The Bohun Manuscripts: A Group of Five Manuscripts Executed in England About 1370 for Members of the Bohun Family…with an introductory note on the group by Eric George Millar.
Oxford: Printed for the Roxburghe Club by John Johnson at the University Press, 1936. First edition. Note that the present item is seemingly the most thorough reproduction of the Bohun manuscripts to date. Images of the manuscripts, other than that made for Eleanor de Bohun, are still not accessible online (at least, not to the general public), and we could not locate any other significant reproductions of any of the Bohun manuscripts published in the intervening years. With sixty-eight collotype plates fully reproducing five of the sumptuous Bohun Manuscripts, which were the only known to exist at the time of publication: three or four produced for Humphrey de Bohun, 7th Earl of Hereford (Oxford, Exeter College, MS. 37; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D. 4.4; Vienna, National Library, Cod. 1826; and probably a Psalter in the collection of T.H. Riches) and one for Mary de Bohun (Copenhagen, Royal Library, Thotts Saml. 547). Title-page in red and black. Slight rubbing and scuffing to spine. Small bookplate (Anthony Robert Halwyn Thompson) to corner of front pastedown. Minor toning to endpapers at gutter. Still a clean, bright, near-fine copy of this scarce Roxburghe Club facsimile of the coveted Bohun Manuscripts. Publisher’s quarter morocco over red cloth. Spine titled in gilt. Folio. [vi], 61 pp. Item #17024
There are now about a dozen manuscripts that have been identified as belonging to the Bohun manuscripts group. In her book Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England, Lucy Freeman Sandler notes that the Bohun family manuscripts are “the largest and most important group of English illuminated manuscripts of the period. These books offer material evidence of the high level of the artistic accomplishment in fourteenth-century England. Even more, they supply evidence of the cultural tastes and world outlook — social, political, and religious — of their aristocratic reader-viewers, communicated by the designer-artists who were uniquely positioned to interpret their masters to themselves,” (p. 3). She goes on to say, “Our idea of the English manuscript illumination of the second half of the fourteenth century is defined by the Bohun manuscripts. No books as important as those illuminated for the Bohuns have survived from this period,” (p. 20).
Price: $3,000.00