Religious commentary, early 14th century, c1400

Component identifier:

Item 9

Content Summary:

Origin: Italian

Content: mentions Jericho, crossing the Jordan, and Moses. Also talks about mountains that occur in the bible. Possibly a 'spectrum historial'.

Rubric: mentions Giovanni Boccaccio, and this is probably therefore his ‘Liber de Montibus’

Script: Italian Gothic rotunda. Foliate initial ‘S’ has the fleshy acanthus of Bolognese illumination, but the script lacks the lateral compression of script from Bologna university production orbit.

Decoration: Column picture - landscape depicting mountains and an orchard - very degraded

Extent: 1 leaf

Other details: This would have been a very fine copy for a wealthy patron. Used as a pastedown and gum has discoloured and distorted the fragment

Immediate source of acquisition:

The documents in this collection were presented to the National Library of Australia by Sir Rex Nan Kivell in 1969. He referred to it as ‘The Nan Kivell Calligraphy Collection’. The documents were collected by him as specimens of early calligraphy and/or examples of early documentation. He acquired them over a number of years from varied sources which were not recorded. However, it seems likely that the group of legal documents in Series 1 relating to the Elliott family of Salisbury would have a single provenance. Nan Kivell had a country house in Devizes, Wiltshire, which is only a short distance from Salisbury.

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