Avoiding Tedium with Medium Aevum

In the middle of the last decade, the Times Literary Supplement indulged in a game of finding literary references to itself. At the time, I noted that there was at least one academic journal which could engage in a similar game, if it wanted — though more likely it would want not. Britain’s longest established journal dedicated to medieval studies, Medium Ævum, might seem unlikely to feature in comic fiction but (as I pointed out) it does gain a walk-on part in Kingsley Amis’s early success, Lucky Jim.

I am not sure anyone has asked why Amis might have his hero day-dream about getting a job with Medium Ævum, beyond the amusing implausibility of that publication being able to offer to struggling lecturers one from a set of paid positions. Perhaps he enjoyed the irony of a journal devoted to the things medieval having a title which sided with the Renaissance humanists, those disparaging inventors of the ‘middle age’, down to the use of the diphthong. Or maybe its inclusion was a sign that he had an inkling of its illustrious literary associations with the Inklings, in particular with J. R. R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis. If you drew a conceptual map, you would find Medium Ævum does not lie far from Middle Earth.

Into that world, I now enter — or, indeed, return, as I have had previous experience of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, the publishers of the journal. A little more than a decade ago, I had a happy time helping with the running of the Society, developing its activities and its grant-giving. Though Medium Ævum was run autonomously, I had dealings with its team, both its copy-editor and type-setter, and its editors. I already knew Prof. Nigel Palmer, who was helmsman of that team; he had, in fact, been one of the interviewers for the Lyell Research Fellowship in Palaeography when I was fortunate enough to become that role’s first holder. Nigel’s range of expertise was as broad as his commiment to the journal was deep. He had taken up the baton originally in 1990 as editor for Germanic languages but came to be responsible for Latin, manuscript studies, art history and matters relating to Eastern Europe. He also guided each issue of the journal from typescript to print. In all this he worked closely with his colleagues, Prof. Corinne Saunders at Durham, who looks after Old and Middle English, and Prof. Sylvia Huot at Cambridge, who is responsible for Romance languages. I came also to know and like both of them in my former time with the Society.

Now, the saddest circumstances have forced on the Society a change. When Nigel unexpectedly died on 8th May, he was still very much in harness, overseeing the move to press of the first issue of volume XCI of the journal. His posthumous conventional epithet immediately and rightly became ‘irrreplaceable’: no one could attempt to imitate the expanse of his learning or his sustained energy. The Society’s solution was to ask two to do the work where one had. They wisely asked Stephen Mossman, of whom Nigel thought very highly, to take care of his core passion of Germanic languages. For Latin and palaeography, as well as the role of guiding the journal through the publication process, the Society approached me. So, at the beginning of August, the new arrangements were announced and I find that I have become Managing Editor of Medium Ævum. I am not unaware that it will be a significant amount of work, and that it sets me a challenge, but I cannot avoid feeling about myself: ‘lucky him’.

Humfrey, duke of Gloucester and Magna Carta

As this evening I will be giving a lecture to the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, and the organisation has kindly agreed to my request that it should be a free event, it seems only fitting that I should share a nugget of unpublished research with you.

The title of my talk is ‘St Albans, Oxford and the fate of the library of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester’. This will be, in fact, the second time in just over two years that I have spoken to a St Albans audience. The previous occasion was memorable for taking place in the city’s cathedral, the former abbey; my lectern was close to where the duke’s impressive chantry still stands. This time, there can, of course, not be any trip to Hertfordshire; all will take place thanks to the magic of Zoom. It is also made possible by the riches of manuscript material which is now online, and it is about one such volume that I have something to reveal.

Frequent visitors to this site might realise that I have a long-term project to reconstruct the history of the library of that most ostentatious of fifteenth-century English collectors, the royal prince, Humfrey. This is long-term not in the sense that a funding body might imagine, taking three or so years; this is one which is being undertaken (on and off) over decades. It might prove a life-time’s work, if my life is long enough. As readers of this site will know, I make no apologies for offending the gods of REF: I am a devotee of slow scholarship.

This, yes, is a long-winded manner of saying that what I am about to discuss involves research from the BC era — that is Before Covid-19. I have returned to it in these winter days thanks to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts site. It involves one small piece of information which needs to be placed into a wider context, and that will be provided by my eventual study of the duke’s library. For today, I want to concentrate on that single detail.

Humfrey’s connexions with the abbey of St Albans are well-known; he is often talked of as a friend and intellectual soul-mate of its long-term abbot, John Whethamstede. The latter, we know, gave manuscripts of his writings to the duke — it is symptomatic of the losses that have occurred from the duke’s book-collection that none of those survives. Indeed, the only manuscript that care now bear witness to the association between the insitutional library of St Albans and the private one gathered by Humfrey is a famous volume of part of the history of Matthew Paris. It was written by the author himself, was kept at the abbey and is now in the British Library, as MS. Royal 14.C.VII. In between, it was for a few years, owned by the duke of Gloucester.

London: British Library, MS. Royal 14.C.VII, fol. 9

Quite how Humfrey came to possess it is not apparent; the assumption that he was given it by Whethamstede is understandable but unproven. What precisely happened to it after it left his hands is another interesting and shady story, which I will touch upon in my talk this evening. What I want to mention now is what happened to the book while it was (presumably) at his palace of Greenwich.

One of the issues around the duke’s book-collecting is the issue of his personal involvement with the volumes he owned. On the one hand, those who sought his patronage expressed their astonishment at how learned he is — but they say that before they met him (if they ever did) and they would say that, wouldn’t they? On the other, he was willing to give away over three hundred of his manuscripts during his lifetime, to the University of Oxford — was he bored of them? The situation, of course, is more subtle and, indeed, of wider significance: we need to places what habit around him in the wider context of the practices and purposes of courtly reading. It was much more often a group activity than a solitary one; it could also be a delegated habit, with prince expecting others to do it for him. I have, however, over the course of my research, come across some cases where Humfrey himself does write in the margins of his books — not simply his ownership notes, which are well-attested, but notes engaging with the text. This manuscript gives a notable example of this.

Humfrey annotates the volume on a few occasions, and far less regularly than some other readers, like Polydore Vergil in the next century. One instance, however, is of particular interest. It occurs next to Matthew Paris’s discussion of Magna Carta.

London: British Library, MS. Royal 14.C.VII, fol. 155v with annotation by Humfrey, duke of Gloucester

Humfrey paused at this point and picked up his pen. He wrote ‘nota bene’ (his most frequent intervention in the books he read) but then goes on: ‘nota de Illis qui faciunt contra magnam cartam anglie quomodo incurrunt sentenciam excommunicacionis’. That is, ‘note about those who act against England’s Magna Carta how they incur the punishment of excommunication’. Here we have a royal duke, a descendant of Kings John and Henry III, noting the importance of obedience to Magna Carta.

We might like to see in this some sign of a ‘constitutionalist’ mindset on the part of Humfrey. We might also want to claim that the fact this is one of the rare occasions on which he felt compelled to write demonstrates how important this was to him. Or we might wonder what propelled him to write and for whom he was writing. The sense I often get when seeing his interventions in his books is that he sees himself being seen: this prince whose life could hardly ever be private was expecting an audience even to these acts we would imagine as moments of inward reflection. What I sense and what I will talk about at length another day is that, for Humfrey, the page was his stage. There is a theatre to annotations.

