Religious text, 1160-1170

Component identifier:

Item 21

Content Summary:

Origin: English

Content: From a large monastic volume - St Augustine's commentary on the psalms, here on Psalm 138

Script: Protogothic textualis. English - serifs to the feet, ampersands and skeletal strokes but stylistically not Southeast England

Decoration: Would have had good foliate initials, of which part of one in green remains

Extent: 1 bifolium

Other details: Fragment from would have been a particularly large, fine volume. Bottom one third only extant.

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.

Access and use