Goffredus de Trano, Summa super rubricis decretalium and Iohannes de Deo, Liber seu summa dispensationum, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment [northern Germany (perhaps Rhineland), fourteenth century, with an additional final quire of c.1400]

Goffredus de Trano, Summa super rubricis decretalium and Iohannes de Deo, Liber seu summa dispensationum, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment [northern Germany (perhaps Rhineland), fourteenth century (most probably first half of that century), with an additional final quire of c. 1400]

241 leaves (plus an endleaf at front), the last leaf pasted to backboard, complete, collation: i-iii8, iv6, v10, vi-xix8, xx6 (once 8, last 2 leaves cancelled blanks removed after Early Modern foliation), xxi-xxix8, xxx11 (first original leaf a blank cancel, removed before Early Modern foliation added), occasional catchwords and original quire signatures, seventeenth- or eighteenth-century foliation in upper right hand corner of rectos (slightly imperfect, but followed here), double column of 38 lines, in a small number of skilled gothic bookhands (see below), capitals touched alternately in red and blue, rubrics in red, running titles in red or blue capitals, initials alternately in red and blue with contrasting penwork, space left blank for Tables of Affinity and Consanguinity on fols. 169r and 171r, prick marks for lines remaining in outer margins, a few leaves with extremities of edges slightly turned over, 2 further leaves with small sections of blank edges torn away, and small cuts to gutters of adjacent leaves from removal of 2 cancelled blanks, some slight areas of discoloration, small spots and scuffs and occasional natural flaw in parchment, a few leaves showing the volume very slightly trimmed (removing mostly edges of lines of marginalia), overwhelmingly in excellent condition on cream-coloured heavy parchment with wide and clean margins, 305 by 220mm.; fifteenth-century German binding of blind-stamped pigskin (tooled with frames formed of simple fillet and geometric panels around a central floral boss within a rhombus) over massive wooden boards, the spine tooled in same and sewn on 5 double thongs, leather added over binding structures in German style with spine covered first and leather panels for boards then laid over (inner vertical edge of board cover now slightly lifted), title in ink on fore-edge, clasps wanting and holes in leather where these clasps once protruded from edges of boards stitched shut, some green stains in same place from missing copper-based clasps, light scuffing and a few scratches, small hole in leather of spine, front board very slightly coming away from some thongs, but solid in binding

An imposing and elegant German monastic codex, in its late medieval binding, and from the collections of Leander van Ess and Sir Thomas Phillipps

Provenance:

1. Most probably written and decorated in the first half of the fourteenth century for use in a German monastic community, perhaps in the Rhineland. The subsequent owner (Leander van Ess) obtained many books from monasteries in this region: he had served as a monk at Marienmünster in North-Rhine Westphalia and took books with him when it was dissolved in 1803. Perhaps significantly, a large group of his manuscripts came from the Carthusian monastery of St. Barbara in Cologne, which was founded in 1334. If future research upholds a connection to this last house, then it may have been among the founding books of their medieval library.

2. Leander van Ess (in fact Johann Heinrich van Ess, 1772-1847), important early bibliophile and manuscript collector at time of the suppression of the German monasteries and the spilling of their libraries onto the open market, pastor of Swalenberg, theologian at Marburg University, German translator of the New Testament, passionate proponent of lay Bible reading and founder of the Christliche Bruderbund zur Verbreitung der heiligen Schriften), with his printed collection number 95 on spine, this corresponding to the published catalogue of his collection: Sammlung und Verzeichniss Handscriftlicher [sic] Bücher aus dem VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV, etc. Jahrhundert …, Darmstadt, 1823, no. 95. On his library see: M. Mc. Gatch in 'So precious a foundation', the Library of Leander Van Ess at the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, 1996, pp. 47-84.

3. Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), the single greatest manuscript collector to have ever lived who assembled a collection of 60,000 manuscripts. This his MS. 480 and thus among his very first purchases, made in 1824 when he was only 33 years old, and as part of the entire manuscript collection of van Ess (some 372 volumes for £320). This was the famous acquisition for which van Ess naively sent the books to Phillipps before payment had been made, resulting in five years arguments and wrangling over Sir Thomas outrageous refusal to pay the entire bill (all described in van Ess angry letter of 1826, printed in A.N.L. Munby, The Formation of the Phillipps Library Up to the Year 1840, 1954, pp. 29-32). Phillipps paper label pasted to base of spine, and hand written numbers inside frontboard and at foot of fol. 1r. Sold in Phillipps sale, Sothebys, 24 April 1911, lot 274.