How to Research in the Online-Only World, part II: not so wicked Wikipedia

In the first instalment of these ten tips on researching online, we talked about what you need to do before you start searching online. Today’s suggestions are about what will happen when you type your first query and press enter. Tip II can be summarised as: do use Wikipedia as a springboard for your research.

It is everywhere: you open your browser, you provide a search term, and, in most cases, one of the top results will be a Wikipedia entry. We all know that the world’s favourite online encyclopaedia is not to be trusted – they tell us so themselves – but it is also unavoidable. The sensible approach, then, is not to pretend it does not exist and to move on to the next hit but to read it conscious of its quirks and limitations. This, of course, is what we must do with everything we read, but Wikipedia has some particular difficulties — as well as some advantages.

In a schema popular in the US, Wikipedia constitutes a ‘tertiary source’, that is something which is not a distillation and interpretation of the primary evidence but a distillation of those distillations (which are termed secondary works). In this tertiary category sit all reference works. What marks Wikipedia out from all encyclopedias is its policy that anyone can edit it, and that is often seen has a cause for concern, a sort of worry about what happens when you let non-experts loose. I have suggested in the past that this principle does not, in fact, make it inherently any more unreliable than traditional encyclopaedias. The observation I made some years ago still holds true: the better-known concepts and characters might receive attention from editors who are more opinionated than well-informed but, if the subject is relatively obscure, Wikipedia is sometimes a fuller and more helpful resource than other encyclopaedias, which would give the topic at most cursory attention. That is because, for those articles where few people bother to make a contribution, the ‘anyone’ who provides the information is likely to have a scholarly interest in the subject — like, for instance, being someone who has written their MA dissertation on it. What I will say has changed since I made that observation is that some of the larger articles have become more shapeless: text tends to accrue rather than be deleted, with the result that it can read as stilted or even self-contradictory.

The implication of what I have just said is that there is wide variation in the quality of articles in Wikipedia. So, how do you decide whether the piece you are reading is a stinker or not? Here comes the first piece of advice:

1. Scroll to the bottom — after all, it is the section called ‘References’ which is going to be most useful for you, letting you move away from Wikipedia to other resources. Look at this section and ask yourself two questions: how up-to-date are the works cited? Are they scholarly? The first of these, which (as we will see in Tip III) is a question you should regularly ask, is straightforward: look at the dates of publication. The second may need a little explanation: while it is not always an accurate guide, where something is published may suggest its scholarly worth. Being printed in an academic journal or a university press is no guarantee of quality, but if what is being cited is (for instance) a newspaper or a commercial site, alarm bells should ring. As an example, let us look at this article about an academic playwright and author from fifteenth-century England. The text looks fairly full — this is not what Wikipedia calls a stub — but look down to the ‘attribution’ and ‘references’. The attribution explains that part of the text has been imported from the Dictionary of National Biography (universally abbreviated to DNB). That was a worthy reference work at the beginning of the twentieth century (the article used was published in 1901) but it has been superseded by the more recent, rewritten Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (abbreviation: ODNB). You can check how much has actually been imported from the DNB, because the original text is available on another wiki site, Wikisource. If we now look at the references cited on the Wikipedia page, they do not suggest that article has been substantially supplemented. The first is to a German reference work, while the second comes from a scholarly journal, but it is a review of a 1970 edition of a play of Chaundler. Reviews are not something you would usually expect to find cited in a scholarly work — they themselves are ‘tertiary’ in the sense that they mainly comment on others’ work with the primary evidence. This Wikipedia page is, in fact, so indebted to ‘tertiary sources’ that it could be called quaternary.
2. Understand how the page has come to be how it is at the moment — the citations each page provides help you gain some sense of how much trust you can place in it but you can go further. Look to the top of each article and you will see some tabs. To the right, just left of the search box, there is ‘view history’. Click on this and you can trace through the editing process. Wikipedia is an encycolopedia that lets you see its workings in a way no other would. You may not, however, find that listing of edits, scintillating reading. For something more informative, go to top left, and next to ‘Article’, you will see ‘Talk’; click on that and you will see discussion betweent the various contributors about how to improve the article. These are most entertaining when dealing with a controversial figure, like Richard III. The entries reveal how repeated and valiant attempts have been made to save the page from the immoderate partisanship of that monarch’s latterday supporters. It must be admitted, though, that they have not managed to delete the clanger of a statement that the Battle of Bosworth ‘marked the end of the Middle Ages in England’, as if one August afternoon in 1485 was when the light-switch was flicked from darkness to modernity. Leaving that aside, what the ‘view history’ and ‘talk’ tabs do is let you understand how a page has come to be as it is, and return in a few days or weeks and you can see how it has changed again. So, if an article does not read well, look to these sections to appraise how that has happened.
3. You will need to verify what you read — it is an article of faith among historians that we trust no one, not the writers of the primary evidence nor the scholars who have gone before us. But Wikipedia requires particular care. Remember: it has a policy that no original research should be included on its pages. So, in every case, ask yourself: from what secondary work did they get this information? Here the references and external links will help. You will want to check them to find out on what basis they make a claim that has been repeated here.
4. Remember that Wikipedia is not one encyclopedia but several — it exists in a wide range of languages, including (I am pleased to say) in Latin. The crucial point is that the articles are often not simply translations from one tongue to another but are largely independent of each other. Some of you might say: what use is that to me when I only read English? Don’t worry, you have time to learn more languages. For now, though, if you only read one language, it is all the more important that you check the other versions: if you are thinking of a research topic and find there are major works on that subject in another language, you may want to think again (or start learning the language straightaway). And you do not need much linguistic knowledge to navigate a Wikipedia page because they are all laid out in the same way. So, scroll down the left-hand side of the screen and you will see that the last section is entitled ‘languages’: click on those to find what is being said about your intended subject in other countries.
5. Think of editing Wikipedia yourself — you must not take the democratic principle that anyone can edit the online encyclopedia to mean ‘anyone but me’. As you develop your knowledge, you are likely to be able to make valuable improvements to a page. Do not be a passive recipient of knowledge, be one of its creators. There are already some people in MEMS who do it: join us.

The wording of this tip is not my own: it is Wikipedia’s. They do not expect you to rely on it unthinkingly. The main advantage it has for you is that it can lead you to other sites and materials. It can help you begin the virtual paper-chase that is building your bibliography — and that will be the topic for the next instalment.

The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain — in one word

 

If you had to summarise your book in one word, what would it be? The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain has its official publication date on 2^nd May 2019. I have, then, been giving some thought to what my response to the question would be and I think the answer is: cosmopolitanism.

