Bull's Head and Mermaid - The Bernstein Project - Österreichische ...

IV 1
IV 3 John of Mandeville:
Journey to the Holy Land
[1468–1472]
Paper, 41.5 x 29 cm, 160 sheets
WLB Stuttgart HB V 86
Sheet 2
This anthology, in various hands, has been identified as having
been written in the Earldom of Württemberg; a linguistic
analysis indicates its provenance as being the upper
Neckarland. It was first acquired by the Weingarten Abbey
as part of the library of Johann Friedrich Ochsenbach. The
first section (Sheets 2ra-53va) contains a German translation,
by Michael Velser, of “the Journey to the Holy Land”
by John of Mandeville. The text is a French travel documentary
in the form of a novel that was composed between
1357 und 1371; the anonymous author calls himself Jean
de Mandeville. The travel report, large portions of which are
fictive, quickly found a wide circulation after having been
translated into Latin and nearly all European languages.
A watermark expertise on this manuscript was provided
by Gerhard Piccard. He describes it as written on Großregalformat
paper from Milan containing a watermark of an
eight-petalled flower without stem. Piccard was able to find
an identical watermark in a Strasbourg incunabulum with
the date 1474. Sheets 158 and 159 are different, and thus
Piccard assumes that the Milan paper ran out in the course
of the writing. The two added sheets are of the common
Kanzleiformat and contain the watermark “Bull’s head with
eyes, stem and five-petalled flower with attached mark”.
For this watermark, Piccard refers to his Findbuch
“Ochsenkopf” (No. 861), where the manufacture of paper
with this type of Bull’s head is documented as dating from
1470 to 1472. It is assumed that the stocks of large format
paper took a longer period of time to be depleted, and thus
Piccard first suggests manuscript HB V 86 as having been
written between 1468 and 1478. The added pages in Kanzleiformat,
however, enable a further chronological limitation,
so that the final dating he offers is the period between
1468 and 1472.
Literature: Bremer, Jean de Mandeville; Irtenkauf / Krekler,
Die Handschriften der ehemaligen Hofbibliothek Stuttgart,
Bd. 2,2.
C.K. (C.P.-K.)
IV 4 Vitae sanctorum
[1439–1442]
Paper, 29.5 x 21 cm, 178 sheets
WLB Stuttgart HB XIV 19
Sheet 4 (blank, watermark: “Bull’s head”)
The original owner of this manuscript, “Lives of the Saints”,
was the early humanist Felix Hemmerli. Hemmerli was born
in either 1388 or 1389 in Zurich and died in Lucerne probably
in 1458 or 1459. It is known that he was a participant
in both the Council of Constance (1414–1418) and the
Council of Basel (1432–1435). The manuscript later was ac-
51