AZO OF BOLOGNA [with] BLANOSCO, Johannes de.

£275,000 · Offered by Sokol Books

Decorated manuscript on vellum. A notably large and handsome legal sammelband, from the dawn of the gothic age, containing two important legal treatises – the second of great rarity and never appearing on the market before. Provenance: Most probably written and decorated for use in a southern French monastic community. The later provenance strongly suggests that this was the Benedictine Abbey of St. Mary of Lagrasse, in the Languedoc at the foot of the Pyrenees in south-western France. The house was founded in the seventh century, raised to abbey status in 779 by Charlemagne, and closed during the Secularisation of French monasteries following the Revolution, with its goods seized by the State in 1789 and sold. Monsieur Chapuy(?), priest (curé) of Lagrasse: his ex libris marks in pencil on front endleaf in a hand of c. 1800. Extensive antiquarian notes on second author in later pen on verso of same leaf, signed ‘Giray’. Then sold at auction, presumably by one of his heirs, in Lyon in the early twentieth century: a sale ticket of this date issued by Monsieur Guillot of the Hôtel des Ventes, 19 Rue Confort-Rue de l’Hopital 6 in that town, loose in front of volume. Reemerged in sale in Nîmes 2022, the subject of several news reports and blogs. Text: A fine, large law codex with two important ms texts, produced in France between the mid-C13 and early C14. No other copy of the second work, ‘Libellus super titulo de actionibus’ – a fundamental text in feudal law – appears to have e

• Binding: Hardcover

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