meadowmeadow

jothelibrarian:

Pretty medieval manuscript of the day is another beauty from the collections of the National Library of New Zealand. It is a missal dating from the fifteenth century. The script is so neat it is hard to believe it was written by hand.

The National Library give the following details about the Missal on their page on Flickr:

This Missal was copied in England (perhaps London) between 1400 and 1425, possibly at the workshops of Johannes and of Herman Scheerre. A Missal is a book containing the text for the Mass. This beautifully decorated manuscript contains illuminated initials in varying sizes from 1- to 6-lines. Originally it also had three elaborate, probably historiated, 8-line initials, but two of these have been cut out of the manuscript (one of these pages is shown here on the left). The left-hand page also has an elaborate border with scroll-acanthus, birds, and feathery spray motifs in blue, orange, red, green, white, black and gold. At the fore-edge of the right-hand page you can see a white page-marker.

Image source: Missal, f.22v-23r, (272 x 182 mm), 15th century, Alexander Turnbull Library, MSR-18., from the National Library of NZ on the Commons, and licensed by Creative Commons on Flickr.

I may have to go and see this at some stage! Beautiful.