Seneca, Tragoediae, Northern Italy (?Bologna), s. xiv ex, with binding fragments from a gospel book, England (Lindisfarne), s. viiiin

Title

Seneca, Tragoediae, Northern Italy (?Bologna), s. xiv ex, with binding fragments from a gospel book, England (Lindisfarne), s. viiiin

Shelfmark

Lincoln College MS. Lat. 92

Place of origin

Northern Italy (?Bologna)

England, Lindisfarne

Date

s. viiiin

s. xiv ex.

Language

Latin

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Parchment is Italian, white and silky on the flesh-side, slightly more velvety nap on the hair, but with little difference in colour. The material is somewhat unyielding and there is cockling at the middle of the fore-edge. Arranged like to like, flesh-side outermost.

Physical extent

i (vellum) + 163 + ii (foliated 165–165, conjugate bifolium of Insular parchment (s. viiiin) 2 formerly pastedown).

Hands

One scribe writing an expert northern Italian Gothic Rotunda. The letters are well formed, entirely consistent and perfectly justified at the left. Tall-s is found in initial and medial position with round-s in terminal position and less frequent use at the end of lines of the secondary Italian form of round-s with attenuated lower curve (becoming more frequent in the later reaches of the manuscript). Although there are small differences in the overall performance, the letters becoming slightly larger and showing increasing effect from the slant-pen angle, it does seem to be the work of one hand throughout, as is affirmed by the ductus in particular of g, s, and round-backed d. Ascenders on the top line are routinely elaborated with cadels. Ink ranges from mid-brown to black. Punctuation by virgule, punctus elevatus, and low point. Running headings were supplied by the rubricator.

Decoration

Illuminated pages throughout have been robbed, with consequent loss of text (leaves before 21, 37, 46, 64, 79, 94, 109, 122, 136). The first leaf remains but the initial S has been excised with its border decoration, leaving a window that extends up and down the inner margin; an outlying gold ball remains. Of the more than sixty copies of Seneca’s Tragedies that contain miniatures, the great majority are Italian and were produced at the end of the fourteenth century and start of the fifteenth (MacGregor, ‘Handlist’, 1258–60, with a survey of pictorial treatments which can be applied to this missing initial).

Borders, lost: see above.

Remaining decoration is confined to minor initials signifying the start of major new speeches: these are blue or red three-line capitals with some quite extravagant penwork flourishing in the other colour, extending the full height of the written space. These were done by a limner who was not the scribe. Briefer exchanges in the text are signified by simple blue or red capitals in initial position with the speaker’s name abbreviated in red in the adjacent margin, by the main scribe, who also added the rubricated running heads.

Binding

By Roger Barnes of Oxford (d. 1631), an early seventeenth-century binding of reverse calf over pulpboard. Decoration on both boards is restricted to a rectilinear pattern of intersecting lines. Three-line blind fillets to the edges crossing unmitred at the corners, repeated inset at 40 mm to produce a square at each corner and a central panel, unembellished. Sewn on six single, whittawed thongs, laced into the board and raised at the spine. Endbands of white thread are non-structural. Paired fore-edge ties of undyed cord are cut away flush to the boards. Fore-edges are sprinkled red. Marks of the usual college chain clip are at the fore-edge of the back board towards the head; nail-holes and verdigris on the lifted pastedown. The condition of the binding is very good with no warping and only a small amount of splitting at the tailcap. Pastedown of Italian vellum at the front, still pasted down, and early Insular parchment at the back, which was lifted in 1896 according to E. N. Bennett (see Labels and marks).

Labels and marks: There are no medieval marks of ownership. The James number ‘85’ in pale brown ink is at the head of fol. 1v. On the front flyleaf recto in brown ink of s. xvii is ‘ff: 51: 12’. The College bookplate of 1703 is affixed in normal position at the centre of the front pastedown. The Bodleian shelf-mark is written in pencil underneath: ‘MS. Linc. Coll. (d) Lat. 92’. The fore-edge label is rubbed away and illegible. On the spine, square paper labels: at the head, an arabic numeral 25 on the small, printed label, and at the foot the larger, blue-bordered label, nineteenth-century, with ‘92’ in ink. Below that is the printed label with Bodleian shelf-mark, now mostly rubbed away. A brief notice by E. N. Bennett, ‘An eighth-century fragment of the Vulgate’, from The Academy, 30 Nov. 1896 is fixed to the front pastedown.

Provenance

The manuscript was produced in northern Italy and appears to have passed between a number of Italian readers before it was acquired by Robert Flemming, who arrived at the university of Padua in 1446 and was in Italy frequently thereafter.

There are no medieval inscriptions in the manuscript but it is asserted in the College’s 1474 inventory to have come from Robert Flemming: ‘Item tragedie senece ex dono eiusdem (sc. Roberti Flemmyng’), 2o fo. aperitque’ (A1. 78). It would have been part of Flemming’s large donation of 1465. At that time, it was being shelved on the fourth desk on the south side of the library, among other Latin classics.

How this Italian manuscript came to be bound with fragments of an early eighth-century gospel book from Lindisfarne is worth some speculation. Nothing is known of the gospel book’s earlier provenance, but Oxford and not Italy was surely the locale where these leaves were brought into the binding. There are two possibilities: that it was done for Robert Flemming, who was resident in Oxford when he returned from Rome, or done instead at the time of the rebinding by Robert Barnes in the early seventeenth century. In favour of the latter suggestion would be the situation at Durham cathedral priory, which had absorbed books from Lindisfarne into its collection after the exiled community established itself there in 995; the library of Durham College in Oxford was stocked with books from the mother-house. A list of books at this Oxford studium in 1315 refers to a gospel book in two volumes (Durham Cathedral Muniments, Misc. Ch. 7307/4), although this sounds more like the glossed gospels in two volumes that was reported c. 1395 (2.6.Ebor.5). More plausibly, our unglossed copy would have been used as a textus in a liturgical setting, and it would be possible to imagine it in a precious binding on the high altar of the college’s chapel. When Durham College was finally dissolved in 1545, its books were scattered and, as happened to manuscripts from nearby Canterbury College, they found their way into local stationers’ shops to be mined for waste parchment. The supply of parchment leaves in Oxford was so great that it seems to have lasted well into the early seventeenth century, when paper waste began to take over. Against this suggestion it should be pointed out that Barnes’s habitual practice when rebinding the College’s books was to reuse the medieval pastedowns and flyleaves which he found with them. Joining two old, written bifolia to be rear flyleaves would not be his normal practice. The two ancient fragments that are present in Lincoln College bindings—the Lindisfarne specimen and the leaf of a Tours Bible in Lat. 37—happen both to be found in books presented to the College by Robert Flemming. Were these fragments in fact his? They are unusually early specimens of script, not only in relation to the rest of the College’s books but also in relation to Oxford pastedowns in general: Ker, Pastedowns, reports little else of such early date. Flemming had a humanist’s interest in old manuscripts and the reformed script (as is represented by the Tours fragment), and he borrowed and acquired romanesque books, such as Lat. 63, 100 and Oxford, The Queen’s College, MS 202. At least one of these, Lat. 63, was from a northern religious house, which may help to account for his possession of a fragment probably from Durham.

Booklists: Vetus Registrum, fol. 16v; James, Ecloga, no. 85; CMA1/2. 1288.