I appreciate that some might me to justify my use of that word. I employ the term in its general sense of involving people from different countries but, the remit of my book, with its cast-list which ranges from St Andrews to Rome and from Majorca to Milan, is rather narrower than the word’s little sense. My use of the concept cannot have the worldwide reach that cosmopolitanism has in present-day philosophy. I could defend my profligate deployment of the term by noting that Diogenes the Cynic, the first person on record to claim he was a cosmopolite, envisaged a world that did not include the Americas or Australasia. I could also point out that The Renaissance Reform draws attention to how humanists saw the British Isles as at the very edge of the world — but I could not claim that those humanists’ vision was so myopic that it stopped at the Mediterranean or that it was oblivious to cultures beyond Western Christendom. Indeed, the interaction of ‘the West’ (as defined by obedience to the pope) with Eastern Christendom impinges on the book’s discussion. Moreover, a sense of the edges of a civilization is intentionally at the borders of its coverage. All that said, The Renaissance Reform cannot pretend to be a contribution to the global Middle Ages. Perhaps, if I had my time again, I might replace ‘cosmopolitan’ with ‘Europolitan’ — a citizen of Europe (with the inclarity of its definition being productive) — except that I see that term has already been appropriated by a Swedish mobile phone company, and I would not want to infringe their copyright.

The emphasis on cosmopolitan in the book is a challenge. The theme of the work is the re-design of the manuscript book, in script and layout, promoted by Florentine humanists at the very start of the fifteenth century and its success among the British. That statement in itself is a provocation, since it is usually assumed that humanism reached England, at its earliest, in the reign of Henry VII and only found glorious summer under the sun of York and Lancaster combined, Henry VIII. In contrast, I insist that there was a sustained tradition of interest from the 1430s which should qualify to be called ‘the English Quattrocento’. This is not to say that the tradition was the sole preserve of roast-beef-eating English-born, or that it grew solely in English soil. On the one hand, there were many immigrants who were central to the promotion of the humanist agenda in England — with the most significant being not Italians but Dutch scribes. On the other, there were Englishmen and Scots who were active in the humanist reforms in their heartland of Italy. These Britons were part of a wider pattern of engagement which, I claim, was integral to the success of the humanist aesthetic for the book. I would go further and say that some were significant not merely in its propagation but in its construction. That is to say, this Renaissance reform originated with a coterie of Florentines but it gained its popularity through international collaborators. The leitmotif was cosmopolitanism at not just the edges of Europe but what was to Italian eyes its epicentre.

Oxford: Balliol College, MS. 310 fol. 32v — Letters of Leonardi Bruni, written in England by the Dutch scribe, Theoderic Werken (1449).

This assertion, for which I give evidence in the monograph and other recent publications, raises a question: why would non-Florentines or non-Italians adopt a script designed to be a local reaction against ‘gothic’ (that is northern European) influence? We tend to see in the humanist bookhand as immersed in a particular set of cultural co-ordinates: the legacy of ancient Rome with its physical presence in Italy (though not much in Florence itself), the humanists’ attempts to revive eloquence both textually and visually. Yet this — I hypothesise — was not primarily what other Europeans saw on the page when viewing a book in the new ‘Roman’ hand. Here, I take cosmopolitan to mean ‘the world’ not in a simple synchronic sense of how it is now but also encompassing its shared inheritance. The humanists, in developing their reform they turned to prototypes of the eleventh and twelfth century — to late caroline minuscule or ‘protogothic’ bookhand. Such prototypes were not, of course, Italian patrimony alone: caroline minuscule, emanating from north-east France and beyond, had been successful across Europe, and ‘protogothic’ had thrived near the shores of the English Channel. That is to say, what non-Italians saw when they looked upon the ‘new’ script, created in its very particular local circumstances, was an acknowledgement of a tradition in which they could see themselves as full partners.

The humanist reform, however, was not a single moment. The bookhand itself developed — in part, thanks to the intervention of ultramontanes. Equally, there was also a ‘second wave’ when, in the north-east of Italy in the mid-quattrocento, what we know of ‘italic’ was invented. That very name, foisted on the script by French and English, suggests its Italian origins, and it worked on viewers in a very different way from the ‘Roman’ hand, since there was not for this any historic precedent to which it returned. While the humanist bookhand was archaising, italic was archaising by metaphor. The result was that this later script’s international success worked differently and was, in its first decades, more dominated by Italians. In The Renaissance Reform, this is presented as a shift in cosmopolitanism but it could be configured otherwise: as a move from Europolitan to Italophile.

A royal letter of 1506, signed by Henry VII, written in italic by Pietro Carmeliano (private hands).

As will be clear from what all that I have said, the field of action for this cosmopolitanism is the page. In that sense, detecting it is akin to the sensitivity art historians show to the multiple cultural contacts that shape a Renaissance painting or miniature. In palaeographical terms, cosmopolitanism can stand as a conceit for digraphism or polygraphism. The Renaissance Reform discusses the movement between scripts, and the adoption of humanist elements in gothic scripts; it also muses on how far we can sense a conscious rejection of the reforms when a bookhand shows no humanist influence. I also invoke at one point the concepts of code-switching and code-mixing, but an implication of what I have just said is that, while these may be separate ‘codes’, they could announce, to some eyes, their shared origin, speaking of one graphic tradition that has ramified into many forms.

It could be legitimately said that the ‘some’ just mentioned are only ‘a few’. The Renaissance Reform is very clear that it is talking about a minority among a minority. Most of its characters stood out from the many who were born in the same village or town because these people were highly mobile across Europe. They also were the privileged because they were highly literate, in societies that were majority-illiterate. Cosmopolitanism — citizenship of this ‘world’ — was only for the select. At the same time, a theme that underlies this book is a sense that they themselves sensed their special status and that some were humbled by it. Some, I suggest, took it less as a badge of pride than as a spur to think on the poverty of their own literacy and, indeed, on the limits of their own cosmopolitanism.

How (not) to describe a manuscript’s weight

Canterbury, Monday 4th March 2019: a day of delights for manuscript-lovers. There are two related events taking place to celebrate the cathedral’s purchase at auction in July 2018 of a so-called pocket Bible from the thirteenth century. The book was most recently in the Schøyen Collection (as no. 15) when it had a short title of ‘Canterbury Bible’; it was advertised at the sale as the ‘Trussel Bible’, after an early owner whose name is still present at the opening flyleaf; since its purchase, it has changed name again, now being the ‘Lyghfield Bible‘, after a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury through whose hands it passed. It will feature in the Cathedral’s Annual Library and Archives Lecture given on Monday evening by the redoubtable Alixe Bovey. Before that extravaganza, there will be a workshop organised under the auspices of the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies by my dynamic colleague, Emily Guerry, and myself.

Canterbury: Cathedral, MS. Add. 392 – the Lyghfield Bible

In preparing for the workshop, I have spent some hours in close company with the Bible and written a short post introducing some of its interesting aspects. As I explain there, it is certainly of a small page-size and is eminently portable, but you would have to have had well-lined and very large pockets to be able to carry it. To bring this home to readers, I thought I should provide its weight and the ever-obliging staff at the Cathedral Archives unearthed some scales. There is an established tradition of describing the weight of a manuscript by relation to some animal: the locus classicus is R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford’s assertion that the Codex Amiatinus (34.25kg) is as heavy as ‘a fully grown female Great Dane’. In similar spirit, let me tell you that the Lyghfield Bible has the approximate weight of a small duck-billed platypus. Imagine having one of those in your pocket.

