Cuttings from an Illustrated Twelfth-Century French Manuscript Bible in Los Angeles and Berlin

Introduction

About thirty-five years ago in 1989, the Department of Manuscripts of the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired a cutting with a historiated initial from a fine twelfth-century French manuscript Bible (fig. 1).¹ It had come onto the market from an anonymous seller to be sold at Sotheby’s, London, on 2 December 1986.² The description in the auction catalog noted that some other cuttings from the same manuscript are in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, and that these had been attributed to southeastern France in the first half of the twelfth century. The Sotheby’s cataloger suggested that they might instead have been made in northeastern France or southern Flanders, however, and refined the date to the second quarter of the twelfth century.³ Since the Getty acquisition, the museum’s attribution has always been to northeastern France in the middle decades of the twelfth century.⁴ This article revisits that date and place of production to show that, through an examination of the sister cuttings, most of which are entirely unpublished, the Getty cutting can be situated in a specific religious context.

The Getty Initial

The Getty cutting embodies most of the kinds of evidence that will be used in the ensuing discussion, so it is worth directing the reader’s attention to its salient features. The initial depicts a barefoot, bearded, and haloed male figure holding a scroll—typical iconography for an Old Testament prophet. The outlines are drawn in dark-brown ink, and the figure’s draperies, neck, and feet are modeled in two tones of blue and an orange-red, allowing the bare parchment to act as highlights; the visible hand, face, and hair are modeled in shades of brown, also with bare parchment for areas of highlight. The prophet stands against a deep-red background within a green initial U (the letter is interchangeable with V in medieval Latin) with simple foliate motifs, which opens the Old Testament book of Micah: “Verbum domini quo factum est ad Micheam Morastiten” (The word of the Lord that came to Micah the Morasthite). The lower-left and right corners of the green letter and its red background show that, as usual, the artist had to fit his design into spaces left in the text by the scribe. Above the initial are the closing words of the book of Jonah, “Explicit Ionas propheta” ([Here] ends Jonah the prophet), and a line of stylized majuscules against a green background, “Incipit Mich[eas]. P[ro]pheta” ([Here] begins Micah the prophet), above which the same words are written in more easily legible twelfth-century script in red ink. The scribe who added this line in red also altered the spelling of the word Micheam a few lines down, because the original scribe had omitted the e. The writing is guided by horizontal rulings in gray plummet (often called lead point, the medieval equivalent of pencil). The second-from-the-bottom line of writing is placed between two such horizontal line rules that extend all the way to the left edge of the cutting. Where they meet the extreme left edge, a small oblique stroke is visible, resembling the hyphens in the right-hand margin that mark word breaks at the ends of some lines of script: this suggests that the cutting was originally the right-hand side of a two-column page. In the upper-left margin of the cutting, in line with the prophet’s head, is a large red S flanked by dots, while the lower-right corner has an ink stamp in the form of a circle enclosing a letter M, or an upside-down W; the significance of these will be explained below. The cutting is stuck down onto a piece of card, so the reverse is not clearly legible, but a few lines of text are partially visible through the translucent parchment.

The Corpus of Known Cuttings

In 1931 art historian Paul Wescher published the first catalog of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett collection of illuminated manuscripts, which includes twelve cuttings from a Bible “from the South East of France, dating to the first half of the twelfth century.”⁵ It was more than half a century later that the cutting now held by the Getty Museum appeared for sale in London, but only three years after this sale another appeared at auction in Cologne; the latter is now in a private collection.⁶ Thus, at the end of the twentieth century, the total number of known cuttings stood at fourteen. Then, in June 2004, art historian Robert Schindler, as part of a project to search the storerooms of the Kupferstichkabinett for uncataloged material, found thirty-eight more unlisted cuttings, more than tripling the known corpus, but he did not have the opportunity to analyze them further.⁷ Nearly twenty years later, these cuttings still remain practically unknown and largely unpublished, except for four that were reproduced in print in 2010 by art historian Beate Braun-Niehr, who attributed them to the Meuse region and dated them to the second quarter of the twelfth century.⁸ Since then, the Berlin and Getty cuttings have been discussed briefly in our respective work elsewhere.⁹ The goal of the present article is to reconsider in much greater detail the entire group—including the cutting in a private collection—which we will refer to collectively as the Getty-Berlin cuttings. Specifically, our aims include making the unpublished cuttings better known; shedding light on their date and origin through a stylistic analysis; examining their modern provenance; and proposing a partial reconstruction of both the original mise-en-page of individual full leaves and of their original sequence in the multivolume Bible from which they come. An appendix lays out this reconstruction, detailing their textual contents, decorations, and more.

Reconstruction of the Original Layout and Dimensions

The original layout and page dimensions can be extrapolated with some confidence. Many cuttings show that the text was laid out in two columns (as was, and still is, conventional for Bibles), while measurements from individual cuttings reveal that the column width is about 10.5 centimeters, the space between the columns about 0.28 centimeters, and the space between each horizontal line about 0.9–1 centimeters.

A first clue to the overall layout comes from the horizontal rulings on each cutting.¹⁰ Throughout the medieval period it was very common for the one or two top and bottom horizontal lines to be ruled across the full width of the page, while most of the remaining lines extended to the width of the text column. In large twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts, the middle horizontals were often ruled all the way across the page as well; or instead, sometimes it was three or four ruled lines that were so extended. Among the current group, the prologue cuttings of Acts, 1 Chronicles, and the Minor Prophets show that the top three horizontal lines were ruled across the page; the prologue cuttings of Malachi, Zephaniah, and Chronicles show that the bottom three lines were ruled across the page; and the initials of Hosea, Obadiah, Malachi, Habakkuk, Ezekiel, Esther, Zacharias, Isaiah, 2 Chronicles, Romans, Daniel, and Micah all show that the middle three lines were ruled across the page.¹¹ The cutting with the prologue to the Pauline Epistles has twenty-seven lines in total: sixteen are above the three at the midpoint of the page (and eight are below them); so there must be at least sixteen lines between the top and midpoint rulings; and each column must have had at least thirty-five (sixteen + three + sixteen) lines of text.

