FEATURES ARCHIVE

Thomas Venning, Senior Specialist in the London Books & Manuscripts department, speculates on the morals of the first owner of an engaging medieval manuscript in the sale of Valuable Printed Books and Manuscripts at King Street on 8 June 2011.

One of the incidental pleasures of studying medieval text manuscripts is to be found in the clues they give about the personalities of early owners. Sometimes these might come from the presentation of the volume – its binding, the elegance or otherwise of the script and layout – or from marginal annotations, with their evidence of conscientious, indolent or distracted readers. Sometimes, though, the give-away is the subject matter itself, and the juxtapositions of texts within the manuscript -- and in the case of this early 15th century German commonplace book, indications from these elements enable us to build up a picture of an appealingly disreputable character.

This is a slight manuscript, a single gathering of 14 leaves, somewhat imperfect, and it contains a series of texts, all in the same hand, on the two subjects which appear to interest the writer: the first, the complex rules in canon law governing the availability and disposition of ecclesiastical livings – we can imagine a German clergyman with a close interest in the material aspect of his calling; the second, secular poems and songs (sometimes notated with the music), in German, Latin or a mixture of the two, on the delights of wine, women and song – one of the Latin texts, relating an interrupted sexual assignation involving a club-footed protagonist named Henry, is quite strikingly obscene.

Further textual clues locate this evidently rather dissolute ecclesiastic geographically in the diocese of Speyer, and chronologically at the beginning of the brief pontificate of antipope John XXIII around 1410. John XXIII was himself deposed in 1415 under charges of heresy, simony, schism and immorality, to be replaced by the considerably more respectable Martin V: but by then one trusts that our anonymous scribe was safely ensconced in a quiet and prosperous Rhineland benefice.