Super Parabolas, Super librum Tobit: MS McClean 108

Titles

Super Parabolas, Super librum Tobit

Maker(s)

Author: Bede

Entities

• Other

Categories

• Illuminated manuscript
• Manuscript

Description

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Parchment and paper, ix paper flyleaves (c.1455, stitched on strip of parchment glued to fol. 1 and foliated i – ix) + 110 fols., 243 x 175 (169 – 177 x 114) mm, 28 – 29 long lines, ruled in hard point, written above top line (except paper quire at front, 241 x 165 (193 – 200 x 128) mm, 2 columns, 41 – 46 lines, ruled in plummet), quire marks, leaf cancelled or lost between fols. 82 – 83.

BINDING: eleventh century, alum tawed skin over wooden boards, sewn on three supports, traces of two fastening devices on foredge, trace of a third one and remains of corresponding strap (reused manuscript fragment) in centre of foredge; repaired and rebacked in nineteenth century.

CONTENTS: fol. i recto Description of the manuscript in English (nineteenth-century addition); fols. ii recto – viii verso, Alphabetical index (addition dated 1455); fols. 1v – 98r Bede, Super Parabolas; fols. 98v – 109r Bede, Super librum Tobit; fols. 109v – 110r Two twelfth-century documents, their crucial words now erased: first one (fols. 109v – 110r) concerning a grant of 32 marks to the monasterium Sigiburgense and mentioning one Adelgerius and Reginhard, second Abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Michaelsberg in Siegburg (d.1105); second document (fol. 110r) recording a census of 12d payable in exchange for an estate in the time of Abbot Henry (domini Henrici Laurensis abbatis).

ORNAMENTATION: Red and brown ink initial [P, 25 ll.] formed of dragon and foliage scrolls on yellow ground (fol. 1v); red penwork initials [4 – 11 ll.] with foliage infill drawn in plummet (fols. 30v, 64v, 71r, 98v); red penwork initials [2 ll.] for subdivisions in Alphabetical index.

Nineteenth-century engraving of Bede pasted on fol. ix verso.

Notes

History note: At an unidentified church related to the Benedictine monastery of Michaelsberg in Siegburg in the twelfth century (fols. 109v – 100r); in Germany c.1454 – 1455 (date 1454 added on fol. 98r; Alphabetical index dated 1455 on fol. viii verso); at the Benedictine monastery of Amorbach at least by the seventeenth century (ownership inscription, fol. ii recto); recorded by the librarian of Armorbach, P. Anton Klug (d.1733), in his Collectanea as V. Bedae expositio in parabolas Salomonis videntur vergere ad saeculum XII vel saltem finem saeculi XI (Wendehorst 1955, 118); probably Fürst zu Leiningen (ex-libris stamped on fol. ii rector), the Fürstenhaus Leiningen was bequeathed with the library after the monastery’s secularization in 1802 (Kaiser 1984, 430 – 38) and most manuscripts were sold in June 1851 to the Antiquarian House Beck, Nördlingen; Beck tried to sell this manuscript for 200 fl. in July 1851 (Wendehorst 1955, 115); Thomas Bateman (1821 – 1861), Middleton Hall, by Youlgrave, Derbyshire, his arms and initials on spine; to his son, William Bateman; his sale, Sotheby’s, London, 25 – 31 May 1893, lot 191; purchased by Frank McClean (1837 – 1904); his bequest, 1904.