Original leaf from an English manuscript pocket Bible. Written in Latin in minute gothic book-hand script, in brown ink on animal vellum. Rubricated chapter numbers, initials and marginalia in red and blue. 48 lines of text in double columns (9 lines per inch!). (195 x 138 mm - 7.8 x 5.5") .
Two large illuminated initials alternating in blue with red penwork and red with blue penwork & extending into the margins.
Produced in England (Oxford?), c. 1250.
This leaf contains Mark 10:19 - 12:31: ''Ne occidas...'' (Do not kill, do not steal, bear not false witness, do no fraud, honor thy father and mother...It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God...Hosanna, blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord...Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's...Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like to it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself...).
Provenance: ex-collection Otto F. Ege (1888-1941) - Dean of the Cleveland Institute of Art & Lecturer on History of the Book in the School of Library Science, Western Reserve University. Text leaves appear in the Ege Portfolios, item 13. A historiated initial leaf from the same book (also from Ege) in the collection of the Endowment for Biblical Research in Boston was published in 1985 in "Manuscripts Sacred and Secular" (item 20).
This leaf, from a ''portable'' Bible during the period of the Crusades, would have been used in the abstract study of theology or the preaching of the Gospel around the medieval countryside.
Shipped in archival 14x11'' mat.