From the information I have given, you will gather that the Bible weighs 700g. Or, more likely, it will not have been transparent to you. Unless you enter your platypus in the village fete’s ‘how heavy is my pet’ competition, or are given to lifting canine weights, then the comparisons are useless. There is, though, a serious point. We are accustomed, in codicological descriptions, to giving the measurements of the page and written space or ruled space (the two can be different). I have become convinced that the formula fashionable in Italy presents that best:

height x width of page = (upper margin + [height of written space] + lower margin) x (inner margin + [width of written space) + outer margin)

That is because it ensures that the placing of the text-block on the page is clarified — and some of my recent research suggests that the placing is culturally specific so useful to record. These details, though, are perhaps not the only co-ordinates worth noting. I cannot think of cases where the breadth of a book’s spine is mentioned, and to note its weight is unusual, a reflection of it being out of the ordinary. Perhaps we should change that, and so make reference to it less of an eccentricity.

Note of clarification: no animals were harmed or even weighed in the preparation of this post.

The Relics of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester at St Albans

One of the greatest pleasures among many of my line of work is being invited to give a public lecture. This is always thanks to the audience, who bring their own knowledge and interests to the event, often encouraging (and sometimes forthrightly challenging) you to rethink your own assumptions, and inviting you to present your research with a fresh perspective. It can also be because of the location — and there are few better than mine last Thursday: the crossing of St Albans Cathedral.

The title for my evening lecture was ‘St Albans and the Cult of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester’. I had been asked because news had reached there of my interest in the duke who, of course, is posthumously a local lad, being buried there with a fine chantry situated behind the high altar, just south of Alban’s shrine. My talk was necessarily an overview, considering, as I put it, ‘how Humfrey became Good’ and ‘how Humfrey became an Anglican’. That, though, is not how I began the discussion and it is that first section I want to discuss with you.

Engraving of Humfrey’s chantry in George Sandford, A Genealogical History of the Kings of England (London, 1677)

I opened the lecture with the visit to St Albans in 1765 of David Garrick and his fellow actor, James Quin. They went to the abbey church and saw the duke’s chapel. They were particularly interested in the duke’s tomb which, as was rediscovered in 1703, lies beneath the monument, with a wooden coffin enclosing a lead one. It had been opened on its rediscovery to find that the duke had been embalmed, preserved in a ‘strong pickle’. The two visitors left the church to find lunch at the Christopher Inn on French Row (which in later years, it is said, was a brothel). Over their food and drink, they mused on what they had seen and Garrick was inspired to pen a short poem, entitled Quin’s Soliloquy, in which it was wondered what the use would be of being pickled when dead; much rather (Garrick claimed Quin proposed) to be pickled in Burgundy wine when alive.

For these two actors, the remains of Humfrey were a curiosity and a cause for merriment, but they did not, as far as we know, carry away any part of him — as did many other visitors. There are tales of the removal of bones and of other parts of the body. For instance, in later years, Elizabeth, countess of Moira, herself a proto-archaeologist, recalled a trip to St Albans in 1747, when she would have been sixteen. She recounted that ‘I took from the skull of Humphrey duke of Gloucester, in his vault at St. Alban’s, a lock of hair which was so perfectly strong that I had it woven into Bath rings’. Similarly, an antiquary named John Webster recorded that he owned Humfrey’s beard ‘which the archdeacon gave me leave to take away’.

This last example, incidentally, sheds a side-light on another element of the eighteenth-century interest in Humfrey. Horace Walpole was keen to have in his collection a depiction of the ‘Good Duke’ and believed that he had two. The first that he bought was said to come from the abbey Bury St Edmunds and to represent both the duke and his uncle and enemy, Cardinal Beaufort. In truth, neither identification has much foundation and that of Humfrey shows a bald old man who is also beardless. Either John Webster was duped or (more likely) Walpole had been over-enthusiastic in his identification.

Print of the panel that Horace Walpole owned and identified as being Humfrey (National Portrait Gallery).

We do not know if Walpole himself was one of those who paid their homage to Humfrey at his monument, but the result of others’ reverence was the depletion of the physical remains, to the extent that only a few bones and his skull now are in situ. The skull was studied in 1830, with a cast being made, so that a phrenological investigation could be undertaken. By the time the report was published a couple of years later, the cast had disappeared.

There are two features that strike me in these tales. The first is that of the secular relic. That visitors could take away hair and bones, with the church’s connivance, might suggest that some payment was made and that this was a much-needed source of funds for an over-large building for the parish it then served (the former abbey was only to be raised to the status of a cathedral in 1877 and, at the point, much restoration was necessary). We might want to see it as the precursor to tourist tat, but that would surely to be misunderstand at least part of its attraction. The examples I have mentioned all suggest an antiquarian or ‘scientific’ interest related to the removals. There was surely also something else involved in these, as with Walpole’s fascination with Humfrey: a sense of association with a ‘great man’ that was best expressed by ownership of some tactile element of him.

We might well find that alien and our distance from this tradition is perhaps part of the explanation for the second element: the ephemeral nature of these relics. The cast was not available very soon after its production; neither piece of hair — to my knowledge — remains. If you happen to own some bodily part of the duke or know where one might be found, I would dearly like to hear from you. As our information stands at present, there is no such thing available to view in a present-day collection. That says much about how the style of interaction reflected in these tales has died. With it, of course, Humfrey has undergone something akin to a second death: the removal of his bones was a dispersal but it is later generations who bear the responsibility of their discarding and disappearance. We cannot but find odd a Protestant habit of seeking relics of such an unsaintly figure as the ‘Good Duke’ but we have also to recognise that our perplexity leaves us struggling to reconstruct not just one aristocrat’s body but a former culture’s apparatus of association in which even a piece of hair could have talismanic qualities. It leaves me wondering whether the eighteenth century would have been more comfortable with ‘actor network theory’ than some third millennium observers seem to be.

I opened with the visit to St Albans in 1765 of David Garrick and his fellow actor, James Quin. They visited the abbey church and saw the duke’s chapel. They were particularly interested in the duke’s tomb which, as was rediscovered in 1703, lies beneath the monument, with a wooden coffin enclosing a lead one. It had been opened in 1703 to find that the duke had been embalmed, preserved in a ‘strong pickle’. The two visitors left the church to find lunch at the Christopher Inn on French Row (which in later years, it is said, was a brothel). Over their food and drink, they mused on what they had seen and Garrick was inspired to pen a short poem, entitled Quin’s Soliloquy, in which it was wondered what the use would be of being pickled when dead; much rather (Garrick claimed Quin proposed) to be pickled in Burgundy wine when alive.

For these two actors, the remains of Humfrey were a curiosity and a cause for merriment, but they did not, as far as we know, carry away any part of him — as did many other visitors. There are tales of the removal of bones and of other parts of the body. For instance, in later years, Elizabeth, countess of Moira, herself a proto-archaeologist, recalled a trip to St Albans in 1747, when she would have been sixteen. She recounted that ‘I took from the skull of Humphrey duke of Gloucester, in his vault at St. Alban’s, a lock of hair which was so perfectly strong that I had it woven into Bath rings’. Similarly, an antiquary named John Webster recorded that he owned Humfrey’s beard ‘his which the archdeacon gave me leave to take away’.

