Palaeography of the parchment Bible from the collection of N. P. Rumiantsev (Russian state library. F. 256. № 816)

Abstract

A Latin parchment Bible with red and blue initials with fleuronnés in pen and a record of the Plague and natural disasters of 1347 is mentioned at the beginning of all descriptions of the foreign part of N. P. Rumyantsev’s collection (RSL. F. 256 No. 816 olim F. 183.I No. 245). It is believed to have been created in Italy in the 14th century (before 1347). A special palaeographic study of the manuscript, undertaken for the first time, showed that it should rather be attributed to monuments of South French origin: the peculiarities of writing, illuminations, and marginalia in Old Occitan, not noted in previous descriptions of the manuscript, point to South France as the place of manuscript creation. L. I. Shchegoleva discovered the proximity of the vocabulary of the marginalia to the vocabulary of Guillaume of Tudela’s “Song of the Crusade against the Albigenses” (Paris. BNF. Français 25425 – Toulouse, the last quarter of the 13th century (c. 1275?)). The proximity of the Paris and Moscow manuscripts is confirmed by codicological data: the part of fleuronnés of the middle initials in the “Song” and in the Rumyantsev Bible belong to the same tradition and could have been executed in the same workshop, although by different masters and at different times. The study of the palaeography of the Rumyantsev Bible has demonstrated the importance of a comprehensive study of the monastic writing of the 13th–14th centuries, in which regional peculiarities and order traditions overlapped, and, above all, the study of the problems of stylization (archaization). The tendency towards archaization of the script traced in the manuscript does not allow us to date it more precisely than the wide period of the last third of the 13th century – the first half of the 14th century.