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Add MS 89379
- Record Id:
- 032-003451648
- Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:
- 032-003451648
- MDARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100078446000.0x000001
- LARK:
- SLARK:
- Format:
- ISAD(G)
- Reference (shelfmark):
- Add MS 89379
- Title:
- Book of Hours, Use of York (‘The Percy Hours’)
- Scope & Content:
-
This manuscript is an illuminated Book of Hours made in York in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. It is the second part of the Percy Psalter (British Library, Add MS 70000), which originally formed a single-volume Psalter-Hours. The manuscript contains perhaps the oldest known example of the Hours of the Virgin for the Use of York (Warner, Descriptive Catalogue (1920), p. 48). It also includes a memoria of St William of York, canonised 1226 (f. 42v). It appears to have been created under Dominican influence, as the Litany includes a double invocation of St Dominic (f. 17r), and a Dominican is depicted in one of the initials (f. 62r).
ff. 1r-13v: Canticles (continuing from Add MS 70000, f. 167v);
ff. 13v-15v: the Athanasian Creed;
ff. 16r-19r: the Litany;
ff. 19v-25v: the Office of the Dead (wanting one leaf after f. 25, which is now displaced as Add MS 70000, f. 168);
ff. 26r-61v: the Hours of the Virgin, Use of York;
ff. 62r-69r: the Penitential Psalms;
ff. 69v-75v: the Gradual Psalms;
ff. 76r-92r: the Hours of the Passion;
ff. 92r-100v: the Long Hours of the Holy Spirit;
f. 100v: added hymns in a ?16th-century hand, Veni Creator Spiritus, followed by the Veni Sancte Spiritus.
Decoration:
13 large historiated initials in colours and gold at major divisions of the text: the Office of the Dead, Christ in Judgement displaying his wounds (f. 19v); Matins, the Annunciation (f. 26r); Lauds, the Visitation (f. 32v); Prime, the Nativity (f. 44r); Terce, the Adoration of the Magi (f. 47v); Sext, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (f. 50r); Nones, Flight into Egypt (f. 52v); Vespers, funeral procession of the Virgin (f. 55r); Compline, the Coronation of the Virgin (f. 59r); Penitential Psalms, a Dominican hearing confession and priest blessing penitents (f. 62r); Gradual Psalms, the Crucifixion (f. 69v); Hours of the Passion, Crucifixion (f. 76r); Hours of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost (f. 92r).
Borders with marginal images in colours and gold: the blessed adoring Christ, the resurrection of the dead and the hell-mouth (f. 19v); musicians, peacock, ape with a mirror, hybrids (f. 76r); occasional musicians, hybrids and animals (ff. 76v-100v).
2-line initials at lesser divisions of the text, in blue or pink on gold grounds, each containing a grotesque, extending into bar-borders on 3 sides of the page.
Initials in gold with blue pen-work decoration, or in blue with red pen-work decoration. Line-fillers in gold, red, and/or blue.
Added calligraphic decoration by John Doharty, c. 1760, throughout (see Provenance, below).
- Collection Area:
- Western Manuscripts
- Project / Collection:
- Additional Manuscripts
- Hierarchy Tree:
- [{ "id" : "032-003451648", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Add MS 89379: Book of Hours, Use of York (‘The Percy Hours’)" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]
- Hierarchy Record Ids:
- 032-003451648
- Is part of:
- not applicable
- Hierarchy:
- 032-003451648
- Container:
- not applicable
- Record Type (Level):
- Fonds
- Extent:
- 1 volume
- Digitised Content:
- http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89379 (digital images currently unavailable)
- Thumbnail:
-
- Languages:
- Latin
- Scripts:
- Latin
- Start Date:
- 1275
- End Date:
- 1299
- Date Range:
- 4th quarter of the 13th century
- Era:
- CE
- Access:
-
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- User Conditions:
- Letter of introduction required to view this manuscript.
- Physical Characteristics:
-
Materials: Parchment.
Dimensions: 175 x 118 mm (written area: 110 x 75 mm).
