Yale University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ms. 27
This late fourteenth-century manuscript of the Speculum humanæ salvationis is bound with the Pseudo-Bonaventura Meditationes de passione christi . It was copied in England and was given to the Collegiate School in Connecticut by Elihu Yale in 1714. (The college was re-named for the philanthropist in 1718.) It is said to be the first illuminated manuscript to come to a North American institutional library. It contains 104 leaves of vellum which measure 28 × 19 cm. The Speculum part contains the Prologue, the Prohemium, forty-five chapters and an undated Explicit. Originally there were 180 drawings of which eighteen have been removed. The miniatures are drawn with a very fine pen, in ink of the same color as the text, but paler, and they were probably not made by a professional miniaturist (figs. II-12, 13). It is in its original binding, of a type known as a "girdle book." These were made by covering the volume, already bound in sheepskin on wooden boards, with an envelope of sheepskin which culminates in a knot formed at the end of the skin, and clasps. This Speculum , weighing three pounds eight ounces, would have been quite uncomfortable hanging from a girdle and was probably designed to hang from the saddle of a traveller on horseback.[22]
II-13.
The Creation of Eve, Chapter I b, fol. 7 recto.
Balaam's Ass and the Angel, Chapter III d, fol. 9 recto.
Jacob's Ladder, Chapter XXXIII b, fol. 37 verso.
Speculum humanæ salvationis .
Yale University, The Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Ms. 27.