Liber obsequialis, Use of Constance; Breviary (fragment).

1. Liber obsequialis, Use of Constance.

2. Breviary (fragment). (See child page for information about Breviary)

1. Liber Obsequialis

Folios 1r-65r. Incipit liber obsequialis secundum ordinem et breviarium ecclesie constanciensis in dominicis benedictio salis et aque et primo dicitur exorzismus salis (fol. 1r), followed by various rituals, blessings, and prayers.

Fols 1r-2v. Exorcism and blessing of salt and water.

Fol. 2v. Blessing of wine.

Fols 3r-6r. Blessing of candles and procession on the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary.

Fols 6v-7r. Blessing of ashes and marking the heads of those fasting.

Fols 7v-14r. Blessing of palms and procession on Palm Sunday.

Fols 14v-18r. Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday.

Fols 18r-23v. Holy (paschal) Saturday, blessing of the new fire, the Exultet and blessing of the paschal candle.

Fols 24r-29r. Litany of the Saints and blessing of the baptismal font.

Fol. 29r. Blessing of the lamb on Easter Sunday.

Fol. 29v. Blessing of lard, cheese and eggs.

Fol. 30r. Blessing of new crops on the feast of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary.

Fol. 30v. Blessing of divers first fruits.

Fol. 31r. Blessing of bread and salt for the use of men and animals.

Fol. 31v. Two blessings of women renouncing the world.

Fols 31v-32v. Blessing of pilgrims and their insignia.

Fol. 33r. Blessing of a husband and wife.

Fol. 33v. Blessing of a new house.

Fol. 34r. Two blessings of the owner of a house.

Fol. 34r. Blessing of fountains and sources of water.

Fols 34r-34v. Blessing of the grapes.

Fols 34v-43r. Anointing and prayers for the sick, including the Penitential Psalms (fols 34v-38v); Credo, in German (fol. 38v); fols 39r-41r. Litany of the Saints.

Fols 41v-55r. Prayers for the dead and burial rites including (another) Litany of the Saints (fols 52v-54v).

Fols 55r-65r. Blessings and prayers: exorcism of the water (fol. 55r); exorcism and blessing of the salt (fols 56v-57r; sequences of the four Gospels (fols 57v-59r); against tempests (fols 59v-60r); against thunder (fol. 61v, [in honour of] the love of St John apostle and evangelist (fol. 61v); order of receiving catechumens from the authentic sacramentary of St. Gregory (fols 62r-65r).

The Easter litany (fol. 24r) has no distinctive entries. The second Litany (fol. 39r) invokes Otmarus (St Gall), Gallus, Columbanus (abbot of Luxeuil and Bobbio), Afra (Augsburg), and Gertrudis (Saxony). The third Litany (fol. 52v.) invokes Otmarus, Gallus, Conradus (Constance), Gereon (Cologne), Kilianus (apostle of Franconia), Waldburgis (abbess of Heidenheim), and Odilia (Hohenburg). The presence of Constance and saints in the litanies associated with Southern German locations suggests that the manuscript was made to be used in Southern Germany (Sinclair 1969, p. 346).

Text space: 195 x 130 mm. Ruled in light brown ink, generally twenty-four lines per page, with single bounding lines, although fol. 10v has twenty-five; long lines generally throughout, except for sections of the litanies (fols 24v, 39r-9v, 52v-53v).

Red rubrics and capitals; one initial (65 x 65 mm.) on fol. lr in gold, blue, and red with a floral and leaf border in red, yellow, blue and green. Fine cadel letters appear at the beginning of the Exultet on fol. xx; there are also very ornate large initials on fols 39r, 45v, and 46r. Other initials of various sizes in red occur throughout, the largest being fifteen lines high (the 'I' marking the lection from the Gospel of St Mark on f. 8v). A large initial 'B' at the top of fol. 9r extends up into the top margin and is gold with red highlighting.

Fifteenth-century pigskin over oak boards; the covers have large diamonds tooled in blind. One clasp on a leather strap is still attached, but is broken, and there are remnants of two others; the pin for the clasp still projects from the outer edge of the front board. The five double cords used to bind the text block are easily visible at the front of the manuscript, where the cover is detached; the top and bottom cords feed back in channels to secure the head- and tailbands.

Southern (?) Germany, fifteenth century

This book was apparently in Germany in the fifteenth century, as there are annotations in a late fifteenth-century German littera hybrida currens script on fols 13v–14r, and 64r.

The earliest clear signs of ownership are the inscriptions ‘3949 MSS. Ph. £9/9/–’, in pencil on the inside front cover, and ‘3949 MSS Ph’, in black ink on the verso of fol. i. These indicate that the manuscript was owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps. He had it by 1837, when it was published by G. Hänel as number 3949, among a group of Phillipps manuscripts that had unknown earlier provenances.[i] (1837, p. 579).

