Ɵ Leaf from a Lectionary, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment[southern Germany, c. 1100]

Ɵ Leaf from a Lectionary, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment[southern Germany, c. 1100] Single leaf, with single column of 27 lines in a large and rounded German pre-gothic minuscule, with pronounced fishtailing to ascenders and without biting curves, rubrics in red, two large and simple red initials (the first, an 'F', quite elegant), recovered from reuse in a later binding and hence with staining in places, folds, cockling and scuffing to rear (obscuring some text there), sixteenth-century German scrawls from reuse as binding of account book, traces of paper mounts at head of verso, overall fair condition, 313 by 210mm.; in cloth-covered card binding Provenance: 1. Antiquariat Robert Wölfle, Munich bookdealer, with Robert Wölfle active until his death in 1943, and the business passing thereafter to his daughters, who continued to work until their nineties, the business closing in 2011: their pencil notes on foot of recto.2. Bernard Rosenthal (1920-2017), of San Francisco, California, his 'I/268', acquired in 1983.3. Quaritch of London, their cat. 1147, Bookhands of the Middle Ages, V (1991), no. 36.4. Schøyen Collection of London and Oslo, their MS. 631. Script:The inclusion of this leaf and the next two lots allows us to show some of the range of German hands in the Romanesque and pre-gothic periods, from the squat and square formal script as here that harks back to Ottonian book production, through to the taller, thinner and more gothic hands of the next two lots, that despite such paleographical evolutions retain a profoundly German angularity to their penstrokes. Close comparisons for the hand here can be found in the Windberger Psalter, produced in Windberg to the east of Regensberg in the last quarter of the twelfth century (now Bayerische Staatsbibl. Cgm 17: Pracht auf Pergament, Schätze der Buchmalerei von 780 bis 1180, 2013, no. 64).