Pseudo-Origen
A leaf from the Homily De Maria Magdalena in Latin, manuscript on vellum [France or Flanders, second half 13th century].
An attractive leaf from a Cistercian copy of a Cistercian text.

c.315 × 220mm. 30 lines written below top line in a fine gothic script (aptly described by Quaritch as ‘handsomely relaxed and not rigidly angular’), many capitals letters written with double strokes and touched in red, comprising the text ‘a monumento mors michi est […] At illa existimans quia orto[lanus]’ (somewhat creased at the gutter edge and with a natural flaw at the fore-edge, neither affecting the text).

Provenance:
(1) Sir Thomas Phillipps; included in the residue of his collection sold to the Robinson Trust in 1977.
(2) Bernard Rosenthal, with his ‘I/261’ in pencil.
(3) Bernard Quaritch, Catalogue 1088: Bookhands of the Middle Ages, III (1988), no. 69.
(4) Colker MS 420; acquired in 1990 from Quaritch.

The full text is based on John 20:11–18, which relates the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene at the empty sepulchre after his Resurrection; it was composed in the late 12th or early 13th century probably in France and in a Cistercian context, although it is attributed to Origen in a number of manuscripts. See Chrysogonous Waddell, ‘Pseudo-Origen’s Homily on Mary Magdalene at the Tomb of Jesus’, Liturgy 23 (1989), 45–65, partly based on John P. McCall, ‘Chaucer and the Pseudo Origen De Maria Magdalena: A Preliminary Study’, Speculum, 46 (1971), 491–509. The text is characterised as ‘not so much a commentary on the text of John xx. 11–18 as it is a dramatization with a moral’ (p. 498). McCall shows that ‘in almost every case the early texts of the homily are found with works by (or ascribed to) Bernard of Clairvaux […] and at least five of the fourteen earliest manuscripts are from Cistercian monasteries' (p. 494). It is therefore notable that the present leaf has the punctus flexus punctuation typical of Cistercian manuscripts.

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