments, or send them to us via Twitter @BLMedieval.
Update: and the winner is... Peter, at @chesswoodseats ! Peter was the only one who came up with the correct answer; this is a folio from Add MS 15581, a Greek copy of the Gospels from the 11th-12th centuries. Thanks for playing along, and look out for a new Guess the Manuscript soon!
27 August 2013
Anglo-Saxon Invasion
The British Library has one of the most comprehensive collections of manuscripts in Old English, many of which have already been catalogued online with images at the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. We have recently added catalogue entries and images for the Old English manuscripts in the Additional collection. There are relatively few of these, but some of these manuscripts contain unique or very important texts.
They are:
Add MS 47967: The Old English Orosius
Zoomorphic initial (A)'E'(ft) with four heads and interlaced bodies at
the beginning of Book III, Chapter i, from the Old English Orosius,
England (Winchester), c. 892-925, Add MS 47967, f. 31v
Add MS 37517: The 'Bosworth Psalter'
Opening page of Psalm 101 with a large decorated initial, display capitals, and interlinear gloss in Old English, from the Bosworth Psalter, England (Canterbury?), 4th quarter of the 10th century, Add MS 37517, f. 64v
Add MS 40000: The 'Thorney Gospels'
Large decorated initial 'Q'(uoniam) at the beginning of Luke's Gospel, with faint interlinear glosses, France (Brittany?), 1st quarter of the 10th century, Add MS 40000, f. 48r
The glosses in the Thorney Gospels, which are extremely faint, can be seen more clearly online by zooming in on the images, than they can in the manuscript itself. They are above lines 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 17, 18 and 24; if you are having trouble reading them, you can find details in N R Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), no. 131.
Inscription in Old English from the 2nd half of the 11th century referring to
the former binding of the manuscript: '+Aelfric 7 wulfwine. Eadgife goldsmides
geafen to broperraedenne twegen orn weghenes goldes daet is on pis ilce boc her
foruten gewired' (Aelfric and Wulfwine, goldsmiths of Eadgifu, gave for the
confraternity two oras of weighed gold which is wired without upon this same
book), Add MS 40000, f. 4r
Add MS 23211: Fragments of Saxon royal genealogies and a Martyrology in Old English
Fragment with decorated initial from the first page of a martyrology, England (south-west), 4th quarter of the 9th century, Add MS 23211, f. 2r
Add MS 34652: a leaf from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: the preface with a West-Saxon genealogy from Cerdic (494) to Alfred (899) (f. 2) and a leaf from the bilingual Rule of Chrodegang (chapters 60-62, incomplete) (f. 3)
Text page of Chrodegang's rule with initials and rubric, England (Winchester), 2nd half of the 11th century, Add MS 34652, f. 3v
Add MS 61735: Farming memoranda of Ely Abbey (also available on Digitised Manuscripts here, and please check out our recent blog post on the memoranda)
Recto of the 3 strips of parchment
containing an inventory and valuation of livestock supplied by Ely to Thorney
Abbey and a note of rents (payable in eels!), England (Ely), c. 1007-1025, Add MS 61735
Add MS 40165A: Martyrology fragment (ff. 6-7) (also available on Digitised Manuscripts here)
Martyrology fragment written in insular miniscule, England (south-west?), 4th quarter of the 9th century, Add MS 40165A, f. 6v
Add MS 9381: Bodmin Gospels (St Petroc Gospels), with records of grants of manumission in Old England and Latin added on blank leaves and in margins
Canon tables with Bodmin manumissions, France (Brittany), last quarter of the 9th century or 1st quarter of the 10th century, Add MS 9381, f. 13r
Add MS 32246: Part of Priscian's Excerptiones with Old English and Latin marginal glosses and Aelfric's Colloquy
Excerptiones with a Latin-Old English glossary, England, 1st half of the 11th century, Add MS 32246, f. 21v
- Chantry Westwell
19 August 2013
Get Ready to 'Save-As': New Uploads to the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
As many of you hopefully already know, the British Library offers two different ways to work with digital versions of our medieval manuscripts. Our Digitised Manuscripts website contains complete coverage of many of the items in our collections, while the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is another very useful source of digital catalogue records and images.
Miniature
of the Crucifixion, from a leaf from a missal, northern France or Netherlands, 2nd half of
the 13th century, Additional MS 34652, f. 5
The Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is based on a Microsoft Access database, so it has allowed us to develop some very detailed search tools. CIM (as we call it) is particularly useful for iconographical searches, since each image is described individually. You can search for various terms either in these specific image descriptions, or within the wider manuscript records.
We are pleased to announce that from 13 August you will be able to find even more images and manuscripts in the Catalogue, which now includes over 4,200 manuscripts (with separate parts for another 1,000) and 36,000 images.