We can be more specific. The large Esther cutting preserves the last four lines of the book of Tobit and the first thirteen of the book of Esther itself, decorated with a fine historiated initial I (fig. 2). Because the incipit to the prologue occurs at the bottom of the left column, the prologue itself must have begun at the top of the right column. Given that the incipit of the main text begins fourteen lines from the bottom of the right column, we can deduce that the missing prologue must have occupied all but fifteen lines of a full column. The surviving text of Esther (after the incipit in large red and blue display majuscules, which occupy twice the height of a line of regular script) fills thirteen lines and is seventy-two words long—that is, between five and six words per line. The missing prologue text (according to a printed version) is about 143 words long.¹² Thus, the missing text would have occupied almost exactly twice the space occupied by the surviving text: if seventy-two words occupy thirteen lines, then 143 words should occupy twenty-six lines. The prologue’s explicit may have occupied one additional line, judging by some of the other cuttings. These numbers suggest a column height of about forty lines (prologue text [twenty-six lines] + Esther incipit [one line] + Esther text [thirteen lines]), or forty-one lines, if the explicit was written on a separate line.

The Esther cutting is about 23 centimeters wide, but it has been shorn of its side margins; we may therefore estimate that the page, including the margins, would have originally been approximately 30–35 centimeters wide. We have calculated that there were probably about forty lines per column, and measurement shows that ten lines occupy about 9.5 centimeters, so forty lines would have been about 38 centimeters high. Adding an estimate for the upper and lower margins to this calculation, we may provisionally suggest an overall leaf height between 45 and 60 centimeters.

These extrapolated dimensions, although imprecise, are consistent with the grand scale of French Romanesque illuminated Bibles. Often referred to as lectern Bibles, these volumes would have been too heavy to move around with ease and were therefore typically kept on a lectern in a monastery’s choir for the prescribed biblical readings of the Divine Office or in the refectory to be read aloud during meals.¹³ If we take as a sample the French Bibles cataloged by Walter Cahn in 1982, we find that the leaves of most of them (with a few outliers) range from 45.5 to 55.5 centimeters in height and from 33 to 38 centimeters in width.¹⁴ We should not make too much of these broad comparisons of dimensions, however, as most medieval manuscripts have been trimmed at least once during rebinding. The main point is that the dimensions proposed here for the Bible from which the Getty-Berlin cuttings derive are consistent with what we would expect.

Decoration

Looking at the whole group of initials, each from twelve to twenty lines high, the most impressive are the eleven depicting standing or seated figures. They can be identified, thanks to their adjacent texts, as the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Daniel, Hosea, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, and Zacharias; the heroines Ruth and Esther; King Solomon enthroned; and—the sole New Testament figure—Saint Paul writing.¹⁵ The protagonists are set against a red, blue, green, or yellow background, occasionally ornamented by white dots in geometric patterns. The same solid-color backgrounds are used for nonfigurative initials, such as the initial O of Onus, for Nahum (fig. 3). The contrast between the colors of the frame, ground, and body of the initials creates a vivid mosaic. In addition to the eleven historiated initials, there are forty-one large decorated letters with intricate spirals of heart-shaped acanthus leaves, brightly colored with red, blue, green, and yellow ink, the inner parts often filled by small dots and striations. In one case, the initial I for In principio at the beginning of Genesis contains burnished gold (fig. 4).¹⁶ The bodies of the initials are sometimes divided into geometric sections with a double contour line and decorated with vegetal elements symmetrically arranged; in one case, one side of the initial letter is formed of a dragon with long neck and tail (Min. 4679). Six more other small cuttings have portions of script, sometimes introduced by pen-flourished initials drawn in red or blue ink.¹⁷

Basing his observations on the relatively meager body of reproductions available at the time of his writing, Wescher noted that the style of the Berlin cuttings can be compared with the famous Legendary from the Cistercian abbey of Cîteaux, south of Dijon in eastern France, and a Bible from the Benedictine abbey of Talloires, on the banks of Lake Annecy in southeastern France.¹⁸ Nearly a century later, now that innumerable possible comparanda have been published, an analysis of the decoration reveals even closer similarities to manuscripts produced for Carthusian communities in this region. In 1084, Saint Bruno, the founder of the order, established the Grande Chartreuse in southeastern France between Grenoble and Chambéry, and the life of the monks came to be regulated by the Consuetudines (Customs) composed by the fifth prior, Guigo, between 1121 and 1128.¹⁹ As reported by Guibert, abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, who visited the Grande Chartreuse between 1115 and 1117, the community lived in poverty, and the church had no embellishment other than a silver goblet and the library. The monks had already gathered a conspicuous number of decorated manuscripts, and the library was continuously enriched thanks to the activity of copyists, mainly the monks themselves.²⁰ During the twelfth century, thirty-six Carthusian sister houses were founded in Europe, among which was the Chartreuse (charterhouse) of Liget, in the French diocese of Tours: it was founded by King Henry II of England, perhaps in atonement for the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170.²¹

A first comparison with our fragments can be seen with the so-called Liget Bible in five volumes, dating from the last third of the twelfth century. Written by four scribes, it was painted by two illuminators, one responsible for the first three volumes and part of the fifth (extending to fol. 129v), and the second for the rest.²² If we look at the pages completed by the first illuminator, we can easily recognize how the decorative patterns of the incipit letters, made of symmetrical, heart-shaped vegetal spirals and colorful tendrils set on red, green, blue, or yellow backgrounds, are the same as the Berlin cuttings—for example, the initial O for Osculetur (fig. 5).²³ Moreover, the initial L for Liber at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew,²⁴ with a blue ground ornamented with white dots, is identical to the I at the beginning of Genesis in Berlin (see fig. 4). In addition, the figures that inhabit the initials of the Liget Bible, especially in the third volume (Ms. Latin 11508), show more than a passing resemblance to those of the Getty-Berlin group: the robust, cylindrical forms of the bodies, showing the limbs; the shapes underlined by garments falling down in the so-called damp fold;²⁵ the mantles ending in a zigzag pattern; the essential facial features; and the solemn gestures inherited from classical antiquity through Byzantine art, typical of the Romanesque products from the late eleventh century onward. Eloquent comparisons can also be established between Isaiah in the Kupferstichkabinett example (fig. 6) and the V for Vir representing Job in the Liget Bible (fig. 7); and between Zacharias in the Kupferstichkabinett cutting (Min. 1905) and the O for Omnis with Christ and a personification of Wisdom from the Liget Bible (fig. 8). We recognize the same physiognomies, with curved eyebrows and irregular profiles; Christ and Daniel have long heart-shaped noses, and the men and Isaiah have large rounded noses. As other scholars have pointed out, the Liget Bible is very closely connected to manuscripts from the Grande Chartreuse, especially the Bible of Notre-Dame de Casalibus, which was made by 1132 and has almost the same textual prologues.²⁶ The Great Bible of the Grande Chartreuse has been dated circa 1170–74 by Dominique Mielle de Becdelièvre on the basis of it being written partly by the same scribe as a homiliary of the Grande Chartreuse, which itself can be dated on the basis of whether saints are present (some of whom were added to the Carthusian calendar circa 1170) or absent (notably Becket, who was added to the Carthusian calendar circa 1174).²⁷ It was written by two main scribes and illuminated by fine artists led by the so-called Genesis Master, who is none other than the artist responsible for the parts of the Liget Bible written by its second scribe.²⁸

These manuscripts demonstrate a close relationship between different Carthusian monasteries in their book production, and the same is true for a copy of Gratian’s Decretum of the last third of the twelfth century, ornamented by twenty-six initials and possibly from the Grande Chartreuse:²⁹ the initial Q of Quidam (fig. 9) shows exactly the same decorative patterns as the Genesis initial in the Kupferstichkabinett cutting (see fig. 4), and so do the other decorated initials.