4. Walther Dolch (1883-1914) for the Eduard Langer Library. Langer (1852-1914) was an industrialist and politician based in Branau/Broumov (Bohemia/Upper Austria, now Czech Republic), who built the largest library of its kind in Austria-Hungary.

5. Fürst Alexander Olivier Anton von Dietrichstein zu Schloss Nikolsburg (1899-1964); his second sale with Gilhofer and Ranschburg, 25 June 1934, lot 286: lot number in pencil and sale catalogue clipping pasted inside front board.

6. Christies, 21 November 2012, lot 24, to Les Enlumineres, their TM. 676, sold in 2014.

Text:

This weighty monastic tome contains two important texts that were indispensable legal reference works for any ecclesiastical institution in the Middle Ages. The first is that of the Summa super rubricis decretalium by Goffredus of Trano (1200-1245) an Italian canon lawyer. He studied under the celebrated legal specialist Azo, and subsequently took up a professorship of Roman Law at Naples. In 1244, he was appointed cardinal by Innocent IV, his former fellow-student at Bologna. This text is the product of a comprehensive rewrite and improvement of his glosses on the Decretals, made in the years just before the authors death. It became the seminal work in its field and survives in 280 medieval codices.

To this has been appended the Liber seu summa dispensationum of Johannes de Deo (born 1189-91, d. 1267), a native of the Algarve, who studied canon law and perhaps also civil law at Bologna in the years before 1229. In due course, he taught in the university there for at least two decades, producing a number of summaries and digests of canon law. Around 1260 he took up office as archdeacon in Lisbon, and he died there some seven years later. The present text survives in two recensions composed before and after 1243, and that here is the second, shorter version (see J.P. von Schulte, Geschichte der Quellen und der Literatur des kanonischen Rechts, II, 1877, p. 96, n. 10, and A. de Sousa Costa, Doutrina penitencial do canonista Joâo de Deus, 1956, pp. 103-105, pp. 196-197, for a list of other manuscripts). It addresses the thorny legal issue of dispensation, the act by which an ecclesiastical superior could grant exemption from a particular law, most famously in the granting of the right to marry when kinship laws forbade this, or the right to dissolve a marriage. In this text Johannes de Deo examines all forms and types of dispensatio, granted by various members within the hierarchy of the Church, but also among the normal social bonds of lay society.

Script and date:

The vast majority of the script and decoration of this codex appears to be that of the fourteenth century, with occasional parts looking like they might just date to the previous century hence the dating by Van Ess to the fourteenth century, and by the cataloguer of the Dietrichstein sale to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. However, the most recent cataloguers of this manuscript, in apparent attempts to err on the side of caution, have stated without discussion that it dates to as late as c. 1400 or even c. 1400-1425. These later datings are almost certainly in error, and have obscured some of the glorious beauty of this elegant medieval book.

The codex is in fact substantially a fourteenth-century composition, which originally ended on fol. 231v (note a secretarial hand there summarises the contents of the volume and their numbers of leaves, as one would expect at its end). This section includes about four scribes, which often shift in their size of script, aspect and level of lateral compression over some pages, making it difficult to determine the contribution of each (scribe 1 writes fols. 1r-3v, handing over after the first line there to scribe 2, who probably copies to fol. 136r, before scribe 3 appears and copies up to fol. 157v, apparently followed by a fourth scribe who copies up to fol. 231v). These hands find close parallels in German monastic manuscripts such as the Guillelmus Brito from Bavaria and the first half of the fourteenth century, now BnF., latin 10448 (see F. Avril and C. Rabel, Manuscrits enluminés dorigine germanique, I, 1996, no. 162), the Regensburg Obituarium, written between about 1307 and 1391, now BnF. n.a. latin 772 (ibid., no. 161), the Catholicon from the Rhineland, dating to the second quarter of the fourteenth century, now BnF. latin 7628 (ibid., no. 156), the New Testament, probably from the Rhineland and of first half of the fourteenth century, now BnF. latin 8848 (ibid., no. 151), and the Commentary on the New Testament, probably from Alsace, and the first quarter of the fourteenth century, now part of BnF. latin 17 (ibid., no. 153), among others. This section of the codex has numerous marginalia in a number of hands, some of which were trimmed through when the book was bound into its current binding in the fifteenth century. In addition, the decoration of the initials remains the same...