Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine

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Accession number:

MS M.1038

Title:

Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine

Created:

France, second quarter of the 14th century.

Binding:

Bald silk velvet over alum-tawed leather over wooden boards, rebacked in sheepskin; boards and leather perhaps date from the 15th-century, the textile cover and rebacking are later.

Credit:

Purchased in 1982.

Description:

119 leaves (2 columns, 31 lines), bound : vellum, ill. ; 212 x 150 mm

Provenance:

Payne and Foss; Sir Thomas Phillipps (Ms. 4219); Katharine Fenwick; Thomas FitzRoy Fenwick; Alan George Fenwick; William H. Robinson, Ltd.; Robinson Trust; H.P. Kraus, New York.

Notes:

Ms. Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine; written and illuminated in northern France in the second quarter of the 14th century. Three miniatures are dated to ca. 1455 by the Index of Christian Art.
Texts: Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine (fols. 1-114) and acrostics on the Pater Noster and Ave Maria in Latin (fols. 114-119).
Decoration: 109 small miniatures, 1 illuminated initial with border extension, numerous filigree initials.
The illumination of M.1038 is unfinished. The miniature on fol. 22r (Carpenter's Square) is unfinished.
Many miniatures are worn down to the underdrawings.
According to Michael Camille, M.1038 is very closely related to Paris, BnF, MS Fr. 1818, which he dated ca. 1340. He suggests that the illustrations in M.1038 seem directly copied from the latter manuscript, owing to their similar shape and placement in the manuscripts. Most pages with miniatures and some pages without have iconographical descriptions written by the scribe, placed in the side or lower margins and framed with a shield-shaped outline in brown ink. In Camille's opinion, since the illustrations were copied from another manuscript, the marginal notes were not intended as instructions to the illuminator but rather as a type of rubric to the text, which does not have prefatory rubrics at section divisions.

Variant Title:

Pèlerinage de vie humaine

Script:

bastarda

Language:

Old French and Latin

Resources:

Description/Bibliography

Century:

14th century

Genres:

Illuminated manuscripts