However, this style is not found in the majority of Carthusian manuscripts; for example, if we look at the Great Bible of the Grande Chartreuse, a difference can be seen in the design of the vegetal tendrils—softer and less nervous—and in the way the colors are applied on the letter bodies and ornaments: while the illuminators of the Bible favored thick, uniform layers of painted color, the artist of the Getty-Berlin cuttings, with the exception of the Genesis initial, applied colors in thin, close strokes with a pen. In fact, scholars have long recognized that this way of drawing sprouts, with the veins of the leaves clearly visible, derives from Cistercian manuscripts made for Cîteaux and Clairvaux in the first half of the twelfth century. If we look at the De civitate dei (City of God) of the third quarter of the twelfth century (figs. 10, 11),³⁰ for example, the similarity of the scrolling vegetal tendrils filled with pen striations symmetrically arranged in a figure-eight shape, with most of the letters set on a monochrome field, is quite evident. The same is true for the Lectionarium officii Cisterciense (Lectionary of the Cistercian office) and the Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum (Incomplete work on Matthew’s Gospel), both now in Troyes.³¹ Another comparison is possible with the famous Bible of Stephen Harding, dated 1109 in the second of four volumes (which was originally the end of the first of two volumes), and perhaps finished a year or two later (fig. 12).³² Besides the use of pen drawing, the shape of the acanthus leaves and the colors filling the interstices are also basically the same as those seen in the Carthusian manuscripts; when analyzing the books originally from Cîteaux (such as Mss. 32, 131, 159, 180, and 641, now at the Bibliothèque Municipale in Dijon³³), it is immediately clear that their decorative patterns heavily influenced the illuminators active for the Grande Chartreuse.

The stylistic relationship between Cistercian and Carthusian production can be easily explained in light of the devotion that Saint Bruno showed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and his motherhouse.³⁴ Correspondence between Guigo and Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, records the request of the prior of the Grande Chartreuse to borrow some volumes from the library of Cluny.³⁵ While the monks from the Grande Chartreuse visiting Cîteaux and other Cistercian foundations were likely the intermediaries for exchanges of books, the artists themselves may have traveled on the route that connected the two abbeys.³⁶ A famous example from this melting pot is Ms. 616 at the Bibliothèque Municipale in Dijon. Containing two Carthusian texts (the Consuetudines Cartusiae and the first part of the Supplementa ad Consuetudines Cartusiae), it was produced at the Grande Chartreuse but was owned by the abbey of Cîteaux during the twelfth century, perhaps as a gift from Abbot Antelme to Abbot Goswin, who headed the Cistercian abbey of Bonnevaux from 1141 to 1151 and then Cîteaux from 1151 to 1155.³⁷

Even though we no longer have the whole Bible, it is clear that the Getty-Berlin cuttings represent some of its most important incipits. Despite the facts that there are no full-page miniatures (as found in a few of the most lavishly decorated Bibles), and that ocher and yellow usually have to stand in for gold, the biblical books and their prologues are introduced by elegant vegetal knots, and many have figures magnificently staged within the initials, as in the Liget Bible or Great Bible. These Bibles exceed the cuttings in quality and complexity of representation: in the Great Bible, the beginning of Genesis is ornamented by a full-page historiated initial I (In principio) under an arch, depicting the Creation, other Old Testament scenes, and the Incarnation;³⁸ and in the Liget Bible, the Creation story is depicted within a giant historiated initial of five medallions.³⁹ The cutting in Berlin, however, merely offers scrolling acanthus leaves forming four circular loops, one above the other, somewhat analogous to the round medallions in which Creation scenes are often arranged in Genesis initials.⁴⁰ In both the Liget and Great Bibles, there are many initials depicting groups of figures or events—such as the representations of Solomon enthroned⁴¹ and of Job suffering (see fig. 7)—while in the cuttings we have only single figures.

Scholars have studied the evolution of book decoration within the Grande Chartreuse library, recognizing a few exceptional cases in which the texts are accompanied by a rich ornamental program, including the Bible of Notre-Dame de Casalibus, completed before 1132, and the Great Bible of circa 1170. Especially in this latter case, copiously illustrated, the function of the decoration could be either a tool for the meditation of the reader or a literal representation of the contents.⁴² As for the cuttings, the figured initials are portraits of prophets, Saint Paul, Solomon, Ruth, and Esther, while the decorated initials have a functional purpose—marking the incipits—as well as an ornamental one. The Bible from which the cuttings were taken can thus be put in a relative chronological sequence between the Bible of Notre-Dame de Casalibus and either the Great Bible or the Liget Bible, offering a good mix of decorated and figured initials, superseding the older pattern of the first Bible but not reaching the pictorial complexity of the second.

However, only the style allows us to establish a link with the Grande Chartreuse or, more precisely, with a Carthusian monastery. There is neither an ownership inscription nor documentary evidence connecting the cuttings with any of the charterhouses; there are no inventories of the Liget monastery library; and those of the Grande Chartreuse library are too vague to allow us to positively identify our now-dismembered Bible.⁴³ Two historical facts may be relevant here. First, when the monks of the Grande Chartreuse were expelled from the monastery in 1792 in the wake of the French Revolution, the manuscripts of its library were mainly transferred to the municipal library in Grenoble. Second, the famous manuscript thief Guglielmo Libri visited the library at Grenoble in October 1842, where he was left unsupervised, and library stamps cut from Grenoble volumes were discovered among his papers when he was brought to trial in 1850 for his thefts from many French libraries.⁴⁴ It is also possible that our Bible came from one of the other major Carthusian monasteries, such as the Chartreuse of Portes, Écouges, Currière, Pierre-Châtel, or Liget.⁴⁵ Moreover, the style itself is no guarantee that the original manuscript belonged to the Grande Chartreuse; in fact, the peculiar decoration of the Grande Chartreuse books became, by the end of the twelfth century, typical of many other workshops active for religious communities in the southeast of France.⁴⁶

Script

Analysis of the handwriting does not (in the current state of our knowledge) connect the cuttings to a precise Carthusian foundation; it simply confirms that the Bible was written around the 1160s. The writing shows the typical characteristics of late Caroline minuscule script, in the transitional phase, sometimes called pre-Gothic or proto-Gothic, before the emergence of the fully Gothic littera textualis. Features of this period are the use, in combination, of the following:

• the round s at the end of words (see, for example, fig. 1, last line, eius; dominus abbreviated to dns; and deus abbreviated to ds) and the tall s used at the beginning of the words samariam and super, three and four lines from the bottom
• both uncial d (with the ascender slanting to the left) and d with an upright ascender (both forms are found on the bottom two lines of fig. 1: audite, attendite, and plenitudo; cf. dns and ds)
• both et and the ampersand (&) (the Genesis cutting, fig. 4, mostly uses et, but the ampersand also occurs once; see also the bottom two lines of the Getty cutting, fig. 1)
• a few ligatures persist, such as st (see, for example, testem, the very last word of the Getty cutting, fig. 1)

Some differences in the writing among the cuttings suggest the participation of at least two scribes. If we compare, for example, the Esther cutting (see fig. 2) with the Getty cutting (see fig. 1), several differences are readily apparent. Overall, the former’s script is more laterally compressed, with letters and their individual strokes closer together; the common abbreviation mark to indicate a missing m or n is a horizontal stroke with serifs (very unlike the curved form found, for example, twice on the last line of the Getty cutting); the Tironian symbol for et (shaped somewhat like a 7) appears (for example, twice in the first line of the left column) alongside the ampersand (for example in lines 4 and 9 of the right column); the ct ligature is still joined, not broken as in the Getty cutting (line 2 of the main text, factum); and other letterforms have small differences. Punctuation also provides corroborating evidence as to the date: we see an abundant use of the punctus elevatus, punctus interrogativus, and punctus versus,⁴⁷ but the punctus flexus, introduced by “early Cistercian scribes to assist readers in deciphering the sense of unfamiliar texts”⁴⁸ and later adopted by Carthusian scribes, is absent. As noticed by Mielle de Becdelièvre, the punctus flexus features in the Great Bible from the Grande Chartreuse but not in the older Notre-Dame de Casalibus one,⁴⁹ again suggesting that the Bible to which the cuttings belong was a product of about the 1160s.

It is not possible to understand with certainty how the task of writing the manuscript was divided, in part because of an almost complete lack of evidence concerning the original quire structure. In her magisterial study of French Romanesque Carthusian manuscripts, Mielle de Becdelièvre notes that many books from the Grande Chartreuse were written by more than one scribe, and her comparative analysis of the texts demonstrates that there was no systematic division of the work, not even for the rubrics. She suggests that in some cases the differing styles of script might be attributed to a master and a student.⁵⁰ Concerning the production of manuscripts within the Carthusian Order, in general, we know that writing was recommended in the Consuetudines by Guigo:⁵¹ the monks were supposed to copy books during the day in their own cells, as attested also by Peter the Venerable.⁵² Given the strict rule of anonymity of the scribes, it is almost impossible to find names of the copyists who spent three or four daylight hours in winter and eight or nine hours in summer doing the opus manum (manual work), using the writing instruments listed by Guigo including quill pens and a penknife for cutting, pumice stones and chalk for preparing the surface of the parchment, and ink horns and a sharp knife or razor for erasing mistakes.⁵³

Text

Before analyzing the text of the cuttings, it is necessary to know what to expect of a twelfth-century Bible in general terms. The Bible in use today is based, in many important ways, on an “edition” of the Bible commonly known as the Paris Bible, which was formulated in the early thirteenth century and disseminated across Europe from Paris by the middle of the same century. The Paris Bible has a specific selection of biblical books, in a fixed sequence, most of them preceded by specific prologues, and each book is divided into chapters at fixed points. The Paris Bible also set a new standard for the authority of the words of the text itself, earlier copies having become more and more corrupted by the compounding effect of successive scribal errors from one copy to the next. Important to our present purposes is that, prior to establishment of the Paris Bible, Bibles varied considerably; the selection of books, their prologues, their texts, their sequences, and their divisions into chapters were not standardized. In addition, earlier Bibles often included features that are not found in the Paris Bible, notably capitula lists—that is, brief summaries of the subject matter of the chapters, placed before individual books, similar to tables of contents. Modern Bibles often have a short summary at the beginning of each chapter, such as “Christ’s sermon upon the mount; the eight beatitudes,” but in capitula lists, such summaries are grouped together at the beginning of each biblical book.

It follows from this that in order to reconstruct and understand the original form of the Bible from which the Getty-Berlin cuttings come, we must use all available clues to its textual contents, which may not follow a standard sequence. The appendix to this article attempts to present this reconstruction in detail, but it may be useful to provide an example here. The recto of one cutting (Min. 159) has a portion of text from near the end of the book of Ecclesiasticus (alias Sirach) and, on its verso, a prologue to the book of Job. Another cutting (Min. 138) has part of a different prologue to Job on its recto, and part of Job chapter 1 on its verso. The recto of a third cutting (Min. 140) has text from near the end of the book of Job, with a prologue to Tobit on its verso. From these three cuttings we can deduce that the parent volume had the following sequence of six texts: Ecclesiasticus, followed by a prologue to Job; another prologue to Job, followed by the book of Job itself; and a prologue to Tobit, which was doubtless followed by the book of Tobit itself. This is entirely unlike the order of texts found in the Paris Bible and modern editions, in which Job is adjacent neither to Ecclesiasticus nor Tobit but is instead between Esther and the Psalms. As we will see in due course, the sequence of these three biblical books as represented by the cuttings is highly significant.

Some sequences of biblical books, as represented by the Getty-Berlin cuttings, are typical. For example, the first eight books of the Bible (known collectively as the Octateuch) run in the standard sequence: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth.⁵⁴ Similarly, the Twelve Minor Prophets appear as a group in their usual sequence. Some cuttings provide no clues as to what preceded or followed them: examples are cuttings with portions of the books of Wisdom (Min. 168) and Acts (Min. 132). Large parts of the Bible, including most of the Pauline Epistles and all of the Gospels, are not represented at all in the known cuttings, suggesting the possibility that they were in one or more separate volumes that are entirely lost (large-scale twelfth-century Bibles were typically bound in two, three, or four volumes).

