Upcoming Presentations

Session: 701

Title: Manuscript Production in England, France, and Central Europe: Patrons, Collections, Artists, and Context

Date/Time: Tuesday 6 July 2021: 14.15-15.45

'Ici faut glose et tixt et premier fuill suivant a tieu signe la troverez': New Suggestions about Early Ownership of the Paris Apocalypse (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr. 403), c. 1250-1470

(Language: English) 

Emerson Richards-Hoppe, Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University 

Index Terms: Bibliography; Heraldry; Lay Piety; Manuscripts and Palaeography

Abstract: 

This paper presents new evidence that the Paris Apocalypse (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 403) was originally owned by the Clare Family, in particular Richard de Clare (5th Earl of Hertford, 6th Earl of Gloucester) and his wife Maud. Previously, scholarship traced the 1250s Paris Apocalypse only to the 1370s in Charles V's collection. My evidence for earlier provenance draws on the scribe's use of the Clare's arms, three red chevrons, as the first signe-de-renvoi, a symbol to guide the reader. From the Clares, I am able to trace the manuscript into the English royal collection of Edward I and II, connect it with the previously known provenance of ownership by John Duke of Bedford, and back into a heretofore unknown ownership of William Cleve, rector of Cliff at Hoo. 

Concurrent Sessions 3

Thursday, 15 April 2021, 20:30 UTC / 16:30 EDT / 13:30 PDT

3B: The Late Medieval Codex: Margins, Contents, and Contexts

SESSION TRACK: MANUSCRIPTS AND BOOK HISTORY

An Investigation of a Printer's Block (Manchester, John Rylands Library, 17252): The Earliest Extant Woodblock Printing Apparatus or an Eighteenth-Century Creation

Emerson Storm Fillman Richards, John Rylands Library, Manchester

Abstract: 

The Paris Apocalypse (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. fr. 403) launched a cycle of images which is found nearly unchanged in two other contemporary, extant Anglo-Norman illustrated Apocalypses (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D.4.17 and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, Ms. M. 524), a fourteenth-century tapestry and Franco-Flemish manuscript (Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS. Lat. 19), the fifteenth-century woodblock prints (Schreiber numbers I and IV), and possibly even into the eighteenth-century by way of a curious item which may be the oldest extant printer's block (Manchester, John Rylands Library, 17252), or it may be an eighteenth-century creation laden with political and religious implications for England in the early 1700s. This item is the focus of my investigation. 

In this paper, I will first briefly contextualize the medieval significance of this cycle of images from its emergence in the thirteenth century. The image on the single printer's block a two-paneled scene from St. John's apocryphal vita of his exile to Patmos, which was not included in all of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Apocalypses with similar image cycles, and stands as a feature of demarcation for some studies of stemma. I will then turn to the implications of the printer's block for then-contemporary culture and for modern scholarship. In two parts, I will present a speculative work considering the cultural importance of the item, whether it be of fifteenth- or eighteenth-century manufacture. If the item is fifteenth-century, then its significance to understanding the often-simplified development of manuscript to print culture has gained a windfall. If the item is early eighteenth-century— we have records of it being an English collector's possession in the 1730s— the question must be asked: why this image of John's exile from this cycle? Was it a forgery for the burgeoning antiquarian item and antiquarian book trade, meant for a cabinet of curiosities? What is its position as a representation of a "by-gone", Catholic era in a moment of English Protestant pride? Finally, what is there to be said, if anything, about the early twentieth-century use of this printer's block to produce several modern wood-block prints, which are now housed alongside the block in the Rylands. To conclude, I will make my own assessment of the woodblock's date, though it has been examined inconclusively by expert eyes. Efforts are now being made by the John Rylands Library to carbon date the item, though, even this will not be entirely conclusive. 

This enigmatic printer's block offers a site which speaks to most questions posed by the study of the post-medieval lives of medieval artefacts and I intend to touch on issues of provenance; cultural transmission of images, the status or value of the illustrated Apocalypse in thirteenth-, fifteenth-, and eighteenth-century England; and, issues of collecting, forging, and using medieval objects in post-medieval periods as objects of wonder or propaganda.