A total of thirty-six manuscripts were digitized this week, a number reduced by the time off for Candlemas. Continuing recent trends, the bulk of the manuscripts are Reg.lat, with Pal.lat the second most populous collection. The final few manuscripts are from the 19th C section of Vat.lat, with one from Vat.estr.or and Barb.lat.

To the right is a page from Pal.lat.540, a Book of Hours made around 1390 in Avignon. Although there are no coats of arms to identify the owner, an obit on March 21 (f.2v) for Blanche of Geneva suggests that this manuscript was made for her.². This page, f.206r, is an illustration of St. Jerome to start the "Abbreviated Psalter of Jerome" , one of the more popular forms of shortened psalter ³

The bottom border is from Vat.estr.or.171, f.20v. This is a Tibetan manuscript in the dbu med script. An interesting detail is that this manuscript was part of a collection of seven Tibetan manuscripts acquired in mid to late 2019¹, making the time from acquisition to digitization less than three years.

Sources

1. OWL: Online Window into the Library/Avvisi dalla Vaticana, No. 11, July-Sept. 2019. Online
2. Freeman Sandler, Lucy. “The Avignon Hours at The New York Public Library.” Quand La Peinture Était Dans Les Livres, edited by Mara Hofmann et al., vol. 15, Brepols Publishers, 2007, pp. 285–94, https://doi.org/10.1484/M.ARS-EB.3.39
3. MOREY, JAMES H., editor. Jerome’s Abbreviated Psalter: The Middle English and Latin Versions. Arc Humanities Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1h9dm65