Choir Breviary (Franciscan Use)
Type: Manuscript
Date: 1260-1300
Setting: Central or Northern Italy (Umbria?)
Produced By/For: [unknown]
Contents: Devotional: Breviary
Shelf Mark: Ms.Lat.7
Location: Call no. BX2049 F7C46 1260
Description from Vendor
This large-format manuscript is a marvelous artifact of Franciscan life and worship. Used for singing by the Choir, it is notable for its content, including other texts not commonly found in more portable Franciscan Breviaries: the Franciscan Ceremonial (known to its editor in only thirty-five manuscripts), the Indutus planeta (Haymo of Faversham's description of the private Mass), the Franciscan liturgical statutes of 1254, and others. It is accompanied by additions over at least two centuries and other plentiful signs of early use.
Bound in Italy in the fifteenth century in substantial beveled wooden boards extending beyond the book block covered with blind-stamped brown leather, with an outer border of palmettes, framing a large rectangular center panel with four rope-interlace diamonds positioned to form a cross, above three large stamps of fleur-de-lis and foliage, rounded spine with four raised bands, four corner bosses upper and lower boards, two clasp and catch fasteners, fastening back to front (restored), edges once dyed green(?), rebacked with the spine laid down, resewn, with reinforcement strips added in the middle of quires, new head and tail bands, extensively restored but now in very good condition.
Full description available through Lesenluminures.com.
Provenance: Purchased from Les Enluminures, 2017.
Transcription and Textual Notes by Emma Usselman and Kira Razzo, December 2018
Transcription and textual notes* for fols. 2r-7v (liturgical calendar) by Emma Usselman and Kira Razzo, as part of coursework for a manuscript studies class with Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin (ENGL), December 2018, is available here.
* Transcription conventions follow those set out by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham in Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, 2007), pp. 75-78. Textual notes on manuscript features, scribal hands, and corrections follow the transcription. The work has been checked and lightly edited by Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin.
Images
Facsimile images available through UVic Libraries Digital Collections.
Images also available through Fragmentarium: on details of a paper patch on f. 129v; on its flyleaf, f. 1.
Click on thumbnail for full size image.
Back to Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts.