Frankenthal Bible
The Frankenthaler Bible , earlier incorrectly called the Worms Bible , then the Worms-Frankenthaler Bible , is a copy of the Holy Scriptures that was handwritten during the Romanesque period in the then Electoral Palatinate and later town of Frankenthal . It consists of two volumes and has been in England since the 18th century, where it is kept in the British Library in London under the shelfmarks Harley MS 2803 and 2804 .
nature
The bindings and the written pages of the Frankenthal Bible are made of strong and well-processed parchment in folio format . The leaf size varies in height between 520 and 534, in width between 354 and 360 millimeters. This makes it the largest known Frankenthal manuscript in terms of format. The text sheets are inscribed with dark brown ink and each divided into two columns of 44 lines. The Bible has three larger color portraits of authors, four edge illustrations drawn with a pen, 102 more or less elaborately illuminated initials and nine canon tables .
content
The first volume contains the Old Testament books from Genesis to Job on 301 pages . The 274-page second volume begins with the Psalms and also contains most of the New Testament . It ends with Acts 16:17. The letters of the apostles and the secret revelation are missing .
- Volume 1 (signature Harley MS 2803) ( digital copy )
- Volume 2 (signature Harley MS2804) ( digital copy )
history
According to the date in the colophon , the manuscript began in 1148; it should have been completed after about three years. The Israeli art historian Aliza Cohen-Mushlin found out in the 1980s that the production did not take place in Worms , but in the Frankenthaler scriptorium ten kilometers away . This belonged to the Augustinian Canons' monastery , which the Ministeriale Erkenbert from the then episcopal city of Worms had founded in 1119 on his country seat in Frankenthal. The remains of the monastery and its collegiate church are now called the Erkenbert ruins .
As text and ink analyzes show, numerous repairs were made to the first volume in the 15th century and two repairs to the second volume; in the process, holes were pasted over with leather patches and gaps in writing were often repaired very carelessly. The damage may have already occurred when the Frankenthal collegiate church burned in 1171.
In the 16th century, the manuscript came into the possession of the Liebfrauenstift Worms . Because of the Peasants' War of 1525, in which the Augustinian monastery in Frankenthal , which had become an abbey in 1140 , was looted , it was brought to safety in Worms, where it then remained.
In 1720, the Worms Liebfrauenstift sold the Bible in order to be able to finance the repair of building damage that had occurred in the Palatinate War of Succession in 1689 . The buyer was Edward Harley, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1699-1755). In 1754/55 he transferred the “Worms Bible” with the entire library that he, his father of the same name and his grandfather Robert had compiled, the British Library. There the Frankenthal Bible is available under the stock numbers mss. Harley 2803 or 2804 .
Frankenthal, the city of origin of the Bible, organized an exhibition in the city's Erkenbert Museum that lasted more than two months in autumn 2007 , in which, in addition to the Frankenthal Bible, other books created or temporarily stored in the scriptorium there were shown. They were not only obtained on loan from London and the Vatican Library , but also libraries in Darmstadt , The Hague , Göttingen , Heidelberg , Karlsruhe and Vienna had made exhibits available.
literature
- Aliza Cohen-Mushlin: The Making of a Manuscript. The Worms Bible of 1148 (British Library, Harley 2803-2804) (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 25) . Verlag Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1983, ISBN 3-447-02419-4 .
- Aliza Cohen-Mushlin: The Twelfth-Century Scriptorium at Frankenthal . In: Linda L. Brown-Rigg (Ed.): Medieval Book Production. Assessing the evidence . Proceedings of the Second Conference of The Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1988. Los Altos Hills 1990, pp. 85-101 (English).
- Edgar J. Hürkey: The Frankenthaler Bible - twelve images from the manuscript mss. Harley 2803-2804 . Catalog. Ed .: Frankenthaler Altertumsverein with the support of the Fritz-Carl-Wilhelm-Foundation. Frankenthal 2001.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Edgar J. Hürkey: The Frankenthaler Bible - Twelve Images from the Manuscript mss. Harley 2803-2804 in the British Library, London. Catalog. kunstportal-pfalz.de, 2001, accessed on October 1, 2016 .
- ↑ a b c The Augustinian Canons and the Bible. City of Frankenthal, accessed on February 4, 2011 .
- ^ Aliza Cohen-Mushlin: The Twelfth Century Scriptorium at Frankenthal . 1990, p. 85-101 (English).
- ↑ Evangelischer Kirchenbote, Sonntagsblatt für die Pfalz: Old manuscript has returned , No. 39, September 30, 2007 ( Memento from February 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive )