Beschreibung:

with prologues and Interpretations of Hebrew Names, decorated manuscript in Latin on parchment [England (probably Oxford), mid-thirteenth century] 437 leaves (plus 2 modern endleaves at each end), wanting a few single leaves (including a leaf from Job, which ends imperfectly in 41:21, and two from the Psalms which start imperfectly in 8:6 and are wanting Psalm 49:8-57:5, a leaf or two after Deuteronomy, with 12:15-18:22, and the same from I Kings, with 5:1-7:15, and a single leaf with the end of St Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews and the opening of the Acts of the Apostles), bound too tightly to collate, double column, 50 lines in a tiny early gothic bookhand, capitals touched in red, one-line initials in red or blue, running titles alternate in same, larger initials in same with penwork tracery, over 70 large initials in variegated blue and red (the colours separated by sweeping strokes or crenelated lines, and the 2 opening initials full-page in height with small clover shapes and dots picked out in blank parchment within their coloured panels), with offshoots of mirrored coloured leaf-shapes or elaborate penwork tracery in contrasting colours filling the borders, some terminating in small animal heads, the interpretations of Hebrew Names in 3 columns of 50 lines, numerous additions of thirteenth to sixteenth century in pen or drypoint in apparently English hands, tiny contemporary repair to a leaf at the end of Zachariah now with patch fallen away removing a small square 3 lines deep, and another leaf in the Minor Prophets with small patch covering the edge of a few lines of text, some spots and discolouration to endleaves and areas of ink loss to leaves in centre of volume due to poor ink (notably in Ezekiel), slightly trimmed at edges with small losses to edges of penwork and running titles, but overall in good and solid condition with wide and clean margins, 175 x 120mm., bound in nineteenth-century English morocco, profusely gilt in frames of arabesque designs (both inside and outside of boards), watered silk doublures, edges gilt and gauffered Provenance: (1) Most probably written and decorated for an Oxford student in the mid-thirteenth century, who seems to have added for his own reference the near-contemporary 5 page concordance of the Gospels at the end of the volume, listing subjects and chapter numbers in a series of long tables. Thereafter passing to a number of later English owners, with sixteenth-century and post-medieval names Wollocu[m]b in the upper border of a leaf from Colossians, John Templer, Thomas Pyme and William Cuttler amongst others below the beginning of Daniel (partially erased), and John By[***] at the foot of the opening of Micah. (2) Samuel Whyle: his seventeenth- or eighteenth-century ex libris at foot of the Prologue to Genesis and the opening of Genesis. (3) Henry Yates Thompson (1838-1928), newspaper owner and grand bibliophile, whose personal collections were either sold by Sotheby’s in the early 1920s or given to the British Library in two batches (one on his death and another on the death of his wife in 1941, with other gifts going to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. (4) The present volume was a gift to his descendant, Allan Heywood Bright (1862-1941), Liberal politician: an inscription and inserted letter from Yates Thompson recording his gift of the book at New Year 1894, as “one sometimes sees more beautiful examples of these Bibles, but they are very rare, & every collection of M.S.S. should have one of these”; by descent to Christies, 16 July 2014, lot 1. Text: The evolution of the thirteenth-century Bible marked the initial jump from the medieval production of books to the earliest form of cottage industry, with scribes working on copying quires at the same time as each other, all under the direction of a single libraire (see Shailor, The Medieval Book, 1988, p. 98 and Sotheby’s, The History of Western Script: 60 Important Leaves from the