Psalter and Hours of the Virgin

Title

Psalter and Hours of the Virgin

Shelfmark

St John's College MS 131

Associated place

Buxton (Leics.)

Place of origin

Italy

Date

s. xv2

Language

Latin

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Vellum (FSOS/FHHF).

Physical extent

Fols. iv + 174(numbered fols. 1–172, v–vi) + iii (numbered fols. vii–ix).

Hands

Written in gothic textura rotunda . Punctuation by point and double point .

Decoration

In the Psalter, which provides the decorative standard for the whole, headings in red; individual psalms introduced by alternating 2-line lombards, gold leaf on purple flourishing and blue on red flourishing.

Verses divided by similar lombards, 1 line high.

Larger psalter divisions are marked by champes with floral sprays (more colourful than English examples).

These also appear at the head of the abbreviated Psalter (fol. 96v), of the Hours (fol. 104, etc.), and of the Offices for specific hours within the various sets.

After fol. 114, a floral column border typically accompanies such initials at major breaks.

There is one fully illuminated page, at the head of the Psalter (fol. 7): a full border of lacy foliage and flowers, with putti hunters (one certainly an angel with trumpet) and animals; a historiated initial with David and his harp; and two roundels, one unfilled, the second David beheading Goliath.

Six historiated initials with bar borders the height of the page in the style of fol. 7; these initials, all but the first and last lines high, alternate with the champes in marking divisions of the Psalter into nocturns: David with his harp (fol. 19, 8 lines); similarly (fol. 26v); fool with a watching angel (fol. 34); David calling from the waters (fol. 41v); David with his harp (fol. 51v); the enthroned Virgin and child with a kneeling suppliant in sackcloth (fol. 160, 9 lines).

See AT, no. 967 (101) and plate lxviii (fol. 7), ascribing the work to the Neapolitan painter Cola Rapicano.

Binding

Modern replacement. Bound on three thongs. At the front, a marbled paper leaf, two modern paper flyleaves, and a medieval vellum flyleaf at the rear, two modern paper flyleaves and another marbled paper leaf (vii–ix).

Acquisition

‘Liber Collegij Divi Johannis Baptistae Oxon’ ex dono Domini Gulielmi PaddeiMilitis et ejusdem Collegij olim Convictoris 1634’ (fol. 2, upper margin).

Provenance

Additions to the calendar, associated with the recusant Westons of Buxton (Leics.) , presumably in the hand of William Weston. He married in 1560 Helen, daughter of John Story who was executed in 1571 (see 13 May and 1 June); their child Edward Weston, a Catholic writer, was still alive in 1633 (his birth in 1566 under 30 October). These added entries cover 1557–96 (the last, under 21 November, for the death of William Weston). These relationships are explicated by s. xix notes, based on Antony Wood’s researches (fol. iirv). An earlier William Weston (d. 1540) had been a knight Hospitaller, who fought in the siege of Rhodes 1522 and was Lord Prior of the order in England 1527–40.

Latin verses‘debetur summo gloria summa deo’; ‘A domino solo pendet mea vita salusque │ ipse regat solus me ac mea cuncta sibi’ (fol. iiiv, s. xvi ex.; the second distich repeated at the top of fol. 1), neither in Walther.