THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST: a large historiated initial on a fragment of a Gospel Lectiona𝓰ry, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [France, 10th or early 11th century]

A fragment, c. 245 × 60 mm, preserving most of the outer column (the text is continuous) of a leaf written in two columns, of 19 lines written in very widely-spaced Caroline minuscule script, rubrics in red using uncial forms, incipits using Rustic Capitals, touched in red, illustrat🐽ed with a LARGE HISTORIATED INITIAL on the recto, and the extremity of another decorated initial on the verso; recovered from use in a binding, with consequent imperfections including a vertical crease and sewing-holes, both affecting the drawing, a narrow part of the column of text missing, the outer corners cropped; a remarkable survival desp⛎ite the defects; framed and glazed in a double-sided frame.

PROVENANCE

1. JOHN SELDEN (1584–1654), polymath antiquarian, lawyer, legal historian, and linguist: believed to be from a cache of manuscripts and binding fragments bequeathed by him to his principal executor:
2. SIR MATTHEW HALE (1609–1676), Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, ‘the most learned, the most able, the most honourable man to be found in the profession of the law’; by descent to:
3. T.E. Sherwood-Hale (1861–1945): found in 1939 in an outbuilding at the Hale family house at Alderley, Gloucestershire (for the evidence for the previous owners and an account of the finding of the Selden-Hale cache of manuscripts, see Rennell, 1986, pp. 1–4), together with Anglo-Saxon fragments and the Will of Aethelgifu; acquired by their discoverer:
4. James Fairhurst (d. 1999), scholar and manuscripts collector: sold in our rooms, 10 June 1963, part of lot 157, bought for £30 by:
5. Philip C. Duschnes (1897–1970), New York bookseller; doubtless sold by him to:
6. Esther Rosenbaum (d. 1980), advertising executive, of Chicago: her sale in our rooms, 25 April 1983, lot 3 (ill.); reoffered in our rooms, 5 December 1989, lot 13, bought by:
7. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 901.

TEXT AND ILLUSTRATION

The surviving text consists of parts of three readings: John 17:6–11, followed by a rubric and the historiated initial; Mark 16:14–15 (recto) and 16–20 (verso); and Luke 24:49–50. The columns of text must have been rather narrow, as there are only about six letters missing at the beginnings/endi🐈ngs of lines. The first reading is from Jesus’s prayer for his disciples, after the Last Supper; the second r༺elates Jesus’s appearance to the disciples after his Resurrection, and his Ascension, at the very end of the Gospel of Mark; and the third has the very last lines of the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus departs from his disciples and ‘was carried up to heaven’.

Carolingian drawings are extremely rare in private hands. The present example is very interesting for its iconography. Christ is apparently depicted immediately prior to his Ascension, standing on a green hill, wearing the pallium (usually worn only by archbishops and the pope), and looking upward at a small Cross he is holding with his fingertips. Below him is part of a group of Apostles, at leas🐽t one of whom has a halo.

LITERATURE

Lord Rennel, ‘Introduction of Provenance’, in The Will of Æthelgifu: A Tenth Century Anglo-Saxon Manuscript (Roxburghe Club, 1986)