On the inside front cover is the ex libris of Robert Carl and Marion Oak Sticht, dated 1909, and written in pencil on the back pastedown in Sticht’s hand is his undeciphered code ‘thg’ in a rectangle. Also on the front pastedown is the label of the next owner, the bookseller A.H. Spencer, located at 86 Bourke Street, Melbourne. An extract of entry number 28 from A.H. Spencer’s sale catalogue for Sticht’s library is on the back pastedown, with the inscription ‘Spencer 1.5.23. £9/9/–’. These refer to the date the manuscript was acquired by the State Library of Victoria, and the amount paid. The spine carries an old paper sticker with the letter ‘z’, whose significance is unknown.

G. Hänel, ‘Katalog der Handschriften der Bibliothek des Herrn Baronet Phillipps zu Middlehill in Worcestershire’, Archiv für philologie und paedagogik, Vol. 5, 1837, 546–94.

A.N.L. Munby, Phillipps Studies, 5 vols, Cambridge, 1951–1960, Vol. 3: The Formation of the Phillipps Library up to 1840, 1954, p. 154.

K.V. Sinclair, ‘Phillipps Manuscripts in Australia’, The Book Collector, Vol.11, 1962, p. 335.

K.V. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia, Sydney, 1969, pp. 345–7, No. 209.

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, 3–9, p. 6.

R. Rastall, The Notation of Western Music: an Introduction (London, 1983).

(for 1 and 2): The incipit on the first folio introduces the manuscript as a liber obsequialis. In the modern sense of the word, this would contain directions and texts for the administration of the sacraments and sacramentals by a priest or deacon in relation to a funeral service. However, as Eric Palazzo has explained:

‘The terms agenda, baptisteria, obsequium [“Mass”, “baptism”, “funerals”], which one frequently encounters in medieval texts from the eleventh century on, designate most often complete rituals identified by the liturgical act whose text is first in the manuscript…. The relatively unstable condition of the ritual prior to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was thus accentuated by designations that are variable and vague. The word rituale appeared only in the sixteenth century in Italy in the printed editions; at the same time, terms like agenda and obsequiale would persist in certain countries such as Germany’.[i]

In the Liber obsequialis in the State Library of Victoria the rites for the dying and the dead do not appear until towards the end of the book (fols 34v-54v). After opening with  the asperges rite which prefaces the solemn Mass on Sundays, the book presents a comprehensive collection of rituals and blessings associated with certain feasts and seasons of the Church year, such as the blessing of candles on the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin (2 February); the blessing of ashes on Ash Wednesday; and the special ceremonies for Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The manuscript which is of a substantial size clearly served as a complementary book for the missal and breviary for services held in the church throughout the year, as well as a portable manual for rites and blessings conducted elsewhere.

Binding[ii]

The manuscript seems to retain its first binding, although it is somewhat altered. The original back pastedown was identified by Sinclair as a recycled document on parchment containing an agreement between a certain ‘Cunrat Knittel’ and a ‘Hans Knittel, Brandeburger’, written in a German littera hybrida script that dates to the second half of the fifteenth century (1969, pp. 345–7). The folio was glued face down to the back cover, and ink from the text has been transferred to the wooden board to which it was stuck. What is unusual here, is that this pastedown was sewn into the text block– its tab can be seen between folios 56 and 57. Subsequently, a further sheet of paper was glued over the pastedown. After the manuscript was acquired by the SLV and its shelf-mark written on the paper pastedown, it was cut vertically through the shelf-mark and lifted. This revealed the original pastedown, now also detached from the back cover.

The original front pastedown was cut from the same recycled folio as the back one. It has the same script and parchment support. It was stuck upside-down and face down to the inside of the front cover, and the ink from the text was similarly transferred to the wooden board to which it was attached. It must have become detached by the time the manuscript was acquired by Thomas Phillipps, since he applied his collector’s stamp to the side of the pastedown that had previously been glued to the cover, and wrote his number 3949 beneath the stamp. Furthermore, he applied his stamp in the same orientation as the text, which implies that the front pastedown had been both lifted and inverted (for the latter observation, thanks are due to Eizabeth Melzer). The front pastedown was separated from the manuscript by the subsequent owner Robert Sticht, who placed it among a number of Phillipps autographs in the third album of a four-volume collection of autographs he bought from the British collector Frederick Hendriks (1827–1909), which is also now housed in the collection of the State Library of Victoria (MS 13668).

Digital imaging and research on this manuscript were supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia:Researching and Relating Australia’s Manuscript Holdings to New Technologies and New Readers (2010-13). Substantial donations from the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, Catholic Church Insurance and the National Australia Bank are gratefully acknowledged. The Catholic Diocese of Ballarat, The Network for Early European Research, and Newman College, The University of Melbourne, have also generously contributed to the project.

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. Before he left the project at the end of 2011, Hugh Hudson made a significant contribution to several of the entries, particularly in the area of Provenance and the updating of Bibliography. This contribution is acknowledged in appropriate endnotes. Other contributors, besides the ARC team, both in Australia and overseas, are also acknowledged in relevant endnotes.

These detailed entries draw on the information in earlier catalogues and also update it. In particular, they are based on the following: 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.