Beschreibung:

Leaf from a very large copy of the Acta Sanctorum, with parts of the Passion of St. Theodore the Martyr, in Beneventan minuscule, in Latin, manuscript on parchment [Italy (probably Monte Cassino), eleventh century] Single large leaf, with remains of double column of 33 lines in a good and regular Beneventan hand with notably large letters (cf. the eleventh-century Homiliae Capitulares leaf in Quaritch, Bookhands of the Middle Ages IV: Beneventan Script, 1990, no. 3, and perhaps also no. 8), et-ligature used integrally within words and ri-ligature present, recovered from reuse as a pastedown in a later binding and so with holes, tears and damage to edges, slightly cockled and discoloured, reverse scuffed reducing legibility there, trimmed at edges but without losses of lines of text, overall fair and presentable condition, 430 by 315mm. The present leaf is a notably large and early example of Beneventan minuscule. Beneventan script stands quite apart from almost all modern Western scripts, and in its strangeness both confounds and delights the eye of the modern reader. While the Carolingian script reforms swept away the handful of remaining local bookhands at the end of the Dark Ages and replaced them with Carolingian minuscule, the local script of Monte Cassino stood firm, and in fact spread to dependent areas in southern Italy and adjacent Dalmatia. In time the simple and elegant Carolingian minuscule passed to humanist script and to printing, while Beneventan minuscule carried on alone of the Dark Age scripts to the sixteenth century. To look at its strange curling letterforms, broken lines and reliance on early medieval abbreviations is to stare across an gulf at a paleographical fossil, on another evolutionary branch of development from our own.