Foliation: ff. xiii + 100 (ff. i-iii are pasted paper labels, ff. iv-v are paper flyleaves at the beginning, ff. vi-vii are paper flyleaves at the end, and ff. viii-xiii are loose letters concerning the manuscript housed in a melanex envelope).
Script: Gothic.
Binding: Post-1600. 19th-century red leather with gold tooling.
- Custodial History:
-
Origin: Northern England, York.
Provenance:
A couple, probably Robert de Percy of Bolton Percy (b. 1245, d. 1323) and his first wife, Margery de Everingham (d. before 1317): portraits of a lady and knight are depicted on the Beatus page with coats of arms or five fusils conjoined in fess azure, gules a lion rampant possibly vair, and or a lion rampant sable, as well as or a lion rampant sable impaling or five fusils conjoined in fess azure (f. 16r) (see Jackson, 'Pursuing the Percys' (2022)).
Downes family, 16th century: noted births and deaths in the calendar of the Psalter portion (Add MS 70000), and the same hand appears to have added hymns at the end of the Hours portion (f. 100v).
A 16th-century owner: wrote labels in the margin identifying the texts, and comments such as ‘Heere beginneth the huddle of the Romish trumpery’ at the opening of the Litany (f. 16r).
John Doharty the Younger, surveyor, of Worcester, c. 1760: his notes and sketches in margins throughout both volumes. The notes in the Hours portion are erased but still partially legible. He wrote the date 1760 (f. 19r), his own name (ff. 24r and 89r), and also: 'John Doharty teacher of Ma[thematics] Worcester. The most ingenious man in Great Brittain' (ff. 14v-15r).
F. T. Freeman, Hampstead: his sale, Hodgson’s, London, 13 March 1902, lot no. 497; the manuscript was purchased by J. & J. Leighton, London booksellers, who sold the manuscript to Dyson Perrins for £195 (see below).
Charles William Dyson Perrins (b. 1906, d. 1958), collector and bibliophile: purchased 1905; exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1908 (exhibition catalogue, no. 65); his library catalogue published in 1920, as no. 12; his bookplate, inside upper cover; his sale, Sotheby’s London, 29 November 1960, lot no. 110; purchased by Stephen Keynes, London.
Purchased by the British Library from the estate of Stephen Keynes, 2019. This manuscript was acquired with the generous support of the British Library Collections Trust.
- Information About Copies:
- Complete digital coverage available for this manuscript: see Digitised Manuscripts at https://bl.uk/manuscripts/.
- Publications:
-
Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, Burlington Fine Arts Club: Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1908), no. 65, pp. 30-31 [exhibition catalogue].
George Warner, Descriptive Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in the Library of C. W. Dyson Perrins D.C.L. F.S.A., 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), I, no. 12, pp. 47-49; II, pl. XVI.
Janet Backhouse, The Madresfield Hours: a Fourteenth-century Manuscript in the Library of Earl Beauchamp (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1975), pp. 8-11.
Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285-1385, 2 vols, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 5 (London: Harvey Miller, 1986), I, no. 11b, pp. 20-22; II, pl. 22, 23, 25.
Janet Backhouse, 'A Psalter from the Diocese of York', The Art Quarterly of the National Art Collections Fund, 4 (1990), 24-29.
Peter Kidd, Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Sam Fogg, 1999), no. 8, pp. 30-32 [exhibition catalogue].
Jonathan J. G. Alexander, James H. Marrow, and Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at the New York Public Library (London: Harvey Miller, 2005), p. 210-11, 213 n. 7 [exhibition catalogue].
Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 448.
Laura Cleaver, 'Charles William Dyson Perrins as a Collector of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts c. 1900-1920', Perspectives médiévales [Online], 41 (2020), 1-26 (p. 14).
Eleanor Jackson, 'Pursuing the Percys: the original owners of the Percy Psalter-Hours', Journal of Medieval History, 48:4 (2022), 524-45, available online at [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03044181.2022.2098529] [accessed on 1 August 2022].
- Material Type:
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Legal Status:
- Not Public Record(s)