Search Results: Authors starting with A from Phillip J. Pirages Fine Books and Medieval Manuscripts

Northern France, probably Paris, mid-15th century. 155 x 110 mm. (6 x 4 1/4"). Single column, 16 lines in a gothic book hand. Each recto with three line "KL" in blues, white, and gold and filled with tiny flowers on a burnished gold ground, saints' names in red, blue, and gold, rectos with a panel border of colorful acanthus and flowers on the outer margin. ◆The Recto of the January leaf with light marginal smudges (as expected), a few names on one page slightly blurry, faint yellowing at inner margin of several openings, otherwise in fine condition, with paint and gilt entirely intact. Beautifully written out in an extremely practiced and careful hand (and within remarkably commodious margins on three sides), this is a complete Book of Hours calendar with a particularly satisfying sense of order and proportion. It is desirable as a triple-graded example, where the more ordinary saints' days (typically the dates of martyrdom) alternate in blue and red, but with the major saints' days written in… Read More

Paris: apud Andreas Wechel, 1567. 162 x 108 mm. (6 1/2 x 4"). 4 p.l., 795, [37] pp. Contemporary limp vellum, yapp edges, covers with four small holes for ties (lacking), flat spine with old ink titling. Front flyleaf with blue ink library stamp of Notre-Dame de Mont-Roland Free School (in the city of Dole located in eastern France on the border of Switzerland, active from 1850-1910); title page with early ink inscription: "Ad usum fr: Minorum Cappucinorum Convent[us] Cadillaci Catalogo Inscript[us]." A few short 16th or 17th century annotations. Adams A-398; Brunet I, 119; Graesse I, 48; BMC French 6; USTC 158196. ◆Vellum with one-and-one-half-inch diagonal tear to head of rear cover, binding with minor soiling, two quires lightly browned, but an excellent copy over all--internally fresh and clean, and in a solid, lustrous binding. This history of the Franks to 653 A.D. is the major work of French Benedictine Aimoin de Fleury (ca. 965 - after 1008). At the suggestion of his abbot at the Abbey of… Read More

Flanders, Southern Netherlands, or Rhineland(?), ca. 1250-75. 176 x 135 mm. (7 x 5 1/4"). Single column, 20 lines in a bold gothic book hand. First line of recto with lettering in gilt on blue and pink ground with white highlights, versal initials in blue with red penwork or burnished gold with blue penwork, ten line fillers in geometric designs of red, blue, and burnished gold, recto WITH TWO PENWORK LINE FILLERS IN THE SHAPE OF CREATURES, one being a fish, and the other the head of a beast, the latter biting the tail of a large gilt bird whose neck and beak extend into the right margin, AND WITH A THREE-LINE INITIAL DEPICTING A PROPHET HOLDING A SCROLL, the initial with a long tail extending into the lower margin. See: Kidd, "The McCarthy Collection," vol. II, no. 20. ◆Bottom marginal decoration (including the anthropomorphic tail of the initial) trimmed away (despite ample margin above the decoration), gold a bit worn, but a specimen of great interest nonetheless, and the decoration still very… Read More