Lectern Bibles written for use in Carthusian houses have the individual books arranged in an apparently eccentric sequence; the reason for this is that they were intended to correspond more closely to (but rarely the same as) the order of the liturgical Matins and refectory readings of the year, as stipulated in the Carthusian Statutes, as follows (here in simplified summary form):⁵⁵

• Advent to Christmas Eve: Isaiah, Daniel (Statutes 2.2)
• Epiphany to Septuagesima: Pauline Epistles (Statutes 4.1)
• Septuagesima to Passion Sunday: Genesis to Judges (the Heptateuch) (Statutes 4.4)
• Passion Sunday to Maundy Thursday: Jeremiah (Statutes 4.13)
• Triduum (Last Supper to Easter evening): Lamentations
• Easter to Pentecost: Acts, Catholic Epistles, Revelation (Statutes 4.32)
• Pentecost to August: 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings, 1–2 Chronicles (Statutes 5.1)
• August to September: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Statutes 5.2)
• September to October: Job, Tobit, Judith, Esther (Statutes 5.3)
• October to November: 1–2 Maccabees (Statutes 5.4)
• November to Advent: Ezekiel, the Twelve Minor Prophets, Daniel (Statutes 2.2)

The Great Bible, for example, has almost exactly this sequence:⁵⁶

• Vol. 1: Ezekiel, Daniel, Minor Prophets, Isaiah, Pauline Epistles
• Vol. 2: Heptateuch, Jeremiah, Lamentations
• Vol. 3: Acts, Catholic Epistles, Revelation, 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings, 1–2 Chronicles
• Vol. 4: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Job, Tobit, Judith, Esther, 1–2 Maccabees

The biggest differences between this order of books and the order in which we usually find them in Bibles from the thirteenth century onward are that

• Jeremiah and Lamentations follow the Heptateuch, rather than following Isaiah;
• Acts, the Catholic Epistles, and Revelation, which usually occur at the end of the New Testament, occur instead between the Old Testament books of the prophet Jeremiah and the historical books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles;
• Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus precede, rather than follow, Job, Tobit, Judith, and Esther;
• 1–2 Maccabees follow Job, Tobit, Judith, and Esther, rather than occurring at the end of the Old Testament;
• Isaiah follows the Twelve Minor Prophets, rather than preceding the other Major and the Minor Prophets;
• the Pauline Epistles follow Isaiah (and Daniel); and
• the Gospels are absent.

In the Getty-Berlin cuttings we find that, as above,

• Job follows Ecclesiasticus;
• Job precedes, not follows, Tobit, Judith, and Esther;
• Daniel follows the Twelve Minor Prophets; and
• the Gospels are absent (or at least not represented by any known cutting).

Carthusian Lection Markings

Beyond stylistic analyses of script and decoration and the peculiar sequence of the biblical books, other features of the Getty-Berlin cuttings demonstrate conclusively that the parent Bible was used by Carthusians. In our description of the Getty cutting at the beginning of this article, we noted the presence of a red S in the left margin, next to the start of the text (see fig. 1). Similar marginal notations occur on other cuttings in Berlin, including majuscule letters P (Proverbs 1:29, Zechariah 1:1), S (Joel 2:18), and T (Haggai 1:1); roman numerals I (Daniel 1:1, Joel 1:1), II (Isaiah 1:1, Nahum 1:1, Malachi 1:1), and III (Habakkuk 1:1); and minuscule letters a (2 Samuel 1:1, Proverbs 1:29, Ezekiel prologue), b (2 Samuel 1:5, 2 Samuel 2:18, Tobit 1:1, Ezekiel 1:1, Romans 1:1, 1 Corinthians 1:1), c (Judith 1:5, 2 Samuel 2:22), d (Ecclesiasticus 50:15), e (Proverbs 30:15), f (Romans 16:17), g (1 Samuel 1:28?), and h (Tobit 12:20). All these forms of annotation are characteristic of Carthusian Bibles. The letters P, S, and T stand for primus, secundus, and tertius (or prima lectio, secunda lectio, and tertia lectio) and indicate the start of the three biblical lections read on weekdays by Carthusians. Sometimes I, II, and III are used in their place. Also Carthusian is the presence in the margins of the first eight letters of the alphabet, a to h, to indicate the eight biblical lections to be read on Sundays and major feast days.⁵⁷ (This is not to be confused with the method, probably developed by the Paris Dominicans in the thirteenth century, of dividing parts of a work into subsections using the first seven letters of the alphabet, a to g.)⁵⁸ The three different types of markings in the Getty-Berlin cuttings may represent successive stages of annotation: the cutting with the decorated initial at the start of Proverbs, for example, has on its verso a roman numeral I in brown ink, overwritten with a P in red, next to which is an a, also in red.

Modern Provenance

When or whence the Berlin cuttings entered the Kupferstichkabinett is not certain. They are not recorded in the collection’s accession inventories, and the only evidence is an oval ink stamp on the reverse of each item, with an imperial shield and crown in the center, surrounded by the legend “kupferstich=sammlung der konigl: museen”; this corresponds to a stamp in Frits Lugt’s reference work Marques de collections, no. 1606.⁵⁹ The stamp is generally found on works acquired by the Kupferstichkabinett, founded in 1831, as part of its foundation collections and acquisitions of the first few decades. Its successor, Lugt no. 1607, was certainly in use by 1881, but unfortunately this does not provide a terminus ante quem for the use of Lugt no. 1606, which continued to be applied at later dates to items that were believed by later curators—rightly or wrongly—to have been early acquisitions; Lugt no. 1606 often appears alongside stamps of private collections that were demonstrably acquired later.⁶⁰

If we tabulate the accession numbers of illuminated cuttings with known dates of acquisition, we see how unreliable the numbers are as a guide to the dates of acquisition of our Bible cuttings. One group, for example, is numbered from Min. 1904 to Min. 1908: they thus fall between Min. 1902, which was acquired in 1856, and Min. 1915, which was acquired in 1835, while a much lower number, Min. 1250, was acquired forty years later, in 1875.⁶¹ While we cannot say for certain, the likelihood is that the Bible cuttings were acquired at an early date. It is probably significant that Wescher, who was usually very careful to record provenance in his 1931 catalog, does not suggest anything for the present cuttings.

Neither the Getty cutting nor the one in a private collection has a Kupferstichkabinett stamp, and there is no reason to imagine that they ever formed part of the museum collection in Berlin. Nothing is known of the pre-1989 provenance of the cutting in a private collection, but the Getty one has a stamp (Lugt no. 5551) showing that it was owned by Wescher, probably before he moved from Berlin to the United States in 1948, where he was employed by J. Paul Getty as the very first curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum, which would eventually become the permanent home of his cutting.⁶² Wescher perhaps bought it precisely because he recognized it as a sibling of the group he had cataloged at the Kupferstichkabinett.

