Leviticus, from the Vulgate, with the commentary of Rabanus Maurus

1. Leviticus

Fols 2r^b-101v^b. Vocat autem moysen est ei dominus…(ends) ad filios israel in monte synai.

2. Rabanus Maurus from the Glossa ordinaria.

Fols 1r^a-101v^c. Esicius: Querendum est quare liber iste leviticus dicatur quia scilicet in hoc nomine…(ends) demonstrata sunt quia intentionem divinam celestemque gerunt.

3. Many marginal glosses in a fifteenth-centrury hand.

A Leviticus of similar size to the Melbourne manuscript was listed as number ‘10’ in the catalogue of the manuscripts bought at Auxerre in December 1825 by the book dealer François-Nicolas Comynet. He notes that this Leviticus was identical in style with numbers ‘3’ (Genesis) and ‘6’ (Exodus) in his catalogue.[v]

Peyrafort-Huin has observed that Comynet’s Exodus is probably identical with the Exodus, from the Vulgate, with Commentaries of Rabanus Maurus, which is now MS. G.II.26 in the Public Library in Armagh.[vi] The Armagh Exodus and Melbourne Leviticus are perfectly matched in layout and style, and were most likely produced at the same time and in the same scriptorium as sequential volumes of Rabanus Maurus’ commentary on succeeding books of the Old Testament. Thus, it is quite likely that they correspond respectively to numbers ‘3’ and ‘10’ of Comynet’s catalogue. None of the Pontigny manuscripts identifiable with entries in his catalogue has a binding earlier than the nineteenth century, so it is possible that Comynet removed the bindings of the manuscripts that he had acquired and rebound them. His catalogue lists the Leviticus among a group of manuscripts sent to Paris, perhaps in anticipation of a sale.

Subsequently, the Leviticus passed with a group of manuscripts from Pontigny into the possession of Abbé Joseph-Félix Allard (1795–1831).[vii] He added the inscription on fol. vii, Commentaire sur le Lévitique par Raban, Archevêque de Mayence au 9^e siècle. F.A^xx, and may have brought the manuscript to England around 1824. The remains of brown paper binding between fols ii and iii, and ix and x, together with an 1824 watermark on fols iii–vi, and viii–ix, and an 1828 Whatman Turkey Mill watermark on fols ii and x, suggest that the manuscript was given an inexpensive binding, after it arrived in England. The outer layer(s), however, were removed and the current quality covers added probably just a few years later.[viii] The current binding of the Leviticus in parchment, with blind-tooled double fillets around the edges, brown paste-downs, and some flyleaves with the watermark ‘BATH 1824’, is identical with other Pontigny-Allard manuscripts, such as the Cistercian Missal for Major Feasts (MS. Bywater Adds 2, Bodleian Library, Oxford), so it may be that a similar history of rebinding is shared by all the manuscripts that now have the same type of covers.

In 1863, the Leviticus was advertised for sale with other Pontigny-Allard manuscripts by an anonymous vendor in the English journal Notes and Queries.[ix] Here it is listed as no. ‘27’, which corresponds to the Roman numeral ‘XXVII’ on the spine, and the inscription ‘Codex xxvii’ on the inside front cover. The list specifies that the manuscript came from Pontigny. That the Notes and Queries vendor was probably James Henthorn Todd (1805–1869), Librarian of Trinity College, Dublin, is suggested by the fact that fol. i has pasted onto it an extract from a bookseller’s catalogue for the entry no. ‘181’. This is from the catalogue prepared by Todd for his anonymous sale at Sotheby’s on 1 June 1864. The extract was probably put there at the time of the sale, since the Exodus at Armagh bears the corresponding extract from the same sale, where it appeared as no. ‘180’. The sale catalogue for no. ‘181’ notes that it is ‘altogether similar to the preceding’.

On fol. 1r of the Leviticus is the inscription ‘Perf’, and on fol. 101v are ‘Collated’ and ‘Perfect 101 fol.’ (Sinclair, 1969, p. 338). These are similar to inscriptions in a number of other Pontigny-Allard manuscripts, such as Add. MSS 26761, 26762, and 38687 in the British Library, London, and MS. Bywater Adds. 2 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.[x] They were perhaps added at the time of Todd’s sale, since his catalogue extracts in the Melbourne and Armagh manuscripts each describe the manuscripts as ‘perfect’.

On fol. ii in pencil are the inscriptions ‘114z’ and ‘R.S.Ldn, IV.04. XIV Century French 546/471’ (Sinclair, 1969, pp. 338-9). They are in the hand of the Tasmanian collector Robert Carl Sticht (1856–1922) and indicate that the manuscript was purchased by him in London in April 1904. The ex-libris dated 1909 of Robert Carl Sticht and his wife, Marion Oak Sticht, is also pasted inside the front cover, and this manuscript appears as no. ‘85’ on p. 95 of the first volume of the undated, five-volume, hand-written catalogue of the Sticht collection.[xi] Here the manuscript is valued at £9.9.0, although there is no indication of where it was acquired.

The Sticht library was sold by the Melbourne booksellers A.H. Spencer in 1922 and 1923.[xii] Details of their transaction with the State Library of Victoria are recorded inside the front and back covers of the Leviticus, (Sinclair, 1969, p. 339). On the inside front cover is the small label of A.H. Spencer, who was based at the ‘Hill of Content’ shop at 86 Bourke Street, Melbourne. On the inside back cover is an extract from their 1923 sale catalogue, entry no. ‘43’ and the pencil note ‘85 Ld’. Also on the inside back cover in modern pencil is written ‘Spencer 3.4.23. £14. 14. 0’. This indicates the date the work was acquired from A. H. Spencer for the State Library of Victoria, and the sum paid, on the recommendation of the librarian A. B. Foxcroft.[xiii] The verso of fol. ii has the ex-libris of the Public Library of Victoria, and fol. vi carries the Library’s stamp with the date 3 April 1923.

