A good year from Humfrey, duke of Gloucester

It is time to revise my definitive list of manuscripts once owned by Humfrey, duke of Gloucester. I once wrote that manuscripts from the outsize book collection of the prince who loved to call himself son, brother and uncle of kings turn up in the ‘most expected places’; that remains true, but it is also the case that an absolute surprise can be sprung. That happened yesterday with a government press release announcing that a late thirteenth-century French New Testament once owned by John II, king of France (1350-1364), and now in private hands, was subject to a temporary export ban because it has been discovered that it was once ‘owned by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester [and is] deemed to be hugely important for the study of Anglo-French cultural exchange’ (the press release uses the modern classicising spelling of -ph- which, for all his interest in Renaissance humanism, Humfrey and his contemporaries never used). The statement includes a quotation from the historian Caroline Shenton whose understandable excitement is palpable. She says:

Duke Humphrey is widely  regarded as the most important English mediaeval book collector, but only 47 of his original library of some 500 volumes are known to survive. Now a 48th has suddenly come to light.

I take it she is working from my list of the duke’s manuscripts as it was published a few years ago in Bodleian Library Record. That actually overstates the collection by one as (I am now told) the manuscript in Rheims was not, in fact, owned by Humfrey. Yet, Caroline is still right to calls this New Testament the 48^th to come to light because, remarkably, it is not the first discovery of this year. Last month, Christopher de Hamel convincingly argued at the London Palaeography Seminar for the identification of a fragment as from another book which passed through the duke’s hands (he is about to publish that evidence). Yet more remarkably, a further manuscript — this one complete and sitting in the British Library — will be added to the list before the end of the year, when the article by Matthew Fisher of UCLA announcing it is published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. That is to say, that the number of volumes known to survive from the library of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester is going to rise by three before the end of the year. Should I say ‘at least three’? Does anyone else have something they want to share?

So, in 2023, the number of codices owned by the protector to Henry VI and its heir presumptive will rise from 46 to 49, with the French New Testament being indeed the 48^th.

What makes the French New Testament revealed yesterday stand out from the other ‘finds’ of this year is that the manuscript had been entirely unknown to scholarship. There was at least some knowledge of the other two: the fragment had been through sale houses in the recent past; the full manuscript sits in the national collection. It was simply a case in both instances that a good scholar had not come along and identified it. Those books had been, as it were, sitting there waiting to be discovered: the French New Testament had been hiding in the shadows, too bashful to allow scholarly eyes to scrutinise and identify it.

Its discovery, then, raises questions: how do we corroborate the announcement made, what is its significance and does it deserve to be kept for the nation? I intend to address these questions shortly. For now, let me take a deep breath, overcome my own excitement, and coolly take stock of the new information.