From an unusual copy of a popular text, with a distinguished provenance.
The parent manuscript was doubly unusual: the vast majority of manuscripts are French and 13th century: this is English and 14th-century. One other English 14th-century copy is San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 31189. Because the text is composed in short lines of verse, copies are sometimes in a tall, narrow, ‘holster’ format (cf. [MLC 361] lot 69).
Provenance:
(1) Apparently from an English monastic library: the parent volume (see below) is recorded to have had a 16th-century inscription on the penultimate leaf including the words ‘huius monasterii’.
(2) Hugh Grosvenor (1879–1953), 2nd Duke of Westminster: sold by the Trustees of his will at Sotheby’s, 11 July 1966, lot 229 (then consisting of 267 leaves, but apparently already missing the first gathering, 13 other leaves, and the initials from three more leaves; it had only six illuminated leaves out of an original total of at least 20); bought for £320 by:
(3) Francis Edwards, London bookseller, who presumably dismembered it.
(4) from the collection of Marvin Colker (1927-2020), Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, palaeographer and classicist, Colker MS 156.
We are grateful to Eric Johnson for information about the provenance and sister leaves, one of which was Quaritch, Bookhands of the Middle Ages VIII (2007), no 96 (col. ill.); two are at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI; one is at the University of South Carolina; and another is at Ohio State University.
