Text on recto: ...am. R. Et clamor meus ad te veniat V. Dominus vobiscum. R. Et cum spiritu tuo. Oratio. Aures tue pietatis mitissime ... Alia. Oratio. Ure igne sancti spiritus renes nostros & cor nostru[m] domine: ut tibi casto corpore ser...

Text on verso: ...viamus & mundo corde placeamus Alia Oratio. Mentes nostras quesumus domine paraclitus qui a te procedit illuminet ... Alia Oratio. Conscientias nostras quesumus domine visitando purifica: ut veniens dominus n[oste]r...

Written area 138 x 82 mm. Single column of 21 lines. Foliated "viii" in red in the upper right-hand corner.

Written in a humanist script influenced by roman typeface. In his commentary on the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection's Horae Beatae Mariae ad usum Romanum (Octavo Editions, 1999), Christopher de Hamel notes that this script is associated on “very little evidence” with Geoffroy Tory (c.1480-c.1533), printer to King Francis I of France. The script occurs in manuscripts from the centers of court patronage in northern France.

Decorated with seven two-line initials, on alternating blue and gold grounds. The initials on blue grounds are gold and the blue grounds are highlighted with white penwork. Three of the initials on gold grounds are blue and one is white. Gold grounds are decorated either with white flourishes or with foliage and berries. There are also six one-line paraphs and one one-line initial, in alternating gold and white. The gold initials are on blue grounds, highlighted in white penwork, and the white initials are on gold grounds decorated with black dots and white pearls. Headings are rubricated. The line-fillers alternate between gold branches and gold boxes filled with buds and white flourishes. The leaf has gilding on the fore- and top-edges.

This leaf may be from the same manuscript as the leaves from an untraced Pontifical sold by King Alfred's Notebook in 2014 as items 1B and 49 in the catalogue Enchiridion 19: Medieval Fragments for University Teaching & Research. According to Scott Gwara, those leaves once belonged to Otto F. Ege (1888-1951), the manuscript and book collector famous for cutting leaves out of his manuscripts to sell them individually.

The same sequence of prayer appears in a series of instructions for prayers before mass at ff.32v-33v in the Pontifical of Yves de Mayeuc (Rennes, Bibliothèque de Rennes Métropole MS 1278), which is written in a very similar hand. It also appears in two Parisian printed missals considered in Robert Lippe, Missale Romanum Mediolani, 1474: a collation with other editions printed before 1570 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1899-1907) vol. II, 378-9, one printed in 1530 by Fr. Regnault, the other in 1540 by vidua Th. Kerver.

In Latin.

Record created by YCBA staff from research and description by Katherine Hindley, Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Associate, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Yale Center for British Art, 2015.

Catholic Church > Liturgy.

Catholic Church > Prayers and devotions.

Manuscripts, Medieval > Connecticut > New Haven.

Pontificals.

Manuscripts, Medieval - France - 15th century.