Abstract

Most medieval manuscripts in New Zealand were purchased by New Zealand residents from northern hemisphere dealers. But one of the earliest arrived with its owner, Walter Mantell, in 1840. It contains an inscription, partly in Māori, gifting it to Mantell’s friend John Fitzgerald. In 1881 another immigrant, Charles Hudson, brought an illuminated late thirteenth-century Psalter with him. Now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, and hitherto misidentified as a Book of Hours, it is from northern Flanders or Cologne and probably belonged to a laywoman or a beguine, perhaps a member of the powerful Berthout family of Malines near Brussels.

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