Western Manuscripts

This sale includes some of the oldest manuscripts and certainly one of the largest miniatures ever offered for sale. Dates range from the seventh century B.C. to the early twentieth century A.D. (although the latter, two miniatures by the Spanish Forger, are painted on fifteenth-century fragments). Most surviving pieces of writing from the ancient world are scraps of administrative records. However, this sale includes a number of papyri fragments of major literary texts. These are items of rarity beyond comprehension, including Herodotus, the oldest Greek historian (lot 37); the earliest witness to the Margites, a lost classical text (lot 35); and a piece of an unknown classical Greek play on the history of wine attributed to Aristophanes (lot 38). From the Middle Ages come a remarkable series of charters, including some which have passed by direct descent since the twelfth century (lots 19 and 20). Textually, the Psalter translation of Richard Rolle is extraordinarily precious (lot 48), both as a translation of part of the Bible into the English language a generation before Wycliffe, and as an example of Middle English from a period when little survives. As libraries prepare for the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011, it is a timely reminder that the Bible in English goes back far beyond the Protestant Reformation. Above all, and exceeding all others in scale, complexity and subject matter, is the great Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora) silver mining miniature, painted in Bohemia, probably in Prague, around 1490 (lot 18). It shows the entire process of the medieval silver industry there, from the mining of the ore to the minting of the silver into coins, and is as elaborate as a painting by Brueghel.