We update the online Catalogue twice a year, so please do send along any additional bibliography, your comments, and or suggested corrections to mss [at] bl [dot] uk, and we will include these in the next upload.
Miniature of a man cutting down a tree on
which he sits (an illustration of the proverb: 'chopping down the branch that
supports you'), from Pierre Sala’s Petit
Livre d’Amour, France (Paris and Lyon), 1st quarter of the 16th
century, Stowe MS 955, f. 15r (for example, we’ve already corrected the
just-spotted typo in the description of this image!)
All of the images in CIM are provided under a Public Domain Mark, meaning that, within certain restrictions of reasonable use, images from this catalogue are freely available to the public. We ask that you maintain the library's Public Domain tag, and provide a link or other credit back to the source on the British Library's site – but otherwise, we are happy for you to help us share these riches even more widely with the world!
Or, if you are just interested in exploring, why not take a tour of some collection highlights? Our curatorial staff have teamed up with other experts to put together a series of virtual exhibitions, exploring topics that range from manuscripts of the Bible to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to medieval bestiaries.
Drawing of Matthew the Evangelist and a
musical sequence on 'Fulgens' in Anglo-Norman neums, with the opening showing
metal clasps and part of a front flyleaf, from Orosius’ Historum adversum
paganos, England (Winchester?), between c.
892 and c. 925, Add MS 47967, f. 1v
We will soon have a blog post for you on our recent uploads of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to CIM, but in the meantime, happy searching!
- Kathleen Doyle and Sarah J Biggs
25 July 2013
Guess the Manuscript V
The beautiful weather lately has put us all in a gentle summery mood, so we've decided not to inflict another flyleaf mystery on you. Today's installment of Guess the Manuscript is from the actual body of the actual manuscript; how quickly can you figure it out?
As always, this is from a manuscript in one of our collections and can be found somewhere on the Digitised Manuscript website. Send your guesses in, and we'll update with the answer shortly! You can check out our previous Guess the Manuscript posts here, here, here, and here.
22 July 2013
A Carolingian Masterpiece: the Moutier-Grandval Bible
On Christmas Day of the year 800, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was crowned Europe’s first Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III. Many people, including Charlemagne himself, saw the empire he had established (called Carolingian in his honour) as a continuation of that of the Romans, and the Christmas ceremony in Rome confirmed this in the eyes of the world.
Charlemagne was committed to resurrecting the classical scholarship of Greece and Rome that many felt was lost during the so-called Dark Ages, and he gathered intellectuals from around Europe to his court in Aachen. One notable recruit was the English cleric Alcuin of York (c. 735 - 804), who joined Charlemagne's ambitious project around 781. Alcuin became the leading figure in the group of scholars and artists assembled to stimulate the cultural revival that became known as the 'Carolingian Renaissance'. This Renaissance was focused on Charlemagne’s Court at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) and monasteries such as Tours, where Alcuin was abbot.
The frontispiece to Genesis, depicting the Creation of Adam and Eve, their Temptation and Expulsion from the idealised landscape of Eden to labour on thorny soil, from the Moutier-Grandval Bible, France (Tours), c. 830 – c. 840, Add MS 10546, f. 5v
One of Alcuin's contributions was to produce an emended version of the Latin Vulgate Bible. Subsequently a number of single volume Bibles were produced by teams of scribes and artists at his abbey of Tours, for distribution around Charlemagne’s empire. We are delighted to announce that the one of the great products of that scriptorium, the Moutier-Grandval Bible, made under Abbot Adalhard (834-843), is now available online on the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website.
Miniature of Christ in Majesty, surrounded by the Evangelists and their symbols, from the Moutier-Grandval Bible, France (Tours), c. 830 – c. 840, Add MS 10546, f. 352v
This immense pandect—it is an enormous 495 x 380 mm, and has 449 folios—is one of three surviving illustrated copies produced in Tours in the 9th century. The four full-page miniatures reveal this manuscript’s debt to classical art. The decorated initials are followed by square capitals and uncials which lead into the text script, which is a form of caroline minuscule, upgraded here by the introduction of some variant letter-forms such as 'a'. Some twenty different scribes worked on the manuscript, a signal of the scale of book production at Tours during this period.
Decorated initial ‘F’(rater Ambrosius) from the beginning of Jerome’s prologue to the Bible in the form of a letter to Paulinus, from the Moutier-Grandval Bible, France (Tours), c. 830 – c. 840, Add MS 10546, f. 2r
The manuscript takes its name from the monastery of Moutier-Grandval, in the canton of Berne, Switzerland, where it was housed from at least the 16th century until the 18th when it made its way into private hands. Little evidence exists concerning the Bible’s early history, but it is possible that it belonged to Moutier-Grandval from the very beginning, as the Tours scriptorium routinely produced manuscripts for use in other foundations.
