Bancroft's Marvelous Medieval French Manuscripts
In 1966, The Bancroft Library bought a number of medieval French manuscripts from Sotheby's that were among the remnants of Sir Thomas Phillipps' collection — the largest 19th-century collection of medieval manuscripts in private hands.
The Phillipps manuscripts at Bancroft are a small group, but they are of high quality and have been extremely useful to me in teaching students in the departments of French and comparative literature, primarily graduate students but also undergraduates, about the ways literature circulated in the Middle Ages and the methods we use to prepare medieval texts so they can be read by modern readers.
This miniature group from the prose Lancelot shows, at the top, Arthur and his court on horseback and Arthur blowing a horn. Below, the Lady of the Lake presents the boy Lancelot to Arthur; Arthur welcomes Lancelot. The bottom scene shows Lancelot extracting lances from a wounded knight. |
Bancroft has almost 400 medieval and Renaissance codices, most of them in Latin. I have also had students study texts in Spanish, Italian, and English in seminars on paleography, codicology, and textual criticism. (Paleography is the study of ancient writing, codicology the study of the manuscript, or codex, as an object.)
Students are exposed to how parchment was prepared and how paper was made, how watermarks were used, how the writing grid was laid out, how medieval inks were composed, how to use the binding to date a codex, what colophons are.
They learn about rubrics, decoration, and illumination, the types of medieval books, the medieval book trade, and book production by century.
They learn about wax tablets, on which ancient and medieval authors typically wrote first drafts.
Following are some of Bancroft's medieval manuscripts that my students and I have found particularly interesting and edifying.
Romances about King Arthur were extremely popular in the Middle Ages, beginning with the romances of Chrétien de Troyes written in the 1170's and 1180's.
Twelfth-century romances were composed in verse, as was almost all 12th-century French literature, but by the second quarter of the 13th century, prose had taken hold as a medium that was considered more apt for the dissemination of truth.
First folio of the Merlin; the historiated initial shows four angry devils. |
Since the romances about King Arthur had certain pretensions to being truthful, they were retold in a cycle of five prose romances, known as the Lancelot-Grail Cycle or the Vulgate Cycle, that became the standard biography of King Arthur, Merlin, and the knights of the Round Table.
Bancroft has one copy of each of the five romances of the Vulgate cycle: the Story of the Holy Grail, Merlin, the prose Lancelot the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the Death of King Arthur.
Bancroft's Story of the Holy Grail also contains the verse Lives of the Holy Fathers (Vie des saints peres). While the prose section of the manuscript is written in two columns, the verse part is written three columns to the page.
Students in my paleography seminar have to transcribe short texts in caroline minuscule, gothic book hand, late medieval cursive hand, and bastard or Burgundian hand. Bancroft has a good collection of individual manuscript leaves to facilitate the study of medieval hands, which was assembled over many years by Bernard Rosenthal (Berkeley rare book dealer and a member of the Council of the Friends of The Bancroft Library).
A manuscript of Garin le Loherain, a very high quality chanson de geste, was part of the Phillipps purchase. The signature "Grosley" is written at the top. It is that of Pierre-Jean Grosley (1718-1785), a man of letters who came in second to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the famous Academy of Dijon essay contest. (This was unfortunate for Grosley but fortunate for the history of philosophy, as Rousseau's essay was the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts that launched his fame.)
The beginning of Garin le Loherain in rhyme. The initial shows King Pepin, father of Charlemagne, being crowned. |
Until Bancroft bought it in 1966, scholars had not seen this particular Garin manuscript since the 19th century, and there was another manuscript that was also considered missing. I asked Tony Bliss, Bancroft's curator of rare books and manuscripts, to keep his eye out for the missing Garin, and in 1984 he found it listed in the holdings of the bookseller H. P. Kraus. It was purchased with the generous assistance of the Friends of The Bancroft Library.
The sequel to Garin, Gerbert de Metz, is included in each manuscript, so Bancroft has two copies of each work, one in assonance and one in rhyme. The rhymed version is the only copy that exists.
One of the jewels of the Bancroft collection, although it has no illustrations, is the manuscript of the Letters of Christine de Pizan, Gontier Col, and others that make up the quarrel over the Romance of the Rose, conducted around the turn of the 15th century. This was the first French literary quarrel, and it has had an illustrious progeny.
