Category Archives: Old Books

Found leaf, found books

Another leaf of the Beauvais Missal has turned up! Read all about it in the Huffington Post (here). In the photo, note the label giving its date as 1285, describing it as an “illuminated manuscript on vellum,” and then giving its price as $75.00 (!?). As the article notes, the lucky purchaser’s queries about the leaf led to Lisa Fagin Davis’s getting wind of it and identifying it as having once been a part of the Beauvais Psalter. It has now been virtually re-united with other leaves at Davis’s Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal site (find it at the top of the “Recently Added Items” column).

In related news, a “forgotten archive” of medieval manuscripts and print books was recently discovered in the Ropemakers’ Tower of St. Margaret’s Church in the Romanian town of MediaČ™. As EBS member Antony Henk sums it up, “This find includes 139 printed books dating to between 1470 and 1600, two manuscripts from the early 16th century and about sixty charters and other documents dating to between the 14th and 16th centuries, along with MS fragments kept inside parish records. The earliest of these dates from the Carolingian era.” Read more here.