This last example, incidentally, sheds a side-light on another element of the eighteenth-century interest in Humfrey. Horace Walpole was keen to have in his collection a depiction of the ‘Good Duke’ and believed that he had two. The first that he bought was said to come from the abbey Bury St Edmunds and to represent both the duke and his uncle and enemy, Cardinal Beaufort. In truth, neither identification has much foundation and that of Humfrey shows a bald old man who is also beardless. Either John Webster was duped or (more likely) Walpole had been over-enthusiastic in his identification.

We do not know of Walpole himself was one of those who paid their homage to Humfrey at his monument, but the result of others’ reverence was the depletion of the physical remains, to the extent that only a few bones and his skull now are in situ. The skull was studied in 1830, with a cast being made, so that a phrenological investigation could be undertaken. By the time the report was published a couple of years later, the cast had disappeared.

There are two features that strike me in these tales. The first is that of the secular relic. That visitors could take away hair and bones, with the church’s connivance, might suggest that some payment was made and that this was a much-needed source of funds for an over-large building for the parish it then served (the former abbey was only to be raised to the status of a cathedral in 1877 and, at the point, much restoration was necessary). We might want to see it as the precursor to tourist tat, but that would surely to be misunderstand at least part of its attraction. The examples I have mentioned all suggest an antiquarian or ‘scientific’ interest related to the removals. There was surely also something of Walpole’s fascination with Humfrey — a sense of association with a ‘great man’ that was best expressed by ownership of some tactile element of him.

For us, a bone is most likely to be considered just a bone, a witness to our shared humanity. In a culture where phrenology took the shape of the head to be revelatory of the inner workings of a character, there was a different sense of signification and significance. A parallel could be with the interest in autographs, where a person’s writing was not just a specimen but a potential window on their mind as the movement of the pen could be claimed to reveal that person’s thoughts and inclinations. One piece of evidence taken from their true self, in other words, could express their essence: they are immanent in their slightest remain.

We might well find that mindset alien and our distance from this tradition is perhaps part of the explanation for the second element: the ephemeral nature of these relics. The cast was not available very soon after its production; neither piece of hair — to my knowledge — remains. In fact, we would be hard pressed to find any bone or bodily part of the duke’s in a present-day collection, and that says much about how the style of interaction reflected in these tales has died. With it, of course, Humfrey has undergone something akin to a second death: the removal of his bones was a dispersal but it is later generations who bear the responsibility of their discarding and disappearance. We cannot but find odd a Protestant habit of seeking relics of such an unsaintly figure as the ‘Good Duke’ but we have also to recognise that our perplexity leaves us struggling to reconstruct not just one aristocrat’s body but a former culture’s apparatus of association in which even a piece of hair could have talismanic qualities. It leaves me wondering whether the eighteenth century would have been more comfortable with ‘actor network theory’ than some third millennium observers seem to be.

 

 

 

 

Postcard from Harvard X: where’s the catch?

This final report from my recent time at Harvard’s Houghton Library comes to you like one of those sets of holiday photos that returning travellers foist upon their unwitting ‘friends’. Not, truth be told, that I have many snaps of Cambridge or of Boston — too many hours were spent in the library for that, you see — but what I can provide is a sequence of images of one codicological feature.

Trawling through the humanist manuscripts in the Houghton’s enviable collection, it struck me that they provided an interesting range of examples of how scribes in the fifteenth century ensured the correct order of the quires they were copying. As we know, scribes did not write into a bound volume but instead had loose gatherings in front of them and had to use some method for organising them. They inherited from gothic codices the practice of catchwords — that is, placing the first word of the next quire at the bottom of the final verso of the preceding one — but also looked back to ‘pre-gothic’ habits, some scribes re-introducing the use of quire signatures. The variety of techniques is well surveyed by Albert Derolez in his Codicologie humanistique of 1984, and I have no new finding to add to that. Instead, I want to allow the images to talk – and give them the opportunity to share with you a few more manuscript descriptions.

Let us start with a manuscript that was the centrepiece of my seventh postcard. While it is exceptional in many ways, in its placing and style of catchword, it reflects the most common practice.

Cambridge MA: Houghton MS. Typ. 447, fol. 179v – simple horizontal catchword in the gutter.

 

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Typ. 5, fol. 30v (Florence, s. xv in.).

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Typ. 429, fol. 50v (?Verona, 1471)

Sometimes, a horizontal catchword might placed more prominently, at bottom centre of the folio, and it may be given a little decoration to enhance it. Humanist copyists were often less playful than their gothic counterparts – there is something austere about the archaising aesthetic promoted by Poggio Bracciolini, as seen in MS. Typ. 5, illustrated to the left here. But, on rare occasions, the catchword is used to serve another purpose. So, in MS. Typ. 297 (for which I can furnish you with my own description), the scribe employs this feature to reveal his name, by providing it rather than a decorated surround at the end of successive quires. At the end of the second quarternion, he writes his Christian name, Johannes,  around the catchword proper; at the end of the third, ‘de camenago’ and, at the end of the fourth, an abbreviation for ‘scripsit’. Here is the first:

Cambridge MA: Houghton MS. Typ. 296, fol. 16v.

Horizontal, however, was not the only position. Some scribes preferred to use the inner bounding line of the page as their guide for the catchwords and would write it vertically.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Richardson 16, fol. 21v.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Typ. 143, fol. 20v.

You should just to be able to make out one on this image to the left – it appears faint because it is written in red (a sign, incidentally, that the scribe was working with two pens on his desk, providing this and the rubricated titles alongside the main text written in black). Vertical catchwords also could gain some decoration, as in the case of Houghton’s MS. Typ. 143.

In all the cases so far, the catchword has been obvious and, in the case of Johannes de Camenago, it was intended to reveal his identity, with a little more subtlety than a colophon would have done. For others, though, the art lay in the making this element as discreet as possible, so that it was nearly hidden. A good example of this comes from another manuscript discussed in a previous post: a fascicule produced as a presentation gift of behalf of its author, Andrea Castellesi. The practice was fundamentally counter-intuitive: it takes the vertical direction but divorces it from its common-sensical support, the bounding line. It instead floats close the gutter – in that sense, by its very process of hiding, it calls attention to itself.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Typ. 171, fol. 21v.

In my experience, such artfully hidden-so-you-can-find-them catchwords are a late development in humanist culture; an earlier practice which minimalised the intervention was to replace the catchword with a quire signature, usually a capital letter.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Lat. 375, fol. 21v.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Lat. 266, fol. 88v.

Here are two examples of this habit, the one on the left by that leading inventor of italic, Bartolomeo Sanvito, at work in the late 1470s or early 1480s. The other manuscript was probably made in the second quarter of the century; here is a description of it.

This was an elegant alternative to the catchword and one which spoke of the humanists’ agenda of creating an aesthetic by looking back to a style that preceded the gothic. There are always, though, some who will be belts-and-braces. So, in a copy of Sallust which is Houghton’s MS. Typ. 181, there is a quire signature but this sat above a simple horizontal catchword that has been cropped. As the manuscript is in an Italian binding of the fifteenth century, the cropping must have been contemporary, so the intention was to hide the catchword but leave the quire signature on display.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Typ. 181, fol. 40v.