The collection of letters on the Romance of the Rose is also the first feminist controversy, and Christine de Pizan qualifies as the earliest feminist author. She wrote treatises in defense of women, such as the Book of the City of Ladies.
Christine was offended by the attacks on women and obscene language in the Romance of the Rose. She was one of the most prolific authors of her time, supporting herself after her husband's death with poems and treatises on, among other topics, the art of warfare and Joan of Arc.
Beginning of the first letter in the Romance of the Rose controversy, with rubric in red. |
Carla Bozzolo, a Parisian expert on medieval hands, has identified the writing as that of Gontier Col, one of the participants in the quarrel. Gontier was the secretary of Jean, Duke of Berry (1340-1416), one of the most famous bibliophiles of the Middle Ages. Bancroft's volume belonged to the duke, as can be seen by his signature on the last folio, Jehan. Written above the signature are the words, "Ce livre est au duc de Berry." A subsequent owner tried to erase the signature, but it can be read under ultraviolet light.
The Romance of the Rose, begun by Guillaume de Lorris around 1225 and completed by Jean de Meung around 1275, was one of the most popular and most frequently copied medieval books. Around 300 medieval copies are still in existence.
From the first folio of the Heller Romance of the Rose; note the floral motif and snails. |
Bancroft did not have a Romance of the Rose, however, until 1984, when it received one as a gift from the Heller family of San Francisco on the 80th birthday of Elinor Raas Heller, a benefactor of the University and The Bancroft Library. It is in Burgundian hand and dates from the third quarter of the 15th century. The rubric reads: "Ce est li Romans de la Rose/Ou l'art d'Amors est toute enclose."
The latest French acquisition for Bancroft's manuscript collection is a bifolium (two connected leaves) of the Romance of Brutus (Roman de Brut), a translation made by Wace around 1155 of the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey's book made the legend of King Arthur known to a European audience. He traced the kings of Britain back to Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, and thus to the Trojan heroes of the War of Troy.
Part of codicology is tracing the line of ownership by which a codex reached the modern world, called the provenance. Here is a cautionary example of what it can do.
This French gospel lectionary, dated 1328, was actually written in Italy ca. 1900. |
Among the many manuscripts in Bancroft that did not come from the Phillipps Collection is a gospel lectionary for the year 1328, the gift of professor Charles Jones, who taught in the English Department for many years and who bought the manuscript in Florence in 1920.
Tony Bliss suspected that this manuscript was not authentic, a suspicion shared by some local and visiting experts. He had the parchment and inks analysed by a team of scholars at UC Davis's Crocker Historical and Archaeological Project under the direction of Richard Schwab. The project uses a cyclotron to generate x-rays from samples of early inks, papers, and pigments.
The resulting elemental analysis showed that the blue inks of the lectionary were cobalt blue, a pigment that only came into general use after 1800. The "gold" was actually brass powder. The "parchment" turned out to be paper coated with white lead and tinted yellow, typical of clay-coated printing papers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
So don't spend a lot of money on a medieval manuscript without asking Tony's advice.
It is a tremendous privilege to be able to teach this kind of course in the Bancroft Library. Students can study paleography and textual criticism anywhere, of course, by using microfilm copies or even, increasingly, the World Wide Web. (See Bancroft's Digital Scriptorium at http:sunsite.berkeley.edu/scriptorium, where images of all these manuscripts can be seen.) But to learn the rudiments of codicology, one really has to have access to the medieval artifacts. Only they can generate the excitement that comes from examining books that were produced and read by medieval scribes and readers.
The Bancroft collection provides students interested in medieval literature, here at the edge of the Western world, with an entree into the world of medieval literary artifacts that is extremely rare.
Joseph Duggan teaches French and
Comparative Literature and is
Associate Dean of the Graduate Division.
He holds the Bernie S. Williams Chair of
Comparative Literature.
Volume 115
Fall 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft's Marvelous Medieval French Manuscripts
From the Director: Biotech at Bancroft
Cataloging the Teatro Español Collection
New (Old) Mark Twain Found in Bancroft Scraps
Eleanor Swent Puts Her Mining Expertise to Work
Russian Emigré Wins First Hill-Shumate Prize
Theresa Salazar Is New Curator for Bancroft Collection
New Oral History Catalog Covers Two Decades
Second Chronicle Salutes UC Women Since 1870
Desiderata: Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
