About
Our Name and Mission
In his Gesta Regum Anglorum from ca. 1125, William of Malmesbury recounted how King Alfred the Great kept a notebook or Enchiridion into which he copied his favorite writings. William probably consulted this celebrated Enchiridion for details about King Alfred. Unfortunately, the manuscript disappeared and remains unrecovered, a truly shattering cultural loss. The Enchiridion may fairly be called “the world’s most famous lost medieval book.” Even a single page from this legendary notebook could have conveyed a wealth of knowledge about King Alfred and his turbulent age. When King Alfred’s Notebook was launched in 2010, its name was chosen to convey the inestimable learning that could be derived from medieval books like the Enchiridion, no matter their state of preservation. Our mission remains the recovery of once-treasured manuscripts, a “lost” cultural legacy particularly suitable for university teaching and research.
Our Past Catalogues
Between 2010 and 2015 King Alfred’s Notebook distributed twenty-seven PDF catalogues online, up to five issues per year. Enchiridia 2, 3, and 5 each had supplements. Enchiridion 1 appeared in 2010, and the final PDF Enchiridion, number 21, was issued in early 2015. In 2014 separate catalogues were produced of manuscript books (Enchiridia 19-21: Codices), and of fragments, leaves, and cuttings (Enchiridia 19-21: Fragments). Our final PDF catalogue, Enchiridion 22, circulated only to a handful of clients.
Our Past Inventory
Past sales of manuscript books and important fragments have included:
- The Brixen Gradual, Bressanone, Italy, ca. 1325
- Sermones de tempore et de sanctis and Sermones quadragesimales by Johannes Herolt, ca. 1450
- Martial, Opera, Italy, ca. 1450
- Transcript and original notarial documents of a disputed benefice from Subirats (Catalonia) dated 1422
- Epitome of the Biblia pauperum by Nicholas de Hannapes
- The missal of Santa Maria de Poblet, Catalonia, dated 1515
- St. Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos from late fourteenth-century Austria, brilliantly illuminated
- Psalms from a French bible with annotations in Middle English
- Manual of the Confraternity of Sancta Misericordia Iesu Christi, the Virgin Mary, St. Lucy, and St. John the Hospitaler in Cordoba, dated 1561
- Mid-thirteenth-century Cistercian breviary with gold decoration
- The illuminated “Bochart Roman de la Rose,” late fourteenth-century, one of the largest copies in existence
- Profusely glossed copy of Lucan’s Pharsalia from fifteenth-century Italy
- Fifteenth-century illuminated copy of Clément Prinsault’s Traité du blason
- Fates of the Caesars in Italian, from fifteenth-century Italy
- Rare monastic rules, including the Libellus novellarum definitionum and Rule of 1289 for Franciscan Tertiaries in Italian
- Dominican psalter from Bohemia with illuminated initials
- Processus documenting the canonization of Delphine de Sabran, ca. 1384
- Rental of the Confraternity of Saint-Trophime, Priory of Sainte-Croix, and the Church of Saint-Isidore in Arles, in Latin, French and Occitan, dated 1366-1531
- Fifteenth-century Processional from the Dominican Abbey of St. Louis, Poissy
- Noted mass-book of Carthusian Use, Low Countries, ca. 1400
- Complete fourteenth-century Book of Hours entirely in Old French
- Anthology of more than thirty opuscula of St. Cyprian, Italy, ca. 1425-50
- Anthology including Gregory’s Dialogues and other works of monastic asceticism, Germany, ca. 1450
- Anonymous sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins from in a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript
- Authorial copy of Latin sermons by the Polish Franciscan, Clement de Radymno, copied in Przeworsk, Poland and dated 1541
- Unrecorded and holograph manuscript of Eucharistic prayers called Effusiones cordis from the Buxheim Charterhouse, ca. 1500
- Unique fifteenth-century Theotokarion in Byzantine Greek
- Greek Gospels of Luke and John, ca. 1300
- Latin and French regulations and decrees concerning the sale of bread in Romans-sur-Isère and Grenoble, dated 1473-1582
- Rodulphus de Bibracho, De septem itineribus aeternitatis, ca. 1450, owned by the Augustinian canons of Ter Nood Gods, Tongres
- AND MANY OTHERS …
We have also sold leaves from early bibles, including the St. Albans Abbey Bible, the Bohun Family Bible, and the St. Oyan Bible; from service books, including the Llangattock Breviary, the East Anglian Breviary, the Breviary of Bertrand de Chalençon, and the Warburg Missal; folios and calendars from Books of Hours and other devotional books, such as a Passion Sequence by Pietro Ursuleo; miniatures from Hours, calendars, choir books, bibles, and service books, including a Crucifixion scene probably representing the first example of perspective in northern Europe; science texts, including mineralogy, horse medicine, and health; texts in Latin, Old French, German, Italian, and Dutch. Our manuscript offerings have included rare palimpsests, chansons de geste, troubadour lyric, Visigothic Minuscule, and legal, scholastic, and religious sources. We often produce teaching portfolios of leaves, such as “Decorative Arts of the Middle Ages,” “Medieval Books in the Age of Print,” and “A Collection of Medieval Manuscripts Illustrating the History of the Bible.”