The art of the catchword did not die with print. In one of Houghton’s incunables, printed in Roman type that imitated the humanists’ reforms in 1471, and soon after decorated in the humanists’ favoured bianchi girari style, an early user has added vertical catchwords by hand.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, INC 3346 fol. 1

Cambridge MA: Houghton INC 3346, catchword added

Print, of course, developed its own practices, both of signatures and of catchwords — the latter were placed horizontally but not at the end of each gathering and instead at the end of each page (a reflection of how the text was printed on sheets which were then folded and, if necessary, cut up). That development later infected scribal habits, when a copyist like the great Esther Inglis wanted to show that she was aware of what print did and could do them just as well, even when they were not essential to her art.

What are we to draw from all these examples? You will have your own thoughts, and I would like to hear them. I myself will highlight two basic but important features. First, for the humanists, their reform of the book was not simply about script; it was a conception of the whole page, that worked with existing traditions but re-shaped them to create what they saw as an elegant – and eloquent – page. More generally, these examples should remind us that scribes express themselves not just on the line but deep in the margins; they expect to be seen even in places where people are not expected to look. The pragmatic implication is that the palaeographer must also be a codicologist – these habits can help us identify individual scribes and their milieu.

Finally, as I end my series of ‘postcards’, let me conclude with a thank-you to all the staff of the Houghton Library, who were a model of helpfulness, running an astounding collection. To spend time in their company — both the books and the staff — was a privilege. To all, I say, plurimas gratias vobis ago.

Postcard from Harvard IX: the genius of Esther Inglis

You will all have had the experience of sending postcards late in a trip, with them arriving at their destination after your own return. You may even have travelled home with them and put them in a postbox round from your house. The last two postcards to result from my time as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Houghton Library fall into this latter category, in as much as I am now in Oxford again and the warmth of my hosts in Cambridge MA is only a memory. In the case of both this post and the next, however, all the work was done across the pond, in the Yard of Harvard.

This penultimate instalment allows me to discuss an early modern scribe whom I met for the first time three or four years ago, in Christ Church, Oxford. I was handed a small volume, with a needlework binding, which I — like anybody else I have known who has looked at it — at first assumed was a printed book: it had all the presentational features of one, and the words looked too regular to be by any human hand. But turn over the pages and you realise that the plurality of styles of letters offered from opening to opening was just too various to be the work of a machine. Nor did the volume make any secret of how and when it was produced: it announced that it had been created in Edinburgh in 1599, for Elizabeth I of England, by the pen of Esther Inglis. I was smitten, and delighted that part of my role in the catalogue of Christ Church’s manuscripts assigned to be by the Keeper of Special Collections, Cristina Neagu, was to write a full description of the book, their MS. 180. It is now fully digitised, and the description is also on-line (though it is undeniably easier to read in the hard-copy volume, which is richly illustrated and ridiculously cheap for those joining the Oxford Bibliographical Society).

There has been much good work on Inglis, which has reconstructed her career and her oeuvre, as well as (more recently) thinking about the place of gender in the identity she projected. It is known that she was the daughter of Huguenot émigrés who settled in Edinburgh and that she was first taught to write by her mother. To say that she essayed the panoply of scripts proposed for emulation by men like Jean de Beauchesne is to understate her achievement  — her mastery went beyond that of any writing master. She was also prolific: from a career of about forty years, just over sixty examples of her work survive. Five of those are now in the Houghton Library. I could not pass up the opportunity to deepen my acquaintance with her and to study all of those while I was there. It was also relevant because a future project is forming in my mind, which will consider the transformation of bookhands after print, with Inglis as the endpoint of the discussion. What I discussed in the last post, on Beauchesne, and in this one will act as a first trial for some of the ideas I am developing. I will express these thoughts through a comparison between Christ Church’s MS. 180 and one of those at the Houghton, their MS. Typ. 212, which is also available on-line. It is a volume made in 1606 and, like the earlier one relates to the Book of Psalms — that made for Elizabeth providing the text in French, while the one at Harvard, presented to Thomas Egerton, England’s Lord Chancellor, has a set of Latin verse summaries of each Psalm.

Both similarities and differences between the two manuscripts are immediately apparent. They contrast in basics like the format, the later one preferring an oblong style to the upright rectangle of the earlier one. They share some text — the commendatory verses celebrating Esther Inglis and her skill are the same in both. The connexions and the distance between them is perhaps best summed up in two images:

Oxford: Christ Church, MS. 180, fol. viii.

Cambridge: Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 212, fol. 9v.

 

 

This comparison would suggest that the scribe’s self-presentation is essentially constant except with a move from monochrome to colour. There is a truth to that, though it hides a life-defining change for Esther: between the production of the two manuscripts, she became a mother. We do not know the exact date, but her child, Samuel, graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1618, and so probably went up to university in 1615 – when his mother gave him a ‘thumb Bible’ of her own making which is also now at the Houghton (MS. Typ. 49 – remember when you look at it that each page is 46 x 32mm). As the age of matriculation was often between about twelve and fifteen, Samuel’s birth probably took place in the very first years of the seventeenth century, and, indeed, at that point there is a hiatus in Inglis’s scribal work.

It may be coincidental but I also sense an increased manipulation of her gender as part of her identity in the volume produced after her son’s birth. One element that I found interesting in the life of the 1599 manuscript was how it was part of a group of books that she made as gifts to leading figures in England, addressed to them in her name but to be delivered not by her — she remained in Scotland — but by her husband Bartholomew Kello. All the more striking, he himself was not permitted to present the gift for Elizabeth I but had to pass it to his patron, Anthony Bacon, who was himself a client of the earl of Essex. These specifics reinforce our established understanding of the intersections of gender hierarchies with those of social status, but a further detail caught my attention as I read the letters by Kello which allows us to reconstruct the narrative and which now live in the British Library: his script is fairly close to one variety practised by his wife, and it raised in my mind the question of whether she might have trained or influenced her husband’s writing.

I do not have a definitive answer to that, but a feature of the 1606 manuscript is relevant to this observation. In that volume, as in the earlier one, Esther inserts herself not just by a self-portrait and by transcription of verses in praise of herself, but by providing a dedication letter to the recipient, in French. What is different in 1606 is that this is followed by a second letter to the dedicatee, this one in Latin verse and signed at the end with the name of Bartholomew Kello. In other words, this manuscript presents itself as the result of a marital alliance. What is most notable, however, is that Bartholomew himself, though a competent penman, does not write ‘his’ letter: it is clear that Esther is the scribe and so his self-presentation is entrusted to her hands. What is on display here, in other words, is the product of a wife-husband team.

We might see this as going a little way to counter-balancing the prevalent social norms of gender relations. We might also want to interpret what follows in the manuscript as expressive of a particularly feminine identity, the range of delicately written scripts set off, on every recto, by the painting, in colour, of a flower (occasionally with a tenderly depicted animal). Perhaps there is an element of that, but I think the more significant intention is also a more complex one. Some of these images replicate and all (I would suggest) echo the title-page of the volume, where they form a border placed on a gold background.

Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 212, fol. 1.

What I find interesting here is that the style of illumination harks back to one that was popular a century earlier. Let me direct your attention to just one set of examples, in manuscripts produced for Thomas Wolsey near the end of the 1520s, and so a relatively late but particularly fine instance of the style. It would seem that Esther Inglis has become acquainted with manuscripts in this mode and was keen to engage with them. The result was essentially archaising (in that fecund term of Malcolm Parkes) and that, I would suggest, was her conscious purpose. The change between 1599 and 1606 was that Inglis had moved forward from creating a manuscript that looked identical to a printed book (but better) by looking beyond print and back to the tradition of manuscript-making. She presented herself as that tradition’s inheritrix.

As that final noun demonstrates, her identity as a ‘rarissima foemina’ (as she is called in one of the laudatory verses), was entwined with her role as a witness to the continuing possibilities of scribal production. Against the pattern of mechanical book-making in a printing-house, where men’s muscles mattered as much as their minds, her work hints at a different model of creativity, not one of a single female genius but of a family unit — a family unit, however, where the woman takes her central role. The 1606 volume ends with a motif of a crowned laurel wreath, with crossed pens and the motto ‘Vive la Plume’. In ribald humour, ‘la plume’ can be the penis, but who gives birth to that? A traditional talent, displaced in the brave new world of a mechanised economy, has to be protected and to be nurtured to survive for the next generation. The implication is that for the pen to flow, it needs the generative power of a woman, a wife, a mother.

Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 212, fol. 100.

Postcard from Harvard VII: a master at work

The title for this post promises a single master but, with winning generosity, I am going to offer to you three masters.

The centrepiece of our discussion is Harvard’s MS. Typ. 447, an attractive little volume which, if it were a printed book, would be described as being in small chancery octavo format. It was designed to fit into a pocket, though why someone should want to carry its contents with them is a quandary. Its main text — though, as this description reveals, not its only one — is Palladius’s tract on agriculture, which one would imagine was hardly most people’s vademecum. What is unusual in this manuscript is that it is preceded by a devotional calendar, giving the saints’ days through the year. The combination of religious and pagan may strike us as curious but it has its logic: Palladius’s work is organised by the month, and the commissioner of the volume might have considered that his little book (we know it was a man) brought together different but complementary methods of framing time.

This is by no means the only element of interest to MS. Typ. 447. Its creator gives us both his name and that of the person for whom it was made, as well as the date and place of production. It was compiled in Verona and completed in 1460 (we can narrow that further by a reference to January of that year). The scribe introduces himself as Blasius de Saracenis, a citizen of Vicenza and son of Hieronymus; in modern scholarship, his name is sometimes vulgarised to Biagio Saraceni. What is notable is that the date of this manuscript makes Blasius’s work an early example of the italic bookhand, a style invented in the immediately preceding years. In particular, there are very few examples at this early date of one written at such a small module (the minims are no more than 1mm high).

The scribe most closely associated with the invention of italic is the second master we need to mention: Bartolomeo Sanvito. His stock is, at present, very high, in large part because of the detailed work done on him by the late Tilly de la Mare, carefully completed by Laura Nuvoloni. His skill is undoubted, and the beauty of many of his manuscripts remarkable, but we should not imagine he was a lone worker, creating a new script in solitary confinement. Even Poggio Bracciolini, the creator of humanist littera antiqua, was not experimenting alone, and his achievement was a revival and reform of an earlier bookhand. The creation of italic was arguably more revolutionary, a construction of a new vision of text on the page. To achieve this and, especially, to ensure it gained wider acceptance, what was surely required was not a single genius but team-work. In that équipe, Blasius had a significant role.

It is already known, thanks to de la Mare, that Blasius’s own innovations preceded those of Sanvito. It is likely that they knew each other as Blasius was in Sanvito’s hometown of Padua in the 1450s, until just before he made this manuscript. It is also clear that there were strong similarities between their practices. The best place to be able to observe this is here in the Houghton Library, for Harvard is the fortunate owner of three manuscripts written by Sanvito. One of those, a copy of Sallust which is MS. Richardson 17, dated by de la Mare and Nuvoloni to c. 1487-88. It is of nearly identical dimensions with MS. Typ. 447 (page size in the former: 136 x 90mm; in the latter: 138 x 93mm), and each is in an early binding, so they allow us to compare like with like.

Perhaps most notable is how both scribes present the title in painted capitals, with a change of colour for each line.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 447, fol. 10v.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Richardson 17, fol. 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following Blasius’s opening title, he provides the colophon in blue, in a littera antiqua, but his main script and that of Sanvito’s bear share many characteristics. There is a difference: Sanvito’s bookhand looks more strident, an effect partly achieved by decreasing the distinction between thin and thick strokes which is on display in Blasius’s work. That should make us marvel at the skill with which Blasius wrote such tiny letters with frequent turns of the pen.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Richardson 17, fol. 138v.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 447, fol. 13.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is not on such palaeographical details that I want to dwell. Instead, look at the layout each chooses to use. There is, certainly, an obvious similarity: the majority of each page is blank. That, as I have written before, is a basic co-ordinate of any respectable manuscript, though both take it further than many would. Blasius’s written space occupies only 36% of the page, while Sanvito shows even greater chutzpah, allowing exactly two-thirds of the page to be margins. Yet, there is a contrast between their mise-en-page. It is that Sanvito’s perhaps looks less familiar: he employs a markedly narrow space for the text. It has been suggested by that leading bibliographer, Paul Needham, that Sanvito’s practice might, in general, have been inspired by an interest in the golden ratio — that is, the idea that there is a particularly proportion that is pleasing to the eye, which in mathematics is signified by the letter phi and which equals 1.618. That is to say, the height would be 1.618 times the width. In fact, Sanvito in this manuscript provides something a little different: in the page (the dimensions of which I have already given) the written space is 90 x 45mm. Thus, the width of the text is half its height which is the width of the page which is two-thirds of height of page, with the result that the width of the text is a third of the height of the page.

At this point, I will put in a plea to all those cataloguing manuscripts. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is usual to record solely the size of the page and of the written space, but to fully appreciate the layout, it is important to provide the measurements of the margins too, so that the reader can appreciate the placing of the text-block on the page. This is done in the Italian tradition in a formula (using the recto): (upper margin + [height] + lower margin) x (inner margin + [width] + outer margin). Thus, in this formula, MS. Richardson 17 = (11 + [90] + 35) x (16 + 45 + 29)mm. Those figures give a clearer sense of what Sanvito is doing: the written width is set within margins where the inner is half of the outer, so the proportions across the page are 1:3:2. The height, meanwhile, is placed within margins which are, in total, half of its height, divided unequally to be approximately 1:3.

