Original leaf from an English manuscript pocket Bible. Written in Latin in minute gothic book-hand script, in brown ink on animal vellum. (195x138mm).
Rubricated chapter numbers, initials and marginalia in red and blue. 48 lines of text in double columns (9 lines per inch!). Two large illuminated initials alternating in blue with red penwork and red with blue penwork & extending into the margins. Inner margin has two small cuts closed with archival tape - not into text.
Produced in England (Oxford?), c. 1250.
This leaf contains John 2:6 - 4:47 ''Ibi lapidee...'' (Now there were set there six water-pots of stone...And he found in the temple them that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting... Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise...Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God...Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God...for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life...Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst...).
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.
