Medieval Manuscripts at Loyola University Chicago

Abstract

Abstract: This article provides a summary overview of the collection of pre-1600 western European manuscripts in Loyola University Chicago Archives & Special Collections. The collection presently comprises four manuscript codices, at least thirty-eight fragments, and four documents. The codices are a thirteenth-century book of hours from German-speaking lands; a fifteenth-century Dutch prayer book; a preacher's compilation written probably in southern Germany in the 1440s; and two fifteenth-century Italian humanist booklets, bound together since the nineteenth century, transmitting Donatus's commentary on the Eunuchus (incomplete) and an anthology of theological excerpts, respectively. The fragments consist of thirteen leaves from books dismembered by modern booksellers (most are from fifteenth-century books of hours) and a larger number of binding fragments, all but two of which remain in situ. These represent the remains of ten manuscript books: four Latin liturgical books, two texts of Roman civil law, one large-format thirteenth-century Italian Bible, one thirteenth-century copy of Ptolemy's Almagest in the translation of Gerard of Cremona, one late fourteenth-century copy of the Ockhamist Tractatus de principiis theologiae , and one fifteenth-century Dutch book of hours in the translation of Geert Grote. Many of these materials have remained unidentified until now.