Manuskript- og librarsamlingen

I høst fikk Manuskript- og librarsamlingen en stor gave fra Mette Brekke, datter av billedkunstner Hans Jacob Meyer. Gaven inneholdt bøker og arkivmateriale som har vært i billedkunstnerens eie. Blant annet mange bøker om kunst, utstillingskataloger hvor verk av Meyer eller hans bekjente har vært med som en del av utstillingen, brev, bilder og et lite utvalg skisser.

After books shaped by accumulation, reuse and endurance, today’s object reduces the codex to its most elemental form: a single leaf. Librar BLL Q 43 is a vellum leaf from the Decretum Gratiani, printed in Mainz in 1492 by Peter Schoeffer, one of the most important printers of the fifteenth century and the former collaborator of Johannes Gutenberg. What survives here is not a book, but a fragment that once formed part of a monumental juridical structure.

The leaf measures 475 × 332 mm and is printed on both sides in four columns of approximately 50–52 lines in Schoeffer’s Gothic type. Its layout follows the standard glossing architecture of the Decretum: the authoritative legal text in the two central columns, surrounded by marginal commentary in narrower outer columns. Law here is not linear, but spatial. Authority unfolds through proximity, annotation and hierarchy on the page. Rubrication is extensive and contemporary. Red and blue initials, alternating paragraph marks, and rubricated section headings like D.V, D.VI, D.VII… that structure the text visually and intellectually. Printed guide letters remain visible beneath several initials, exposing the collaboration between press and hand that defines early legal printing. The leaf corresponds to Distinctio V–VI, including canons such as Cuilibet sacerdoti…, confirmed through comparison with the Munich digital copy and the ISTC record (ig00362000)
This fragment survives in an unusual form. It was originally issued as part of the bibliophilic publication Two Essays on the Decretum of Gratian by Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt and Charles McCurry, in which each copy included a genuine leaf from Schoeffer’s 1492 edition. The earlier provenance of the leaf is unknown. Removed from its original codex, it was later recontextualised as an object of scholarly reflection and connoisseurship. The leaf thus carries at least two lives: one as functional legal text, another as curated fragment.

Encountered during Advent, this object sharpens the questions raised by the previous days. If the Bible presented itself as totality, and sermon books as texts shaped by reuse, this single leaf confronts us with authority without completeness or what does it mean for a canon to be fragmented. The Decretum Gratiani was foundational to medieval canon law, yet here its authority is concentrated in a fragment. This leaf is a reminder that fragmentation, non-normativity or q***rness is not always the result of loss. Sometimes it is a later strategy of preservation, study and display. The archive, once again, appears not as a neutral container, but as an active agent that cuts, extracts and reframes.
Tomorrow, we move further into this fragile territory, where the boundaries between book, fragment and trace begin to dissolve entirely.

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today’s book is the largest object we encounter in this first week of Advent: a Latin Bible printed in Venice in 1476 by Nicolaus Jenson, one of the most influential printers of the fifteenth century. Jenson’s type is often praised for its clarity and balance, and here it carries the full weight of Scripture in a monumental folio format. This is a book conceived as totality: II + 940 + I leaves, printed in two columns of fifty-four lines, designed to hold the entirety of biblical history within a single, imposing body.

The Bergen copy, Librar Q 30, is bound in an older light parchment binding, with Biblia Sacra 1476 printed on the spine. Its dimensions, nearly thirty centimetres high, place it firmly within the tradition of lectern or institutional Bibles, objects meant to endure repeated consultation rather than private reading. The typography is a dense Gothic textualis, consistent throughout the volume, asserting visual authority through regularity and scale. The initial following the prologue is richly decorated with gold and ornamental vines, while other initials are hand-painted, guided by faint letterforms left by the printer to indicate where colour and ornament should enter the page. Yet this monumentality is punctured by vulnerability. The book bears clear signs of use and exposure: a partially torn leaf ([m8]), paper repairs at the lower margin of [p1], and a hole in the upper right area of [x4], surrounded by water damage. These are not marginal defects. They mark moments where the material body of the book has been breached, handled, repaired, and allowed to continue. The Bible survives not as an untouched ideal, but as an object shaped by contact, loss and care.The colophon anchors the volume firmly in place and time: Biblia impressa Venetiis opera atque impensa Nicolai Jenson Gallici. M.cccc.lxxvj. Printed in Venice in 1476 at Jenson’s own expense, the book belongs to one of the earliest moments in which the Bible becomes fully integrated into the economies and infrastructures of print. Its authority is asserted typographically and materially, yet its transmission is inseparable from wear and contingency.

