A few months ago, my colleague Jakob Povl Holck at the university library of University of Southern Denmark sent me a batch of photographs from a book he had recently examined. The main attraction of this book was the liturgical fragment on its cover, and which I might return to in a later blogpost. But I was also struck by the frontispiece of the fragment carrier, which is an edition of Eusebius' Chronicon translated into Latin by Jerome - the Chronicon only survives in translations as the original in Greek has been lost - and which was printed in Paris by the printer Henricus Stephanus, also known as Henri Estienne (1528-98).
As can be seen below, the frontispiece shows a beautiful, if incomplete, reparation in which the central roundel has been reconstructed, and in which the original abbreviation of "eius" has been retained in the missing words written out by pen. Understandably, the elaborate knotwork and fronds have not be recreated, but it is clear that the repair work has been undertaken with great care.
We do not know when the frontispiece was repaired. We do know that the book was kept at Herlufsholm School in Denmark for a long time - although we do not know when it came there - and it is easy to imagine that the tear has happened due to carelessness on the part of a Danish student possibly struggling with the sheer size and weight of the book. It is, however, equally possible that the work has been commissioned by the bibliophile who quite likely purchased this work and then later donated it to the school.
Although scholarly speaking the liturgical fragment of this book holds the greatest fascination for me, and the greatest mysteries, there is something very pleasing about such a repair work as this, and I keep coming back to it.
Eusebius' Chronicon, translated by Jerome
Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, RARA L 15
Photo by Jakob Povl Holck
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