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Lot Number
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30
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Title
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Missal, Use of Tours, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum
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Place Printed
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Tours
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Description
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Missal, Use of Tours, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [Tours, end of the eleventh century] 159 leaves, 290mm. by 195mm., wanting 19 leaves after fol.81 (with prayers of Ordinary of the Mass), 24 leaves after fol.88 (with the Propers running from Low Sunday up to the Third Sunday after Pentecost) and 49 leaves after fol.153 (with feasts for September to early December for the Proper of Saints), else complete, collation: i5 (wanting last leaf; a Calendar added to volume in fifteenth century), ii-xiv8, xv6, xvi11 (last wanting), xvii-xx8, xx1 (a singleton), conflicting sixteenth-, nineteenth-century and modern foliation (last followed here), double column, 32 lines in brown ink in a small and precise early gothic bookhand, one- and 2-line simple initials in red or pastel blue, music for the introit, gradual, offertory and communion prayers in diastemmatic neumes, half-length portrait of a tonsured saint, four human faces and other geometric or foliate designs picked out in tiny delicate penwork within initials on fol.81rv, slight spreading to red ink of some rubrics and initials, some small scuffs and minor discolouration throughout, small areas cut from borders of fols.141 and 147, else in excellent condition, modern red leather over wooden boards with two straps
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Lot Note
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text "MS 46 is a Missal for Tours which can be dated on script as c.1025. It is thus one of the earliest Missals, if not the very earliest Missal, extant, as we know the term" (Pope, 'The Library', p.6). It is a large and elegant Romanesque plenary Missal, combining the prayers from the Sacramentary, Lectionary and the Gradual, to which a Calendar has been added in the fifteenth century. The Temporal is from the first Sunday in Advent (fol.1r) to the twenty-second week after Pentecost, followed by masses for the sick and for nuptials (fol.120r); and the Sanctoral, from the feast of St. Stephen, 26 December (fol.122r) to that of St. Augustine, 28 August. The volume ends with masses for the dead, the priests and the people (fol.154r). illumination The striking linedrawings within the initials on fol.81rv are by a skilled and accomplished draughtsman, and are exceedingly early Continental examples of the art. While line-drawing was widely practised in Anglo-Saxon England, it only sporadically appeared in Continental scriptoria in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and these have usually been interpreted as evidence of direct English contact (see M. Holcomb, Pen and Parchment, Drawing in the Middle Ages, 2009, nos.16-20). Parallels to the figure of the tonsured saint with his gaze straight at the reader, detailed features and heavy, solid drapery are to be found in the Exultet roll, produced in Montecassino c.1060 (now Vatican, Lat.3784: illustrated in Pen and Parchment, fig.13), and in Ingelard's Miscellany, made in Paris in the mid eleventh century (now BnF ms.lat.12117: illustrated Pen and Parchment, p.84).
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Estimated Price
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GBP 80,000.00 - 100,000.00( USD 120800.00 - USD 151000.00)
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Actual Price
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GBP 133,250.00 ( USD 201207.50)
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