Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts
Brief Entry
Detailed Entry
MS. 2
Dominican Psalter
Contents:
Date of origin:1423-1456
Place of origin: Nuremburg, Germany
Support:
parchment codex
Foliation:
11th and every 20 folium (31, 51, etc.) numbered through 91; every 10th folium after 91 is numbered in lead by a modern hand.
Dimensions:160mm x 110mm (leaves), 100mm x 70mm (ruled space)
Collation:18 (-1) 2-188 196 20-278 286 294
Script:The text is written by two distinguishable 15th-century book hands. In addition, there are corrections and notes in two possibly contemporary hands and corrections in three later hands.
Binding:Bound in brown calf on wooden boards stamped with floriation and roundels containing Roman busts in the middle rectangle of the design. Two brass clasps are on the front cover but the leather straps have been torn off. Metal tabs have been attached to folios throughout the codex. Four remain intact in the bottom half of the pages. Remains of others persist throughout. In some cases, tabs correspond to pages with decorated initials: ff. 8r, 37v, 54v, 70v, 86v, 106v, and 180r.
Additions:The corrector's hand is observed on ff. 92v and 93r, both on line 15. On 92v, the corrector has erased roughly one-half of the line and inserted "[no]n sunt: et cum". The corrector's letters are taller and in an ink that is lighter than the main hand. On f. 93r, the corrector has erased three-quarters of the line, even tearing a small hole in the parchment. The correction reads "castigacio mea in matu[tinis]." A second correction, in the hand of the main scribe, is found on f. 200v: "prius aut posterius nichil". The caret mark for insertion is in red and corresponds (though barely visible due to trimming of the folium) to the marginal signal. The fourth hand, a marginal annotator, first appears on f. 144r and again on ff. 145r, 145v, 149r, 150r, 164r [first readable text (German): "Montag"], 164v, 165v, 168r, 170v, 175r, and 180v. The fifth hand appears only three times, hastily writing numbers (7,4,6) in the margin of ff. 145r, 145v, and 173r. The sixth hand is the paginator in pencil on the folia noted above. The seventh hand appears only once on f. 205v with the marginal "sapienciam"
Provenance:
Specific mention of Saints Katherine, Margaret, Ursula, Kunegund, and Sebald in the Dominican calendar (ff. 1r-6v) indicate a likely provenance from the Dominican convent of St. Katherine in Nuremburg, Germany. Inside the front cover there is a label of George A. Leavitt and Company, Auctioneers, New York. There is also a label of D. G. Francis, Bookseller, 17 Astor Place, New York; it bears an image of a serpent entwined around an anchor.
Bibliography:Corbett, James A. "Two German Dominican psalters," in Mediaeval Studies. v. 13 (1951): 247-252.
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