The history of this particular copy adds another layer to its material biography. It was purchased in 1976 from an antiquarian bookseller in Oslo, entering the University Library as part of a modern collecting effort aimed at stabilising and preserving objects already marked by centuries of handling. Earlier traces remain visible: crayon marks on A5, writing trials in the margins, and flyleaves made from older paper, including a handwritten Latin fragment. The archive, once again, reveals itself as a composite body, assembled across time from reuse, repair and accumulation. Encountered during Advent, this Bible stages a quiet paradox. Scripture presents itself as fullness and origin, yet the physical book insists on another truth: that history reaches us through openings, through patched surfaces, through places where continuity has been interrupted but not erased. The monumental body of the text remains legible precisely because it has endured damage. Its authority is not diminished by these apertures; it is made visible through them. A bit of what we should be celebrating these days.
Tomorrow, we move from monument to fragment, and from totality to something far more precarious.

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-q-0030.html

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today’s book, Librar 87, was printed in 1483 in the Bavarian town of Memmingen by Albrecht Kunne, remembered in local tradition as one of Gutenberg’s students. Its title, Tractatus sollennis de arte vero modo praedicandi, names a genre rather than a literary identity: a solemn treatise on the true art and method of preaching. It has long circulated under the incorrect attribution to Thomas Aquinas, but the text belongs instead to Jacobus de Fusignano, active in the early fourteenth century, whose concise manuals shaped pastoral training long before the scholastic summa became the dominant model.

The Bergen copy does not survive complete. The first leaf is missing, so the book opens on A2, as if the instruction had already begun before the reader arrived. The treatise proceeds through a tree-like structure, the famous arbor praedicandi, whose branches organise topics, subtopics and transitions with an almost botanical logic. The printer himself confirms this in the colophon: “distinctos passus et formas arboris compilatus”, a formulation that turns the sermon into an object of method.

The book’s trajectory into Bergen is unusually well documented. It was given in 1915 to the Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum by Count Alfred von Oberndorff, the German ambassador to Norway, as recorded in the museum’s accession register (Gave nr. 1). It remained there until 1956, when it was transferred to the University Library. The current limp parchment binding belongs to this later phase, replacing whatever working binding the book carried during its first centuries.

One detail stands out in the manuscript traces: on the final page, a reader named Johannes added a devotional closing in Latin, quoting Ecclesiastes 12:13: “Omnia audita: Deum time et mandata eius observa.” The sentence reminds us that manuals of preaching were not abstract compilations of method, but instruments of practice. Readers annotated them, copied them, carried them into the pulpit or the classroom. This copy still bears faint marginal marks that speak of such use.

Librar 87 teaches us that method is itself a form of memory, a structure capable of surviving loss, displacement and new institutional homes. In winter light, its quiet pages show how knowledge persists through fragments, through transmission, and through the care of readers known and unknown.

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-o-0087.html

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today we turn to a very different kind of incunable. Librar 18 is a small quarto printed in Deventer by Jacobus de Bredaaround 1489–1490, and it brings together three concise Latin texts devoted to the Virgin Mary: Sabellicus’ Elegiae XIII, Gregorius Tifernas’ Hymnus, and Maffeo Vegio’s Salutatio. These works are representative of a moment when humanist learning and Marian devotion intersected in compact, portable formats designed for personal reading.

The material structure of the book is as telling as its contents. It consists of 18 leaves arranged in three gatherings, A (8 leaves), B (6), C (4), all folded into the standard geometry of a quarto. This is a format that signals intention: small enough to be carried, yet organised with the same internal discipline as larger liturgical or scholastic volumes. The text appears in a single column of 26 lines set in a medium-weight textura. This typeface, with its regular vertical strokes, gives the page a steady rhythm and reflects broader printing practices in the Low Countries at the turn of the fifteenth century.

One of the principles of working with early printed books is understanding how they expected to be completed. Librar 18 was printed without decorated initials or rubrication, though traces of a later reader remain: a ‘C’ added on bjjv and a ‘No.’ on bviv. These are small marks, but they anchor the book in lived experience. They remind us that a printed object does not end with the press; it continues to accumulate meaning through use.

The binding is modern, almost certainly produced when the book entered the Bergen Museum collection, and attributed to local binder B. Giertsens. It tells a second story, one about institutional care and the ways collections absorb earlier materials into new systems of preservation.

The provenance of the book might be linked to one of the most significant figures of early modern Norway, Geble Pederssøn, later the first Lutheran bishop of the country. He likely acquired this volume during his studies in the Catholic Low Countries. The booklet would go on to circulate within the intellectual community of Bergen Cathedral School, where books like these shaped the formation of generations of students, including Ludvig Holberg. Its eventual arrival at the University Library reflects the long afterlife of collections that move from private reading to shared cultural infrastructure.

If yesterday’s folio Mariale showed the monumental side of late-medieval devotion, Librar 18 offers the opposite scale: a book built for close reading, light enough to travel, and structured for reflection rather than display. Intellectual history often moves through small, durable objects that carry ideas quietly but persistently across distances and centuries.

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-o-0018.html