Miniature of the book ‘sealed with seven seals’ on an altar, being opened by the Lamb and the Lion of Juda, with the symbols of the Evangelists; below, an enthroned figure holding a canopied cloth (the vault of the heaven?) and an angel blowing a trumpet, at the end of Revelation, from the Moutier-Grandval Bible, France (Tours), c. 830 – c. 840, Add MS 10546, f. 449r
The enormous size and weight of the Moutier-Grandval Bible, as well as the fragile state of its binding, made it a particular challenge for us to digitise. A special cradle was employed to safely house the manuscript during photography, and a team of experts from a number of departments in the British Library worked together to transport, tend, and watch over it during the days of filming – have a look at some of our behind-the-scenes photos below! And if there are any queries about our use (or rather, lack of use) of white gloves, please see our previous post on the subject.
Special thanks are due to Andrea Clarke, Kathleen Doyle, and Julian Harrison of the Medieval and Earlier Manuscript department, Ann Tomalak and Gavin Moorhead of the British Library Centre for Conservation, and Antony Grant, Senior Imaging Technician.
Sarah J Biggs
08 July 2013
A Remarkable Tale of Manuscript Sleuthing: the Ely Farming Memoranda
In a slim box in the manuscripts secure storage at The British Library are three parchment fragments, mounted side-by-side between two pieces of glass in a wooden frame. Two are about the length and width of a ruler, the other is almost the same length but twice as wide. On both sides of the parchment are notes in Old English, some damaged and partially erased, written by several different scribes in a reasonably neat Anglo-Saxon script of the early 11th century. Below the notes are a drawing of the head of a saint, or possibly Christ, in semi-profile, a number of pen-trials such as ‘omnium inimcorum suorum dominabit’ (a phrase copied by novice scribes to practise writing letters with minims like 'm', 'n', and 'u') and some jotted musical neums, very early examples of musical notation.
Verso of the three parchment strips, with a pen-drawing of a saint (or Christ), England (The Benedictine abbey of St Peter and St Etheldreda, Ely), c. 1007-1025, Add MS 61735, verso
The Old English notes are a detailed record of goods sent from the monastery at Ely in Cambridgeshire to Thorney Abbey. These goods include ships and fishing nets, farming tools, wagons, 80 swine and a swineherd (valued at 1 ½ pounds and ½ pound respectively!) along with money to buy land at Thetford mill, oxen, a dairymaid and clothes. In addition there are inventories of farms and livestock and records of rents payable in numbers of eels. So what we have here is a very early example of farming records, probably jotted down on the flyleaf of a liturgical book belonging to Ely Abbey. At a later stage the flyleaf was removed, possibly when the book was destroyed, and was torn into strips to be used in binding. The two narrow strips were used as sewing guards in an early printed book: Diophantus Arithmetica (Basel, 1575), which was rebound in the early 17th century and was owned by James Betton, scientist and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge (1611-28). Betton donated his scientific library to the college in 1626, and the book remains there to this day (shelfmark D. 2. 7).
In 1902, Professor Skeat, the distinguished Anglo-Saxon philologist of Christ’s College, Cambridge, discovered the two binding fragments and published an article about them in the Cambridge Philological Society journal of that year. But it was not until twenty-three years later that a Professor Stenton, a historian of Reading University College, came across a third piece of the puzzle in the collection of a Lincolnshire gentleman, Captain W R Cragg of Threekingham. Cragg had assembled various manuscript fragments in an album, some of which he had apparently bought from a junk shop at Sleaford. A talented manuscript sleuth, Stenton noticed that one parchment strip ‘closely resembles certain old English fragments found in 1902 by the late Professor Skeat’. Once the three strips of parchment were placed side by side (the Cragg portion was later acquired by Queens’ College), their importance as a unique record of farming in Anglo-Saxon England was clear. In addition, the names of monks such as Aelfnoth of Thorney Abbey or that of Aethelflad, wife of King Edmund, are of interest to historians, and four words in Old English occur only in this document (for example, sige: ‘sow’ and baensaede: ‘beanseed’).
Rectoof the three parchment strips, England (The Benedictine abbey of St Peter and St
Etheldreda, Ely), c. 1007-1025, Add MS 61735, recto
The fragments were purchased by the British Library at auction in 1979, and are now part of the library’s important collection of Anglo-Saxon documents. The question is: how many other medieval fragments still remain hidden in old books on dusty shelves, yet to be discovered?
