Pupilla Oculi
by John de Burgh
- Corpus Master
Manuscript in Latin on vellum
England, London (?), c. 1415-1420
450 x 310 mm
112 leaves. Two historiated initials on the opening page. Main text complete. 19th-century English binding of three-quarter brown leather and cloth over pasteboards, sewn on five bands, the spine lettered in gilt capitals ‘Liber de / Sacramentis / Pupilla / Oculi / Vocatus / Constitutiones / Provinciæ / Cantuariensis, / etc. / Sæc. XV’, marbled paper doublures, binding by Tuckett, binder to Queen Victoria. Outstandingly fresh condition.
This rendition of John de Burgh's important manual towers over all other copies of the work, and was produced in the highest grade of script. It was illuminated by a virtuoso artist who also painted the celebrated full-page frontispiece to the Chaucer, Troilus & Creseyde manuscript (now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 61).
Pupilla Oculi is a medieval pastoral manual meant for use by the clergy, and aimed to summarise the church’s penitential and sacramental laws so that they could be applied in practice in both the administration of a medieval parish and the conduct of a good Christian life.
The work’s title, ‘pupil/apple of the eye’ alludes to the Bible (Deuteronomy 32.10: ‘He kept him as the apple of his eye’) as well as John of Burgh’s main source, the Oculus sacerdotis of William Paull, a text he greatly improves, and it appears to have been written initially for a small circle of York residentiary canons who had been educated at Cambridge and served Thomas Arundel, but quickly became popular and grew to be the most widely used Latin manual in English circles.
Our copy is one of only a handful of witnesses to the oeuvre of the talented and innovative ‘Corpus Master’, an artist who had trained on the Continent before coming to England, or who absorbed European art-styles in the cultural melting pot of late medieval London, and who worked for a small but extremely select group of elite clientele, may originally have been in the entourage of Charles d’Orléans. As seen in our manuscript, the Corpus Master favours bright, intense colours, with a palette strongly influenced by courtly French illumination. His visual culture includes an Italianate element, possibly filtered through France.
Few English books with this quality of illumination remain in private hands today, and far fewer will ever appear again on the international market.
This manuscript was acquired by Sir Thomas Thynne in the 16th century and belonged to the glorious library of Longleat House, seat of the Marquesses of Bath (their MS 24).
