Beschreibung:

Acta Sanctorum, with readings for the Feast of St. Thyrsus (28 January), in Latin, complete leaf in Visigothic minuscule from a monumental manuscript [northern Spain (probably Silos), c. 1080] Single vast leaf, with double column, 33 lines in a large and refined Visigothic minuscule, with a ‘t’ with a backwards curling top-bar creating the impression of a ‘ct’, a ‘c’ with a vertical tail which causes it to look like an uncial ‘G’, tall capital ‘I’ used within sentences, and a strange ‘x’ with a vertical lower left stroke and tiny corresponding upper stroke which twists the letter to resemble an ‘F’, one small red initial ‘I’ on reverse with trailing red penwork and set within red penstrokes, the original leaf on a grand scale: remaining borders (vertical 72 mm. wide; bas-de-page 73 mm. wide) showing that the original dimensions must have been approximately 470 by 370 mm., reused on an account book binding and with scuffs to reverse and notes dated 1582 (see below), trimmed at one vertical side and at top to edge of text, somewhat cockled, overall in good condition with wide and clean borders and on heavy Romanesque parchment, 397 by 301 mm. Manuscripts in the strange pre-Carolingian script, Visigothic minuscule, are of great rarity: “Apart from Paris and London, very few libraries in Europe can boast of more than one or two Visigothic manuscripts. The great Bodleian of Oxford has not a single one” (E.A. Lowe). Even as scraps of leaves they are few and far enough between to inhibit any institution or collector from attempting to gather more than perhaps two or three in a lifetime, and nothing of the size of this leaf has been seen on the market in living memory. When the barbarian Visigoths swept into the old province of Roman Hispania in the early fifth century, they established a medieval Christian state there which would ultimately lay the foundations of modern Spain. They inherited the scholarship of the late Roman world (and this was gleaned for information and pulled together by Isidore of Seville, c. 560-636, perhaps producing a survey of civilised knowledge for his Visigothic masters in his Etymologiae) and drew their script from late Roman cursive hands, producing a distinctive national hand at some point in the following centuries. Like Beneventan script (see lot 5), Visigothic was one of the few which stubbonly refused to be swept away by the Carolingian reforms of the late eighth and early ninth century, and it carried on in use in northern Spain throughout the Romanesque period. The last examples to come to the market are two from the Schøyen collection (his sale, Sotheby’s, 10 July 2012, lot 21, a leaf from a tenth-century Commentary on the Benedictine Rule, wanting half of one column, and measuring 274 by 150 mm. (a bifolium from the prologue of the same volume is Beinecke Library MS 447, illustrated B. Shailor, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, II, 1987, p. 398); and lot 22, three small strips from a eleventh-century liturgical volume, each approximately 125 by 30 mm., the latter making £19,000 hammer); and to these should be added an eleventh-century charter in Visigothic minuscule offered by Christie’s, 20 November 2013, lot 15. Provenance: Probably from the ancient Visigothic monastery of San Domingo de Silos (founded seventh century, reaching its zenith of building and artistic activity at the end of the eleventh century, and closed in 1835 when its estates and library were auctioned), in the province of Burgos: with inscriptions on reverse recording that this leaf was used to enclose the sixteenth-century accounts of the properties, lands and vineyards of the Church of San Cosme (St. Cosmo) in the town of “Cobarr” (most probably Covarrubias near Silos, where there was a Colegiata de San Cosme y Damián from the fifteenth century onwards).