The Prayerbook of Jørgen Quitzow, in Renaissance Danish and German, illuminated manuscript on parchment, with near-contemporary additions on paper [Denmark, dated 1570]

The Prayerbook of Jørgen Quitzow, in Renaissance Danish and German, illuminated manuscript on parchment, with near-contemporary additions on paper [Denmark (perhaps the Lutheran Chapter for Noble Ladies at Maribo, Lolland, or just perhaps central Fyn), dated 1570]

80 leaves, the main section (48 leaves) on vellum, complete, collation: i-xi4, approximately 16 lines of an angular calligraphic hand with numerous pen cadels and flourishes set in a near-square single column framed at edges by double orange-red and pale green lines, rubrics in red, sections opening with larger ornate letters and ending with calligraphic interlace penwork knots, double-page opening at front with coloured and illuminated coats-of-arms (see below), 17 hand-coloured woodcuts taken from a contemporary printed text on paper (from a copy of the Danish version of Luther, Husspostille published in 1564; 2 with substantial damage, and a further 8 spaces indicating that woodcuts were once there but have been removed or fallen away), this followed by some 32 paper leaves with near-contemporary additions of devotional material probably added for (or even by) Quitzow, mostly in quires of 8 and wanting a single leaf from this section, else complete, the first 6 leaves also approximately 16 lines in near-square single column, set within single red lines, thereafter 13 leaves with further devotional additions, the last leaves blank, some small natural flaws in parchment, small spots and scuffs, but overall in good and solid condition, 100 by 95mm.; Danish binding of c. 1800, marbled paper-covered pasteboards, spine backed with light tan leather, corners quartered with same, title Bonn/bog in ink on spine, with Thore Virgins 1570 added below

Provenance:

1. Written and illuminated for Jørgen Quitzow (d. 1599: see E. Ladewig Pederson in Adel forpligter - studier over den danske adels gældsstiftelse, 1983, p. 190, for brief comment) of Lykkesholm, Fyn: with the arms of his fathers family (Quitzow, beneath a silver helm and within metallic foliage) facing those of his mothers family (Rønnow of Magelund, within golden foliage and gilt and red helm) as an illuminated opening on the inside facing pages of the first two leaves, and with a scrawled contemporary signature at the foot of those leaves that is certainly his own (Jürgenn Qvitzow / med egen hand). He was an important Danish magnate of the last decades of the sixteenth century, presumably named after his grandfather Jørgen Henningsen Quitzow (d. 1544), who served King Christian III as royal courtier and chancellor from 1537 until his death. His grandmother was Ellen Andersdatter (d. after 1558), a member of the influential Gøye family, who in later life became the first and founding abbess of the Lutheran Chapter for Noble Ladies at Maribo, Lolland, a house which took over the buildings of the first Bridgettine abbey in Denmark (that founded directly from Vadstena in 1418, and suppressed as a Catholic house during the Reformation, but with some nuns remaining in situ throughout the refoundation). This was a community of protestant nuns in all ways bar their titles, made up from woman dedicated to prayer and Bible study in Danish and German. Such Lutheran chapters were a common phenomenon in early Reformation Denmark, often founded to ensure the suppression of earlier powerful Catholic religious centres (in this case the founding Bridgettine house of Denmark). However, old habits seem to have died hard, and in 1563 complaints were made to the bishop of Fyn that the inmates were harbouring Catholics, had resumed prayers for the dead of their Bridgettine predecessors and had returned to wearing the Bridgettine habit in private. Accusations of drunkenness and disorder followed and the house was suppressed in 1621.

Two of the around twenty surviving medieval and Renaissance prayer books made for Danish private owners are securely connected to Maribo (K.M. Nielsen, A. Otto and J. Lyster, Middelalderens danke Bønnebøger, 1945-1982; cataloguing Copenhagen, GKS 1614, 4to and Thott. Samling 553, 4to), and it is possible that the scriptorium there produced also this codex, also produced this codex, perhaps as a gift to Qvitzow from his grandmother or maternal aunt (both reportedly abbesses of the house).

2. Lt. Captain Thore Virgin (1886-1957) of Qvarnfors, Skåne, Sweden: his ex libris and small printed bookplate on front pastedown, noting the acquisition of the book in Copenhagen on 28 March 1927. The remnant of the Thore Virgin library was widely dispersed in recent years, but this volume has until now not appeared on the open market, and is completely unknown and unrecorded.

Text and illustrations:

The text opens with the calligraphic title, En liden trøstelig Bønebog/ aff atskillige slaugs Tydske oc danske bønebøger de trøsteligste tilsamme[n] schreffuen/ nu udi denne siste Verdens tid gantske nødsommelig at bede. 15*70, and includes a lengthy series of prayers interspersed with readings from SS. Augustine, Basil, John Chrysostom, Hilarion, Origen and others, and quotations from the works of Luther (including prayers), Ludwig Rabus (whose prayerbook was published in 1567), and Andreas Musculus (who published a devotional work in 1559). The last six leaves of the parchment section contain devotional Biblical readings.

Books of Hours and prayer books translated into vernacular languages are of exceptional rarity, outside of the Dutch tradition (which had a strong vernacular tradition following the devotio moderna movement and the translation of Gerhard Groote). While a few hundred thousand such manuscripts exist in Latin, only a handful survive in a small number of other vernacular languages. Only about twenty-five such manuscripts substantially in German are currently known to exist (R. Cermann, Über den Export deutschsprachiger Stundenbücher von Paris nach Nürnberg, Codices Manuscripti, 75, 2010, pp. 9-24, and Sothebys, 2 December 2014, lot 49). Seventeen survive in Middle English, none earlier than the end of the fourteenth century (A. Sutherland, English Psalms in the Middle Ages. 1300-1450, Oxford, 2015, p. 27). The total number of Old French vernacular prayer books is unknown but probably no more than fifteen, with many examples of the sixteenth century (see V. Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400-1600, Cambridge, 2014, p. 96 for isolated examples). Of the roughly twenty prayerbooks and associated texts in Danish listed in Middelalderens danke Bønnebøger only three are outside of Denmark itself, and those all in Swedish institutional ownership (Kalmar, Läroverks Bibliotek; Stockholm, KB. A40; and Linköping, Theol. 217). Thus, this manuscript is almost certainly the only such work in any form of Danish which might appear on the market again, and most probably one of the very few early manuscripts in Danish still in private ownership.

Additional Note: The presence of a previously overlooked catchword Det on the last leaf of the original parchment section of this codex indicates that a leaf or so is missing from the end of this section.

Please note that the original parchment section of this codex is missing a leaf or so from its end