- Title: Leaf from a Latin Missal
- Origin: Italy
- Estimated year of printing: c. 1350
Notes:
The oldest item in my collection, this predates Gutenberg’s printing press by a hundred years and so is also my only hand-written manuscript.
A missal is a liturgical book in the Roman Catholic church, containing all the instructions, prayers, and chants a priest would need in order to conduct a Mass. After several centuries of using simple collections of prayers, the first complete missals appeared in the 12th century.
This missal was handwritten by a scribe, likely over a period of several years, so every missal is a unique work of art. Written in Latin using a Gothic script, with brown and red letters, and ornate initials that range from 2- to 8-lines in size with flowering tendrils. This is written on parchment, an animal skin material that was popular before the introduction of wood-based paper.
At nearly 700 years old, it’s impossible to precisely identify the scribe, year, or location of printing, but it can be roughly placed by comparing to similar examples in libraries and museums with known provenances. Of note here, the Gothic script is a specific subtype called Southern Textualis which was primarily used in Italy in the Late Middle Ages — identifiable by its curved letter “O”, which would have been made out of angled lines in the other dominant Gothic script, Northern Textualis. This script is different in many ways from modern Roman script (for example, “R” is a “2”), which makes it hard to transcribe, even if one knows Latin.
Historical context:
The 14th century was a difficult century. Part of the Late Middle Ages, it began with a famine which killed 10% of the European population, caused by a sudden and severe drop in temperatures, called the Little Ice Age, which greatly reduced food production. The middle of the century was dominated by the Black Death, a bubonic plague which killed a third of the European population. The century concluded with the Western Schism, where 3 different people claimed to be the true Pope, causing chaos within the Catholic Church, until Pope Martin V was decided to be the true Pope in 1417.
In terms of literature, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was published at the end of the 14th century. Written in Middle English, the book was instrumental in the popularization of English as a literary language.
Further Reading:
Similar Latin Missal at The Morgan Library
Similar Latin Missal at Sotheby’s
Hill Museum and Manuscript Library: Latin Scripts – Gothic Textualis