Conclusion

We hope to have shown that the Getty-Berlin cuttings come from a large Bible produced in the third quarter of the twelfth century, perhaps in the 1160s, for a French Carthusian house in the orbit of the Grande Chartreuse. A few corrections, additions, and erasures to the cuttings can be found, while some later notes and reading marks by a slightly later hand bear witness to a prolonged, or at least somewhat later, use of the Bible.⁶³

The initials were excised from the Bible probably in the first half of the nineteenth century, possibly by Libri in France, or more likely in Germany, where most of them came to light. Many of the cuttings were then acquired by the Kupferstichkabinett, perhaps as early as the 1830s or 1840s, and perhaps in two or three tranches, of which one large group remained forgotten and unaccessioned until 2004. Two others are known, including the one at the Getty Museum, both of which came onto the auction market in the 1980s; it is to be hoped that more emerge as a result of this article bringing them to wider scholarly attention.

Beatrice Alai is currently affiliated with the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project Capturing Biographies: Materiality, Mobility and Agency of the Illuminated Fragments Collection at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

Peter Kidd has been a freelance researcher and cataloger of medieval manuscripts since 2006; before that he worked at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the British Library, London.

Notes

François Avril and Patricia Stirnemann were (as always) especially helpful and generous with information concerning the style of the cuttings. Joseph Bernaer has done more work than anyone else on Carthusian biblical readings, and although we only cite one important article by him, he has generously shared with us much unpublished information. We also benefited greatly from the suggestions and corrections provided by this journal’s anonymous peer reviewer. We are also much obliged to the Kupferstichkabinett staff, in particular to Dagmar Korbacher, for facilitating our study in the Berlin collection. While this essay and its appendix reflect a joint contribution, Beatrice Alai is responsible for paragraphs two, three, four, and five, and Peter Kidd is responsible for paragraphs one, six, seven, and eight.

1. Unknown maker, historiated initial from a Bible, circa 1160s, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 38 (89.MS.45). An image and some data are available at www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RWR. ↩︎

2. Western Manuscripts and Miniatures (1986), auction cat., Sotheby’s, London, 2 December 1986, lot 4 (ill.). According to the list of buyers and prices published by Sotheby’s after the sale, lot 4 was bought by “Fielding.” The Getty acquired it in 1989 from London dealer Richard Day, so “Fielding” may have been Day’s colleague Jocelyn Fielding. ↩︎

3. “It seems more likely, however, that the book was made further north, perhaps in the north east of France towards the Rhineland, or in the south of Flanders somewhere such as Anchin.” Western Manuscripts and Miniatures (1986), lot 4 (ill.). ↩︎

4. The 1989 acquisition was published in The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 18 (1990): 172, where it is attributed to “probably northeastern France, circa 1131–1165”; at the time of writing (January 2023), the online record repeats this attribution. In Thomas Kren, French Illuminated Manuscripts in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), 5, the attribution is “French, ca. 1131–65,” but no explanation is given for these precise dates. The dates may derive from the date given to a copy of the Twelve Minor Prophets with Glossa ordinaria, MS M.962 in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, said to be from the Benedictine abbey of Saint Saviour at Anchin in Pecquencourt, whose Abbot Gossuin was in post from circa 1131–65. The decoration of the Morgan manuscript has little in common with the present cuttings and in fact rather presents counterevidence to Sotheby’s suggestion (see the previous note) that the cuttings may come from Anchin Abbey. ↩︎

5. Paul Wescher, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Miniaturen—Handschriften und Einzelblätter—des Kupferstichkabinetts der Staatlichen Museen Berlin (Leipzig: Weber, 1931), 16–17, Min. 1904–8, 4678–84: “Französische Schule (Südostfrankreich), 1. halfte 12. Jahr.” ↩︎

6. Auktion 60: Bücher, Manuskripte, Graphik, Volkskunst vom Mittelalter bis zum Beginn der Moderne, auction cat., Venator & Hanstein, Cologne, 25–27 September 1989, lot 1096. ↩︎

7. The thirty-eight cuttings had no identifying numbers, so when he found them in 2004, Schindler assigned them the provisional numbers 128–68 within his inventory of newly discovered manuscripts; these numbers are written in pencil on the mounts and are the only way of referring to them until such time as official museum accession numbers are assigned with the exception of four cuttings (see this essay, note 8). ↩︎

8. Beate Braun-Niehr, “Initialen I, H, F und V,” in Schrift als Bild, ed. Michael Roth (Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, 2010), 25, reproducing two in color; attributed to “Maasgebiet, 2. Viertel 12. Jh.” and “Provenienz: alter Bestand.” These four cuttings (only) have been assigned the accession numbers Min. 30490–93 for the Kupferstichkabinett; they were formerly nos. 129, 147, 151, and 164 in Schindler’s inventory. ↩︎

9. Beatrice Alai, Le miniature italiane del Kupferstichkabinett di Berlino (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2019), 31, fig. 20, 32; and Peter Kidd, “A Collector’s Mark Re-Interpreted,” Medieval Manuscripts Provenance (blog), 11 April 2020, https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/, archived at https://archive.ph/e4nBJ and Archive.org. ↩︎

10. The evidence of the ruling is in fact considerably more complex than our subsequent discussion in the main text, which we have simplified for ease of comprehension. The cuttings come from a multivolume Bible that was not ruled consistently throughout. For example, in some sections the page was ruled not only for the bases of the minims but also for the tops of the minims, such that each line of text has two lines of ruling. ↩︎

11. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett Mins. 1904, 1906, 4648, 4682, 1908; and Getty Ms. 38, respectively. Dominique Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence: Enquête codicologique sur les manuscrits du XIIe siècle provenant de la Grande Chartreuse (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université Jean-Monnet, 2004), 47, recognized such triple rulings as typical of the books from the Grande Chartreuse and more specifically of the volumes made from the second third of the twelfth century onward. ↩︎

12. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds., Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007), 988. ↩︎

13. For a general account, see Christopher de Hamel, “Giant Bibles of the Early Middle Ages,” chap. 3 in The Book: A History of the Bible (London: Phaidon, 2001). See also Diane J. Reilly, “The Bible as Bellwether: Manuscript Bibles in the Context of Spiritual, Liturgical and Educational Reform, 1000–1200,” in Form and Function in the Late Medieval Bible, ed. Eyal Poleg and Laura Light (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 13–22. ↩︎