- Chantry Westwell
01 July 2013
The Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham
The British Library is delighted to be a major lender to the exhibition The Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham, which runs from 1 July to 30 September 2013. No fewer than six of the Library's greatest Anglo-Saxon and medieval treasures are on display at Palace Green Library in Durham, among them the St Cuthbert Gospel, the Ceolfrith Bible and, of course, the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels.
The Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D IV, f. 11v).
The loan of these treasures marks the culmination of many years' planning and collaboration between the British Library, Durham University, Durham Cathedral and Durham County Council. It provides an outstanding opportunity for visitors to examine these books at close-hand, and in the context of other artefacts including objects from the Staffordshire Hoard and from the tomb of St Cuthbert.
The star object in this exhibition is undoubtedly the Lindisfarne Gospels, which (according to a colophon added on its final page) was made by Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne (698-c. 721). The monastic community of Lindisfarne fled its home in response to Viking raids, carrying their books with them, settling temporarily at Chester-le-Street and finally at Durham. Every page of the Lindisfarne Gospels is witness to Anglo-Saxon artistic craftsmanship. Particularly noteworthy for art historians are its carpet pages, evangelist portraits and decorated initials; but the meticulous, half-uncial script is also of the highest calibre. The pages currently on display are from the canon tables which precede the four gospels (one of which is shown above). The Lindisfarne Gospels can be viewed in its entirety on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts site, and can also normally be seen on display in our Treasures Gallery.
The St Cuthbert Gospel (London, British Library, MS Additional 89000, f. 28v).
Another manuscript to be seen in the Durham exhibition is the St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest intact European book, still to be found it its original leather binding. This book was purchased for the nation in 2012 following the largest such fundraising campaign ever conducted by the British Library. Most scholars agree that it was made in around AD 698, at the time when Cuthbert's body was translated to a new tomb at Lindisfarne. The coffin was re-opened at Durham Cathedral in 1104, and the book (a copy of the Gospel of St John) found inside. Two of its text-pages can be seen at the Palace Green Library, one of which has a contemporary annotation, as also seen above. Once again, the entire manuscript can be viewed on our Digitised Manuscripts site.
The Ceolfrith Bible (London, British Library, MS Additional 45025, f. 15r).
An early Bible associated with Anglo-Saxon Northumbria has also been loaned by the British Library to Durham. The fragmentary Ceolfrith Bible (Additional MS 45025) was one of three great pandects (single-volume Bibles) commissioned by Abbot Ceolfrith of Wearmouth-Jarrow (690-716). This Bible seemingly left its home at a very early stage, perhaps as a gift to King Offa of Mercia (757-796), before arriving at Worcester Cathedral Library. After the Middle Ages it was broken up to be used as binding papers in a set of Nottinghamshire estate accounts, before a handful of leaves were subsequently rescued and purchased on behalf of the British Library. This manuscript was the subject of a recent blog-post, describing its fortuitous survival.
The Royal Athelstan Gospels (London, British Library, MS Royal 1 B VII, f. 15r).
As well as the Lindisfarne Gospels, a second Anglo-Saxon gospel-book has been loaned by the British Library to the Durham exhibition. This is the so-called "Royal Athelstan Gospels" (Royal MS 1 B VII), which was also shown at our own recent Royal Manuscripts exhibition, and is described in more detail in its accompanying catalogue. Made in Northumbria in the first half of the 8th century, this book contains an added manumission in Old English, stating that King Athelstan of Wessex (924-939) had freed a certain Eadhelm from slavery.
The Durham Liber Vitae (London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A VII, f. 7v).
The fifth British Library manuscript in the new exhibition is the Durham Liber Vitae or Book of Life (Cotton MS Domitian A VII). This book was made in the 9th century, written in gold and silver ink, and was continued by generations of monks until the Dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. It contains the names of members of the monastic community, together with those of other religious and benefactors, including various Anglo-Saxon kings: you can read more about it in our post The Durham Book of Life Online.
Bede's prose Life of St Cuthbert (London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 26, f. 11r).
Last, but definitely not least, the British Library's famous illustrated Life of St Cuthbert (Yates Thompson MS 26) forms part of the Durham exhibition. This book contains the text of Bede's prose Life of Cuthbert, accompanied by a series of exquisite full-page miniatures. It has been featured regularly on our blog, most notably in the post entitled A Menagerie of Miracles (who can forget the image of the otters washing Cuthbert's feet?).
Lending these manuscripts to Durham underlines the British Library's commitment to increase access to its world-famous collections, and to promote new research into medieval manuscript culture. To find out more about them, have a look at Digitised Manuscripts, where all six books can be examined in great detail. Lindisfarne Gospels Durham: One Amazing Book, One Incredible Journey is on show at Palace Green Library until 30 September 2013.
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