A couple of weeks ago I said on social media that I would blog about the very earliest origin of the  plagiarism accusations against Carla Rossi, so here it is. In several of her many attempts at self-defence, Rossi says that the only basis for my accusation of plagiarism is the borrowing of a few lines (describing the Office of the Dead in the manuscript she calls the De Roucy Hours), e.g. here: [Click to enlarge] [Source] But let's look at the context in which I first mentioned plagiarism. (At the time I had no idea that it would turn out to be such a small tip of a very larg ..read more

"Someone" has -- very tediously -- persuaded Google to remove (for a second time) my most recent blogpost. So let's just replace it with this (click the image to enlarge it): The irony is delicious :-) On the left is a book-review published in 2012; on the right, one of several editions of The Book of Hours of Louis De Roucy ..read more

  Some people may think that Carla Rossi has done the sensible thing and slipped quietly into well-deserved obscurity, hoping that memories are short and people will forget that she was exposed as serial plagiarist by several independent newspapers, other organisations, and many individual scholars from at least six different countries. Perhaps encouraged by the fact that for several months I have not bothered to respond to, or refute, her tediously repetitive and lengthy screeds of falsification, lies, and playing the victim, she has in fact continued to attempt to gaslight anyone who w ..read more

I have just encountered, for the first time, this letter from Sydney Cockerell [Wikipedia] to the Editor of the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 30 no. 169 (April 1917), p. 154 [click the images to enlarge them]: Read more ..read more

This and the following images are used Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (CC-BY-NC-ND) Interesting manuscripts can be found in unexpected places. At the CULTIVATE MSS conference in London a year ago [PDF programme], there was a presentation about the collection of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust [Wikipedia], which was interesting but had very little to do with medieval manuscripts. One partly-medieval volume was mentioned and very briefly shown on screen, however, and after several months of emailing I was eventually able to get a complete set of images of the relevant par ..read more

  Anyone who has ever attempted to describe a manuscript will have faced the issue of terminology for describing script. Over the course of the last 75 years numerous books and articles have been written, and conferences held [1], discussing the issue, and yet we have still not arrived at any real consensus. I think that two main drivers lay behind these publications and conferences, especially the earlier ones. One was to try to make palaeography more "scientific" (with implications of reliability and accuracy), and the other was to compensate for a lack of reproductions. It seems to me ..read more

  In March last year ago I wrote a blogpost about the minor (i.e. small foliate, not historiated) initials cut from the Murano Gradual. For a long time I had been very sceptical that they were indeed from the Murano Gradual -- because their style was so unlike the style of the minor initials that occur on the back of a few of the cuttings of historiated initials -- but when I eventually took the time to look closely at their script and musical notation, the relationship became plain. I therefore compiled a list of all the Murano Gradual's minor initials known to me: my hope is that, one ..read more

A miniature in the Wildenstein collection (shown above), the largest surviving work by the Master of the Murano Gradual, has usually been identified as depicting "Mission to the Apostles". In a previous blogpost, I suggested that the subject is instead The Selection of St Matthias (as an apostle, to replace Judas). Even if my suggestion is correct [1], there is still an oustanding puzzle about the miniature: it appears above a single line of text and music, and the text consists of a single word "INCLITUS": No one has ever been able to identify the text this comes from. Read more ..read more

  I have just noticed that Forum Auctions have a calendar in a forthcoming sale (28 September, 2023, lot 24), with a short description and a two-page opening reproduced in the online catalogue (shown above).  The description tells us that it is a six-leaf quire, bound in "19th century vellum-backed marbled boards", which suggests it was removed from its parent manuscript at least a century ago. Read more ..read more

[click to enlarge] [source] I have lots of blogposts in my draft folder, but all require some more work before they are ready to make public. One concerns the initials of the Murano Gradual, and in the process of compiling it, I found that the Musée Marmottan Monet, which owns a dozen historiated initials and a full-page miniature, have digitised the collection within the past year or so and put them online. This seems like something worth sharing now.Read more ..read more