A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library at Holkham Hall Volume 1: Manuscripts from Italy to 1500. Part 1: Shelfmarks 1–399 by Suzanne Reynolds (review)

Suzanne Reynolds's volume is the first in a series of catalogues of the manuscript library of the Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall, one of the most significant private collections in the world. It covers 126 manuscripts or multi-volume sets which were produced in Italy before 1500 and whose shelfmarks fall from 1 to 399. A second volume, under preparation, will cover the more than a hundred remaining Italian manuscripts in the library (shelfmarks 400 onwards), while other volumes will be devoted to the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from Britain and the rest of Europe outside of Italy and to the manuscripts that were produced after 1500.

After a list of abbreviations and a concordance between the 811 manuscripts listed in Seymour de Ricci's inventory (A Handlist of Manuscripts in the Library of the Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall, Abstracted from the Catalogues of William Roscoe and Frederick Madden, Oxford, 1932) and their current locations and shelfmarks (a quarter of the collection left Holkham in the 1950s, 1980s, and 2001, and is now kept, for the most part, at the British Library and the Bodleian), an exhaustive essay, accompanied by fifteen colour plates, introduces us to the history of the collection, focusing on the acquisitions made by Thomas Coke (1697–1759), later first Earl of Leicester (1744), under the influence of his Grand Tour Governor, Thomas Hobart, and traces the history of their transferral from London to Holkham Hall and of the creation of the Library by Coke of Norfolk (1754–1842). At the end of the essay, the method and form of entries are presented.

Reynolds's volume is a valuable achievement and will surely stimulate further research in the field of manuscript studies, from textual criticism to palaeography, provenance, and manuscript illumination, not only because of the importance of the material in the Holkham collection, but also for the accurate and detailed descriptions offered in the catalogue. As one might expect, the greatest part of the manuscripts (98) date from the fifteenth century, while only seventeen can be assigned to the fourteenth century, five to the thirteenth and six to the twelfth. As for the place of production, manuscripts from Northern Italy are more represented (66), and especially those from North-Eastern Italy (46), while manuscripts from Central Italy are less in number (43), of which the majority are assigned to Florence and Tuscany (29); four manuscripts were produced in Rome and seven in Naples.

Headed by a number (the same as those used by de Ricci), author and title, language, place of production, date of production, material support, and secundo folio, entries are structured in seven sections; in composite manuscripts, information is given within the corresponding section in separate parts labelled A, B, C, and so on. In the first section of each entry, 'Contents', all the texts transmitted in the manuscripts are fully identified and accompanied by incipits and explicits, reference to modern critical editions, and information about the copying of the text and about the place of the manuscript in the textual tradition. The vast majority of the manuscripts (117) are in Latin with only nine texts translated from Latin into the Italian vernacular; four-fifths of the manuscripts are of Latin classical texts, the others biblical, liturgical, patristic, and juridical. The second section, 'Structure', describes the physical make-up of the manuscript, with reference, for humanistic manuscripts, to the systems fixed by Albert Derolez (Codicologie des manuscrits en écriture humanistique sur parchemin, Turnhout, 1984): number of leaves, foliation, dimensions (limited to the leaves and the written page and not including the margins), ruling and pricking, number of lines, collation, and watermarks (without indication of the folding format). The section 'Hands' records all of the scribes and readers at work. For...