Prayer book; ca. 1500–1520, Bavaria

Title

Prayer book; ca. 1500–1520, Bavaria

Shelfmark

MS. Don. e. 253

Associated place

Salzburg

Augsburg

Place of origin

Central Bavaria

Date

ca. 1500–1520

Language

Middle High German (ca. 1050-1500)

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Parchment.

Physical extent

1 + 78 + leaves; one loose paper leaf.

Hands

Copied in a single late Gothic formal text hand, datable ca. 1500–1520. Extensive red headings, red (and occasionally blue) initial letters.

Decoration

Major initials are decorated with floral infilling in penwork.

Occasional human masks and cadelles in the upper margins; scribal pen-flourishing in the lower margins with abstract or floral patterns and masks.

Binding

Probably contemporary. Sewn onto two double thongs laced into wooden boards, covered with brown calf. Blind stamped and ruled (two floral stamps and one roll). The endleaves are those supplied by the binder, that at the front inscribed with a German prayer in a later sixteenth–century hand. Two copper-alloy clasps on leather straps closing on the upper board. Remains of paper labels on the spine suggest an early-modern institutional provenance, as yet unidentified.

Acquisition

Bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, 2022.

Provenance

Charles E. Roseman, Jr. (1913–52).

Sotheby’s Western Manuscripts and Miniatures, London, 6 December 2005, pp. 54-55, lot 43 (with colour plate of fol. 1r). One of fifteen items of Roseman provenance. Sold to:

Nigel Palmer (1946–2022).