[AQUAVILLA, Nicolas De, [with] WIMBLEDON, Thomas].

£150,000 · Offered by Sokol Books

This handsome English manuscript contains texts by likely two medieval English authors, one in Middle English; it has a fine English noble provenance, and has been unseen by scholarship since the 1960s; the Middle English text survives in only sixteen manuscripts, all in institutional ownership, and only one outside the British Isles. Provenance: Most probably written for an English ecclesiastic or theology scholar, in the opening years of the fifteenth century. Among the surviving manuscripts of the Redde Racionem, the text here shows a close affinity (perhaps sharing a common exemplar) with British Library, Additional MS. 37677, an early fifteenth-century manuscript including texts in a Midland dialect once in the library of the archdeaconry of Huntingdon, and the present manuscript may be of Midland or East Anglian origin. Wherever this book survived the Middle Ages, it was almost certainly entered private hands during the dissolution of the monasteries. The library of Lord Tollemache at Helmingham Hall; in their armorial binding and with the classmark L.J.II.2 (the 2 later cancelled in pencil, and replaced by B3 ) on front pastedown; most probably acquired by Sir Lionel Tollemache, 1st Baronet, c. 1600; sold Sotheby's, 14 June 1965, lot 20. 3. Quaritch, cat. 869 (1966), listed without number on back cover of catalogue (with the texts ascribed there to John Quintin, who later edited the first text, and Robert Wimbledon). Text: Both texts here were composed by authors who w

• Binding: Hardcover

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