Let us return to Blasius’s manuscript and his arrangement of the text. In the formula, MS. Typ. 447 = (14 + [86] + 38) x (13 + [54] + 26)mm. You may notice that margins of the width have, as in MS. Richardson 17, an inner margin half the size of the outer. The arrangement of the height is also similar, with the lower margin nearly three times that of the upper. It might be noted in passing, that these proportions would have surprised earlier generations, where (as Erik Kwakkel has noted) it was more usual to have a lower margin only twice the size of the upper. What, though, is more significant for us is that, while Sanvito and Blasius share some co-ordinates of the page, Blasius does not have the height of the written space as double that of the total margin space above and below it. Instead, the proportions are closer to 1.65. More tellingly, the height of the written space to its width and the height of the page to the height of the written space approximate to 1.61 — that is to say, close to the golden ratio.

If all these numbers have made you call for a icepack to cool your head, let us draw this to its conclusion: while Sanvito and Blasius are working with a similar sense of the beautiful page, and perhaps developed that aesthetic together when both were in Padua in the 1450s, there is also a difference. It is Blasius who ensures his page echoes the golden ratio, while Sanvito in later years moves away from it to develop instead a layout based on the prime numbers of two, three and five.

This is not quite the end of the tale or of the fascination of MS. Typ. 447. It has an interesting later history, including being owned by the early twentieth-century Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in that other Cambridge, in England. When it was bought by Sydney Cockerell in 1917, it had lost the opening page of its text. He turned to a known calligrapher, Graily Hewitt, to provide a supply leaf.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 447, fol. 12, supply leaf by Graily Hewitt (1917).

Hewitt’s work is very accomplished, though it patently contrasts in style of script with that used by Blasius. Part of Hewitt’s skill is in providing the exact number of words required while following the ruling Blasius used in his work. One wonders whether, in accepting that layout as his guide, this third master of the page was conscious that he too was paying homage to the golden ratio.

Postcard from Harvard VI: an unnoticed manuscript from the circle of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester

The thrill of the library lies mainly, as I have said before, in allowing serendipity to work its magic and wish upon you a discovery. We might also consider that there is a taxonomy of such discoveries. There are those that are instantaneous and inescapable: they insist on not being ignored. Others, in contrast, are more surreptitious, not revealing themselves immediately but growing as a suspicion in one’s mind. There is, we should add, a third category: that ‘find’ which first seems plausible only to evaporate on further inspection — on those occasions, serendipity is more akin to the satanic verses.

We always hope, of course, to avoid that third class, and the one I am about to discuss falls instead into the second category. The endpoint (or final cause) of this post is, as usual on this trip to Cambridge MA, to provide a description of the manuscript in question, even though there is an excellent description in print by Laura Light; the rationale for compiling a new one is that we can now have a deeper understanding of the production of the volume. As an introduction to that description, it may perhaps be of some interest to reconstruct the steps I took to making this discovery.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Lat. 41, p. 3

Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644) by William Dobson (c) The Royal Welsh Regimental Museum Trust; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

My attention was drawn to MS. Lat. 41, an acephalous and (slightly) imperfect humanist copy of Cornelius Nepos, by a line in Laura Light’s description. She notes that it had been in the collection of Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644); that makes this volume a relatively early arrival from Italy in England and, while there are cases of early seventeenth-century imports, it raised the question of whether he was its first English owner. On seeing the manuscript, it became clear that he was not, because at a back flyleaf which was once the original wrapper to the book, there are two prayers in Latin, written in an English secretary script of the mid-sixteenth century. Their addition could give pause to thought: are they pre-Edwardian or Marian or perhaps recusant? I admit I did not stop to think further because their presence, pushing back its English provenance further, raised the question of how the book reached the country. In the mid-century, England was, notoriously, more of an exporter of manuscripts than an importer, and it is therefore likely that it arrived in an earlier generation: but by what route?

This query in my mind was compounded by the sensation the manuscript exuded of being familiar. The manuscript is localised by Light (on the basis of advice from A. C. de la Mare) as being from ‘Northeastern Italy, s. xv2’. This seemed right to me but I wondered whether we could narrow down place and date further. First of all, the counterpart to the back flyleaf — the front part of the wrapper — presented a contents list written in a script, contemporaneous with the text, which I was sure I had seen before, in a manuscript in the Bodleian, MS. Auct. F. 2. 19. I did not have an image of the relevant page to hand, but through the good offices and humanitas of Daniel Wakelin, one arrived on my screen and confirmed my suspicion. We know the name of this person: he called himself ‘Doctor Garsia Petri’, and we also know that he was in contact with a nobleman visiting Italy in 1458-61 from England, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. It may, in fact, be Doctor Garsia who gave Tiptoft MS. Auct. F. 2. 19, a copy of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations in a variety of littera antiqua associated with (but not by) the leading Paduan scribe, Bartolomeo Sanvito.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Lat. 41, p. 2

Oxford: Bodleian, MS. Auct. F. 2. 19, fol. 139 (with thanks to Dan Wakelin, whose finger appears here, for the photo).

What is more — and what ensured MS. Lat. 41 exuded that sense of familiarity — its main script has strong similarities with that in MS. Auct. F. 2. 19. It is by no means as calligraphic, even at times appearing to be rushed, and we might doubt that the scribe of the Oxford manuscript (and of other ones, listed by de la Mare and Nuvoloni in the appendix to their indispensable study of Sanvito) could ever make something as unaccomplished as this volume. Even if it is not by him, though, the similarities suggest that it came from the same milieu: that is, Padua, early in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. I will admit, though, that my suspicion is that we are, in truth, seeing the same scribe at work (as it were) on an off day.

There are, then, associations with Tiptoft but he obviously was not the only book-collector in north-east Italy in the later 1450s. Is there anything which could confirm an association with him? I went through the manuscript several times and there are not the usual tell-tale signs that I have mentioned on other occasions as being found in other manuscripts owned by him: neither his distinctive manicula nor any annotation next to the text appears here. There are, however, running headers in one of the lives presented here — and their script does appear to be a match for that of a running header in another Bodleian manuscript, MS. Auct. F. 1. 7, where the intervention is certainly by Tiptoft.

Cambridge MA: Houghton, MS. Lat. 41, p. 25, with running header by John Tiptoft

Oxford: Bodleian, Ms. Auct. F. 1. 7, fol. 2, with running header (and annotation at foot) by John Tiptoft.

In other words, the evidence accumulated by turning the pages of MS. Lat. 41 eventually made it undeniable that this manuscript was made in Padua in the later 1450s and was used by John Tiptoft. In the title of the post and in the description, however, I have refrained from claiming he owned it. There were other Englishmen in his entourage who could have commissioned it (and for whom a manuscript of lesser quality would have been more fitting); it is also known that the earl sometimes wrote in books he did not own. Equally, though, there is no sign of his companions — either John Free or John Gunthorp — in this volume. Perhaps I am being overly cautious, but better to err on that side than over-confidence.

I am open to persuasion on that point but it does not greatly affect the consequence of the discovery. It takes the number of manuscripts associated with Tiptoft to forty, an increase of over 30% since the last detailed discussion by Tilly de la Mare thirty years ago. It has long been known that Tiptoft was an avid collector and reader of humanist books but the surviving evidence for his interests has necessarily be considered meagre. That is changing and with it not only our understanding of the earl but also of the Italian milieux in which he moved. Let us hope that serendipity strikes again.