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CHRISTOPHER DE HAMEL AND PATRICIA LOVETT, EDS. The Macclesfield Alphabet Book. BL Additional MS 88887. A Facsimile. London: The British Library, 2010. 32 (with 14 figures) + 46ff. (facsimile) + 4 (unnumbered).
This book is a delight and offers intriguing mysteries. On the one hand, it is a beautiful facsimile of a unique manuscript, and on the other, the original purpose of the manuscript is difficult to explain. The book is a small manuscript of alphabet designs from the second half of the fifteenth century, but with some sixteenth-century additions. There are only forty-six leaves of parchment, each about 245 mm by 174 mm. It is believed to be the work of a friar, or possibly a Cluniac monk, at Thetford, named Roger Baldry, and until recently its existence was unknown to scholars. It was held in the library formed by the Ninth Earl of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle in Oxfordshire and was bought by the British Library at Sotheby's in 2009. Alphabet books are rare, so it is an exciting discovery. The work includes fourteen complete alphabets (some with upper and lower case forms, or at least variants) and samples of color decoration. There are glorious foliate letters, and playful, often-bizarre, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms. Some of the letters would be difficult to identify if they were not in alphabetical order.
The two introductions, by Christopher de Hamel (7-21) and Patricia Lovett (22-30), consider the manuscript from both a scholarly perspective and that of a modern...