599 Years Ago Today

Today, 24 January, five hundred and ninety-nine years ago. The future pseudo-cardinal of S. Onofrio told those guys to pay the wine bill, for pete's sake!  Proof lies in this library's Smith Documents 0300, and here's a picture of it.  (Click on the image to see a larger size.) It's signed, "J., evesque de Saint […]

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Bertykin’s Books

Libraries care about library catalogues, or, more broadly, lists of books, compiled for all sorts of reasons.  On the back flyleaf of a manuscript of a well-known grammatical text is a list of medical books:  it's in the same hand as that of the grammar, and it ends with a curious statement: The sum of Bertykin, […]

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Technical vocabularies–serving wine in the Middle Ages

Plimpton MS 160 is a late 14th century manuscript held by this library; its texts are serious and scientific:  Euclid’s Elements, followed by theoretical treatises on astronomy and mensuration.  A while ago, I had noticed a casual drawing on f. 41v, an otherwise blank leaf at the end, but only recently made an effort to […]

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A “New” Medieval Manuscript

Great news: we were the successful bidders at the November auction of medieval manuscripts at Christie’s, London! The wonderful new addition to our collection, soon to be known officially as Western MS 88, is a canon law compilation, copied in France, ca. 1240. It’s a superb example of the way medieval books usually circulated, with […]

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