Rare Books and Manuscripts

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Medieval Manuscripts

The cataloging of medieval manuscripts is underway, and we hope to have entries on-line by the end of 2007. The medieval collection contains about a dozen more or less complete manuscripts and over fifty manuscript leaves, ranging in date from tenth-century neumes to sixteenth-century antiphonal leaves.

Highlights include a Middle English Prophetia Merlini fragment (edited by Caroline Eckhardt) and a Brut Chronicle in the same hand. There is also a Petrarch Trionfi; a fourteenth-century Florentine Boethius with glosses; two leaves in Spanish from a Valencia confraternity volume; a variant version for lay readers of a pseudo-Bernard tract addressed to a nun and contained in a manuscript written by a noted humanist scribe; a Lenten sermon from 1489, rare in manuscript copies though found in several printed editions; several leaves with prayers in Dutch; and numerous decorated leaves from Books of Hours and breviaries. There are also eleven leaves from the unique Middle High German translation of Valerius Maximus.

Early printed materials include more than fifty volumes of incunabula (recently edited for an updating of Goff) and some leaves, including a Caxton Chaucer leaf; good holdings of Italian books printed before 1601; a collection of early Bibles in many tongues; and an extensive list of manuscript facsimiles, which includes a nearly complete run of Roxburghe Club publications.

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