The significance of a number of other inscriptions remains unclear: on the verso of fol. i in modern pencil are ‘11.VII. Christie’, conceivably a reference to the English bibliophile Richard Copley Christie (1830-1901), ‘[…]6/471’, and ‘444/se/p/D’; on fol. ii is ‘114Z’; on fol. vi is ‘16’; on the verso of fol. vi is ‘293567’; on fol. vii is ‘no. 14’; on fol. 1r is ‘14’; on fol. l0lv is ch… aqua rosarium funiculi… in a fifteenth-century hand; and fol. xi has the letters ‘djk’ in a rectangle in pencil in the hand of Robert Sticht.

K.V. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia, Sydney,1969, pp. 338–9, no. 205.

B. Hubber, ‘“Of the Numerous Opportunities”’: the Origins of the Collection of Medieval Manuscripts at the State Library of Victoria’, The La Trobe Journal, nos. 51–2, 1993, pp. 3–9.

M. T. Gibson, The Bible in the Latin West, London, 1993, p. 36.

M. Peyrafort-Huin, La Bibliothèque médiéval de l’Abbaye de Pontigny (XIIe–XIXe siècles): histoire, inventaires anciens, manuscrits, Paris, 2001, pp. 344, 408, and 438.

S. Carmody, ‘A Life of Scholarship: A.B. Foxcroft at the Melbourne Public Library’, The La Trobe Journal, no. 79, Autumn, 2007, pp.  82–96.

H. Gaunt, ‘The Library of Robert Carl Sticht’, The La Trobe Journal, no. 79, Autumn, 2007, pp. 4–26.

C. de Hamel, ‘The Bible: Illuminating the Word’, in The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia, and New Zealand, B. Stocks and N. Morgan (eds), exh. cat., State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 28 March to 15 June 2008, Melbourne, 2008, pp.19–23.

Mirror of the World, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007 and 2011.

This is one of seven surviving manuscripts formerly owned by the Cistercian abbey at Pontigny in Burgundy, all of which contain a biblical commentary of Rabanus Maurus (776 or 784–856). Rabanus collated a gloss on most of the Old Testament and some of the New, using earlier commentaries of the Church Fathers. The other manuscripts in this series from Pontigny are: Exodus (MS. G.II.26, Public Library, Armagh); Numbers (MS 3, University of Oregon Library, Eugene); Deuteronomy; Joshua (MS Add. 38687, British Library, London); Jeremiah (MS Typ 200, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge); Matthew (MS. lat. 7, University College, University of London); and Acts (MS G.II.27, Public Library, Armagh).

Dr Monique Peyrafort-Huin has proposed a date in the first quarter of the thirteenth century for the Leviticus.[ii] The pen-flourished initial on fol. 2r may be compared with the initial on fol. 4r of the Cistercian Missal for Major Feasts (MS. Bywater Adds 2, Bodleian Library, Oxford). This is datable on the grounds of the feasts included in its calendar to 1203–1214. It is generally agreed that both the Leviticus and the Exodus were made in Paris. An inscription on fol. 130v of the Exodus indicates that it was at Pontigny by 1321, and  it is likely that the Leviticus was also there by that time.[iii] Indeed, as part of the group of Biblical texts containing the gloss of Rabanus Maurus, the Leviticus reflects the interest at Pontigny in the development of scholasticism which was already manifesting itself in centres such as Paris in the early thirteenth century. Given their probable production for Pontigny at that time, both the Exodus and the Leviticus may well have been in the Cistercian library considerably earlier than 1321.[iv]

The Exodus and Leviticus were probably housed together for the next five hundred years. They are identifiable as numbers ‘14’ and ‘17’, respectively, of the 1778 inventory of the Pontigny library as ‘119’ and ‘190’ of the 1791 inventory, and as ‘14’ and ‘156’ of the 1794 inventory.[v] They are also probably to be identified as numbers ‘3’ and ‘10’ of Comynet’s catalogue of c. 1825. The manuscripts certainly both belonged to Abbé Joseph-Félix Allard. The Exodus later belonged to Edward O’Reilly.[vi] The Leviticus may also have belonged to Allard and O’Reilly, since the manuscripts were still together as numbers ‘26’ and ‘27’ in the 1863 Notes and Queries list, and as ‘180’ and ‘181’ in the 1864 James Todd sale.

Chief Investigators (CIs) of the ARC project were Professor emeritus Margaret Manion (The University of Melbourne), Professor Bernard Muir (The University of Melbourne), and Dr Toby Burrows (The University of Western Australia). Graduate research assistants were Alexandra Ellem, Dr Hugh Hudson, Dr Elaine Shaw and postgraduate scholar Elizabeth Melzer (The University of Melbourne). Shane Carmody was the representative of the Chief Industry Partner (The State Library of Victoria). The following curators, conservators, photographers and computer specialists at The State Library of Victoria also contributed their expertise: Katrina Ben, Des Cowley, Ian Cox, Adrian Flint, Ross Genat, Jean Holland, Shelley Jamieson, Afsana Khan, Coralie McInnes, Monika McIntyre, Helen McPherson, Peter Mappin and Sarah Mason.

These detailed entries update the information in the earlier catalogues: K.V. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia, Sydney, 1969, M. M. Manion and V. F. Vines, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australian Collections, London, 1984, and B. Stocks and N. Morgan, eds, The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 2008. Our debt to these pioneering publications and dependence on them are acknowledged here.

Margaret M.Manion on behalf of the ARC team, October, 2013.