Fragment of a bifolium from the Gospels, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [Spain, 12th century].

A fragment from a Spanish Gospel book
Fragment of a bifolium from the Gospels, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [Spain, 12th century].
A fragment from a 12th-century Spanish manuscript with unusual use of red capitals.

c.265 × 230mm. 2 columns of 33 lines, in a protogothic bookhand, capitals in the gospels in red, the text comprising the end of Mark (15:36–16:20) followed by a prologue to Luke, '[despon]dum eum […] Explicit evangelium secundum Marcum. Incipit prologus in evvangelio secundum Lucam. Lucas Sirus Antiocensis arte medicus […] extra ea quę ordo’; (probably the usual one, Stegmüller, Repertorium biblicum, no 620, but perhaps no 615) and Chapters 16–21 of the Capitula followed by Luke 1:1–12 (‘unus reversus […] Expliciunt Capitula. Incipit evangelium secundum Lucam. Quoniam quidem […] irruit super eum’), numerous marginal cross-references to the other gospels, decorated with one decorative pen-drawn initial in red and green and another in red (recovered from use as a wrapper, with some consequent damage, one line lacking at lower edge due to cropping, the outer face dirty).

Provenance:
(1) Inscribed with the dates ‘1607’ and ‘1607, 1608’, and title(?) ‘Constitutor(um?)’.
(2) Bernard Quaritch, Catalogue 1036: Medieval Manuscript Leaves, Principally from a Collection Formed in the 19th Century, Bookhands of the Middle Ages [I] (London, 1984), no. 61.
(3) Colker MS 389; acquired in 1987–88 from Quaritch.

The use of red capitals in the text of the gospels for the first letter of sentences for which there are marginal cross-references is extremely unusual: normally a scribe would write the whole text in brown ink, and then subsequently add a red stroke to capitals. We might imagine that the scribe worked with two pens and two ink-pots (as if often shown in medieval depictions of scribes at work), especially as there do not seem to be any marginal guides-letters, except for the fact that one capital has been omitted: at Mark 16:2 the opening ‘E’ is missing: ‘[E]t valde mane una Sabbatorum […]’.

The lack of guide-letters for the capital letters in the main text is even more curious because guide-letters are provided for the marginal cross-references: where a passage of text can be paralleled in all four gospels (i.e. the first of the Eusebian Canon Tables), the references are written around a red number ‘i’; where a passage occurs in three gospels, there is a red number ‘ii’, and so on, up to ‘x’, for passages paralleled only in Matthew.

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