14. Walter Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 266–83, nos. 50–116. We can compare this with the reported dimensions of the volumes of the Romanesque lectern Bibles produced in the Grande Chartreuse: the Notre Dame de Casalibus Bible (Ms. 16 = 57.2 × 36.5 cm; Ms. 17 = 52 × 35 cm; Ms. 18 = 55.5 × 36 cm) and the Great Bible (Ms. 12 = 57.5 × 37.5 cm; Ms. 15 = 55.3 × 37.1 cm; Ms. 13 = 54.7 × 37 cm; Ms. 14 = 54.5 × 35.3 cm). ↩︎

15. These are Kupferstichkabinett Min. 1907, 1906, 1905, 1908, 30493, 1904, 4683, 4684, 4682, respectively. Those in the private collection and at the Getty Museum are the prophets Hosea and Micah, respectively. ↩︎

16. Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 127, 128, Min. 30491; Inv. 130–50, Min. 30490, 31812; Inv. 153, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, Min. 30492; Inv. 165, 166, 168, Min. 1905, 1908. ↩︎

17. Schindler inventory nos. 156 and 157 have no decorated initials; nos. 154, 155, 158, and 167 have small ones. ↩︎

18. Legendary from Citeaux: Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale, Mss. 641, 642; and Bible of Talloires: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Phillipps 1644. Wescher, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Miniaturen, 16, cites reproductions in Charles Oursel, La miniature du XIIe siècle à l’abbaye de Cîteaux d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de Dijon (Dijon: Venot, 1926), pls. 32–37; and Joachim Kirchner, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Miniaturen und des Initialschmuckes in den Phillipps-Handschriften (Leipzig: Weber, 1926), 47, fig. 51. ↩︎

19. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, especially 13–16, with a list of related literature at 281–84; Walter Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts: The Twelfth Century, 2 vols. (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 1:19. On the first Customs written by the prior Guigo I, see Guigues Ier le Chartreux, Coutumes de Chartreuse (Paris: Sources Chrétiennes, Éditions du Cerf, 1984), 313. On the founder of the Order Saint Bruno, see Josef Hemmerle, “Brun(o), heilig, Stifter des Kartäuserordens,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1955), 2:673–74; and P. De Leo, ed., San Bruno di Colonia: Un eremita tra Oriente e Occidente, Celebrazioni nazionali per il nono centenario della morte di San Bruno di Colonia; Secondo convegno internazionale (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004). ↩︎

20. Guibert de Nogent-sous-Coucy, De vita sua sive Monodiario libri tres, book 1, part 11, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 156 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1853), column 854 (hereafter Patrologia Latina); and Marina Righetti, “Certosini,” in Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1992), 4:625–26. ↩︎

21. Bernard Bligny, Recueil des plus anciens actes de la Grande-Chartreuse: 1086–1196 (Grenoble: Imprimerie Allier, 1958), 100–102. ↩︎

22. Liget Bible, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Mss. Latin 11506–10.The affinities with the Liget Bible were first suggested by François Avril (personal communication with Beatrice Alai, 5 May 2014) and confirmed by Patricia Stirnemann (personal communications with Beatrice Alai, 12 February and 15 April 2020); on the Bible, see Dominique Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible à l’autre . . . La réalisation des deux premières bibles de la Grande Chartreuse au XIIe siècle,” Revue Mabillon 74, no. 13 (2002): 175–76; and Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 429–32, cat. no. 126. ↩︎

23. Liget Bible, Ms. Latin 11508, fol. 35r. For an analysis of the Romanesque decorative pattern, with special focus on leaves and shapes, see Carl Nordenfalk, “Die romanische Buchmalerei,” in Die romanische Malerei vom elften bis zum dreizehnten Jahrhundert, ed. André Grabar and Carl Nordenfalk (Geneva: Skira, 1958), 173–82. ↩︎

24. Liget Bible, Ms. Latin 11510, fol. 16v. ↩︎

25. Wilhelm Koehler, “Byzantine Art in the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 1 (1941): 70. ↩︎

26. Bible of Notre-Dame de Casalibus, Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, Mss. 1, 8, 3. Dominique Mielle de Becdelièvre, “Autour de la Bible de Notre-Dame de Casalibus: Les premiers manuscrits cartusiens,” in Saint Bruno en Chartreuse: Journée d’etudes organisée à l’hôtellerie de la Grande Chartreuse le 3 octobre 2002, ed. Alain Girard, Daniel Le Blévec, and Pierrette Paravy (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2004), 31–38; Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 204, 312–15, cat. no. 1; Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible,” 162–70; and Reilly, “The Bible as Bellwether,” 9–22. ↩︎

27. Great Bible of the Grande Chartreuse: Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, Mss. 2, 4–6; Homiliary: Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 103 (38). Dominique Mielle de Becdelièvre, “Les bibles cartusiennes,” in L’exégèse monastique au Moyen Âge, actes du colloque international (Strasbourg, Palais universitaire, Faculté de théologie protestante, 10–12 septembre 2007), ed. Gilbert Dahan and Annie Noblesse-Rocher (Paris: Brepols, 2014), 60. ↩︎

28. Liget Bible, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. Latin 11509, Ms. 11510, fols. 130r–203v. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 400–404, cat. no. 104; and Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible,” 170–87. ↩︎

29. Decretum Gratiani, Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 475. Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible,” 176; and Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 406–7, cat. no. 106. ↩︎

30. De civitate dei, Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 159. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 207; Yolanta Załuska, Manuscrits enluminés de Dijon (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1991), 125–26, cat. no. 98, pl. 34. ↩︎

31. Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 38, fol. 1r. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 207. ↩︎

32. Bible of Stephen Harding, Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 15, fol. 94r. Alessia Trivellone, Images et exégèse monastique dans la Bible d’Étienne Harding (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2014); Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts, 2:70–72, cat. no. 58; Załuska, Manuscrits enluminés, 51–56, cat. no. 23; and Yolanta Załuska, L’enluminure et le scriptorium de Cîteaux au XIIe siècle (Brecht: Cîteaux, 1989), 63–111. ↩︎

33. Załuska, Manuscrits enluminés, 83–84, cat. no. 40, pl. 27 (Ms. 32); 79–80, cat. no. 36, pl. 25 (Ms. 131); 125–26, cat. no. 98, pl. 34 (Ms. 159); 78–79, cat. no. 35, pl. H (Ms. 180); 75–78, cat. no. 34, pl. F, I, 22, 25 (Ms. 641). For Ms. 641, see also Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts, 2:76–78, cat. no. 61. ↩︎

34. Kathleen Doyle, “Early Cistercian Manuscripts from Clairvaux,” in Illuminating the Middle Ages: Tributes to Prof. John Lowden from His Students, Friends and Colleagues, ed. Laura Cleaver, Alixe Bovey, and Lucy Donkin (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 109–22. ↩︎

35. Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1:19; Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 67–68; and Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible,” 166–67n28. For the correspondence, see Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 189, cols. 314–15; and Giles Constable, ed., The Letters of Peter the Venerable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), letter 24, 1:44–47, 2:111–12. Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible,” 166–67n28, notes a document of 1156 that sheds light on the helpful role played by the Cluniacs in supporting the Chartreuse: “De plus, les frères de cette congrégation, tant les anciens que les contemporains, depuis le temps de la naissance de la maison de Chartreuse, nous ont toujours chéris et vénérés beaucoup dans le Christ Jésus, et ils ont soutenu notre pauvreté par de nombreux bienfaits.” On this source, see Bligny, Recueil, 64–69. See also C. Tosco, “Dai Cistercensi ai Certosini,” in Certosini e cistercensi in Italia: Secoli XII–XV; Atti del Convegno, Cuneo, Chiusa Pesio, Rocca de’ Baldi, 23–26 settembre 1999, ed. Rinaldo Comba and Grado G. Merlo (Cuneo: Società per gli Studi Storici, Archeologici ed Artistici della Provincia di Cuneo, 2000), 115–40. ↩︎

36. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 58. ↩︎

37. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 69. For Ms. 616, see Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 153, col. 631; and Charles Samaran and Robert Marichal, Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de dates, de lieu ou de copiste (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968), 6:517. ↩︎

38. Great Bible of the Grande Chartreuse, Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 2, fol. 5v. ↩︎

39. Mielle de Becdelièvre, “Les bibles cartusiennes,” 67–73. ↩︎

40. For a description, see Nordenfalk, “Die romanische Buchmalerei,” 181. ↩︎

41. Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 5, fol. 4 ↩︎

42. Reilly, “The Bible as Bellwether,” 22–29. ↩︎

43. A summary of the history of the Grande Chartreuse books is offered by Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 65–86, with related literature. ↩︎

44. P. Alessandra Maccioni Ruju and Marco Mostert, The Life and Times of Guglielmo Libri (1802–1869), Scientist, Patriot, Scholar, Journalist and Thief: A Nineteenth-Century Story (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995), 205, 229, 388n145. ↩︎

45. On these monasteries and their libraries, see Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 87–92, 204–8. ↩︎

46. Among the later witnesses to this stylistic dissemination is an early thirteenth-century Bible at Chambéry that shows in the first volume (Chambéry, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 34, fol. 170v) the style associated with the manuscripts made for the Grande Chartreuse. Its Carthusian origin was noted by Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible,” 176n55; and Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 225–26. See also Caroline Heid-Guillaume and Anne Ritz, Manuscrits médiévaux de Chambéry: Textes et enluminures (Paris: CNRS and Brepols, 1998), 118–24. ↩︎

47. M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 76–78. ↩︎

48. Reilly, “The Bible as Bellwether,” 19. ↩︎

49. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 191. See also Nigel Palmer, “Simul Cantemus, simul pausemus: Zur mittelalterlichen Zisterzienserpunktion,” in Lesevorgänge: Prozesse des Erkennens in mittelalterlichen Texten, Bildern und Handschriften, ed. Martina Bakes and Eckart Conrad Lutz (Zurich: Chronos, 2010), 483–570. ↩︎

50. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 50–55. ↩︎

51. Guigues Ier le Chartreux, Coutumes, c. 29.3. ↩︎

52. Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination, 19; Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 13–15, 21; Pierre Vaillant and the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, Les manuscrits de la Grande Chartreuse et leurs enluminures (Grenoble: Roissard, 1984), 36; Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 153, col. 694; and Paul Lehman, “Bücherliebe und Bücherpflege bei den Karthäusern,” in Scritti di storia e paleografia: Miscellanea Francesco Ehrle, pubblicati sotto gli auspici di S. S. Pio XI in occasione dell’ottantesimo natalizio dell’E. Mons. Cardinale Francesco Ehrle (Rome: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1924), 5:364–89. ↩︎

53. “Pennas, cretam, pumices duas, cornua duo, scalpellum unum, ad radenda pergamena novaculas sive rasoria duo, punctorium unum, subulam unum, plumbum, regulam, postem ad regulandum, tabulas, grafium.” Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 17, 23, 26; and Guigues Ier le Chartreux, Coutumes, c. 7.9. ↩︎

54. No cutting with any part of the book of Judges has yet been identified, but there is no reason to doubt that it appeared in its normal position. ↩︎

55. The sequence of Carthusian readings is discussed in detail by Joseph Bernaer, “Zur Lesung der Bibel im Nachtoffizium der Kartäuser: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kartausen in Niederösterreich,” Hyppolytus Neue Folge, St. Pöltner Hefte zur Diözesankunde 35 (2019): 45–86, with similar tables at 49, 57, 59. Another similar table (“Ordre des lectures de la Bible d’après les Coutumes de Chartreuse”) can be found in Mielle de Becdelièvre, “D’une bible,” 170. ↩︎

56. The only difference here is that Lamentations follows Jeremiah, rather than vice versa. Mielle de Becdelièvre, “Les bibles cartusiennes,” 74 (“Annexe A”), tabulates the order of books in seven twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century Bibles. ↩︎

57. Bernaer, “Zur Lesung der Bibel,” 64, discusses all these types of markings; cf. Mielle de Becdelièvre, Prêcher en silence, 115, 190. ↩︎

58. Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 225, 228–29, and elsewhere. ↩︎

59. Frits Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins & d’estampes . . . avec des notices historiques sur les collectionneurs, les collections, les ventes, les marchands et éditeurs, etc. (Amsterdam: Vereenigde Drukkerijen, 1921), 291. For a revised version, see www.marquesdecollections.fr/. ↩︎

60. This is the case of Min. 31397–98; see Alai, Le miniature, 121, cat. no. 6. ↩︎

61. Wescher, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Miniaturen, 213, 93, and 213, respectively ↩︎

62. Burton B. Fredericksen, The Burdens of Wealth: Paul Getty and His Museum (Bloomington, IN: Archway, 2015), 24–36. The Wescher provenance of the Getty cutting was first proposed in Kidd, “A Collector’s Mark Re-Interpreted.” ↩︎

63. Additions: Inv. 132r, 133v, Min. 4678; erasures: Inv. 130r, 134v, 141r, 146v, Min. 1906v, 4683r; later notes: capitulum, Inv. 132v, 145v, 149r, 157v, Min. 4679r, 4683r, 4684r; reading marks: Inv. 132r. ↩︎