A leaf from a Caroligian Homiliary
A very large leaf from a Homiliary, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [Italy, first half 12th century].
A very imposing and elegant example of 12th-century Italian script and decoration.

c.500 × 350mm. 2 columns of 50 lines, in Caroline minuscule with a rubric in red uncials, the text comprising the end of Leo I’s Sermo 68, followed by the beginning of Paschasius Radbertus’s Epistola ad Paulam et Eustochium, on the Assumption of the Virgin, in the style of and here attributed to St Jerome (‘misericordia dei […] in sæcula sæculorum Amen. Sermo Iheronimi presbyteri De assumptione sanctae Marie ad Paulam et Eustochium. Cogitis me o Paula et Eustochium […] Quam sane archangelis’), decorated with a foliate initial ‘C’ in red infilled with blue, a late-medieval number ‘259’ in the upper fore-edge margin is perhaps a folio number (natural flaw in vellum in the upper two lines of the outer column, around which the scribe had to write).

Provenance:
(1) Sold at Sotheby's, 25 June 1985, part of lot 7, bought by Maggs (Colker and Maggs appear to have believed it was formerly owned by Mark Lansburgh (1925–2013), teacher and collector of manuscripts, but he was apparently only the previous owner of another item in the Sotheby’s lot)
(2) Colker MS 357; acquired in 1985 from Maggs.

On the authorship of the Epistola ad Paulam et Eustochium, see Hannah W. Matis, ‘The Seclusion of Eustochium: Paschasius Radbertus and the Nuns of Soissons’, Church History 85.4 (2016), 665–89.

This lot is offered without reserve.
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