A manuscript in a book. Two thousand years ‘liberal arts’.

This blog post was written by Cáitlin Kernan, Irene Rooker and Juliane Witte as part of an assignment for the MA-course Medieval Written Culture in March 2021, supervised by prof. Marco Mostert and Bart Jaski, keeper of manuscripts of Utrecht University Library (editor).

Among the millions of books in de depots of Utrecht University Library, we investigated two similar-looking books, with the shelf marks THO RIJS 37-18 and 37-19. They contain theological works of the Leuven professor Johannes Driedo (died 1535) and were published in Leuven, Belgium, in 1548. While the body of these books is interesting, what was found in the binding deserves just as much, if not more, attention.

Remarkable flyleaves

Bound inside the covers of the sixteenth-century books are a total of four medieval bifolia (double leaves), sixteen pages in all. These parchment flyleaves were used to protect the first and last page of the book from the leather and nails of the covers. Taken together, these fragments form one complete quire of a discarded medieval manuscript. They are written in a late Caroline minuscule, the script which was standardised during the reign of Charlemagne (died 814) and used throughout western Europe. The letter forms point to a date of the late eleventh century or early twelfth century, so the fragments were written up to almost a thousand years ago. The text of the fragments is well over another thousand year older still, for it is a copy of De Inventione, an early work of the great Roman thinker, Cicero (died 43 BCE). De Inventione was a work on rhetoric and was probably written while Cicero was a student himself. It is the first known text that uses the term ‘liberal arts’ (artes liberales).The fragments now left cover De inventione I.19-39.

Who was the first owner?

The question is if we can reconstruct how these fragments ended up in the two books. One of the first personal elements one notices about the host volume is the lovely signature by Clemens de Valle. Personalized with a little smiling face, his signature gives us an indication that he was the first owner of the books. We were able to track him down: he entered Leuven University in 1544, and entered the Pig Pedagogy (Paedagogium Porci), one of the four pedagogies where students in the liberal arts received their education. He graduated in 1546/7, and probably returned to his hometown Goes in Zeeland. We can be sure that Clemens bought the books, written by a Leuven professor, while he himself was studying there. He had them bound in leather, decorated with roller stamps with emblems of IVSTITIA, LEA, LVCRETIA and HERTVCH. The book binder who made this binding would also have added the medieval flyleaves, which perhaps he got from a discarded manuscript of De inventione of one of the religious institutions in Leuven.

Rijsenburg seminary

After de Valle our fragments stay quiet for roughly three centuries, after which we can re-locate the host volume thanks to an ex libris sticker from the library of the seminary Rijsenburg, which assigns it to the Collection Lipmaniana. Samuel Lipman (1802-71) had a great interest in Christianity, which might be why he purchased Driedo’s books. After a career in law, he dedicated himself to writing a new Dutch translation of the New Testament and became close friends with Herman Schaepman, who was then a professor of church history at the seminary of Rijsenburg (province of Utrecht). Upon Lipman's unexpected death, his whole personal library, along with a yearly stipend, was gifted by his widow to the seminary of Rijsenburg as a sign of appreciation for Schaepman.

Our host volumes and fragments then lingered in the Rijsenburg library for almost a hundred years while the seminary provided education to the Dutch Franciscans and the archdiocese of Utrecht. In 1969, teaching moved to the Uithof of the University of Utrecht, which then expressed interest in purchasing the roughly 155,000 books which made up the various seminary libraries. In 1972 the purchase was completed and our manuscript found its current home. 

We have come full circle

And so an almost thousand-year old fragment with the oldest use of the term ‘liberal arts’ by student Cicero ended up in the books of a Leuven student of the liberal arts. These books contained theological texts of a Leuven professor, were acquired by a collector of theological books, and finally entered the collection of Utrecht University Library, where they were studied by us, students of … the liberal arts. For us, this was an unexpected result of studying these old books and their manuscript fragments.