Haverford, PA, Haverford College, MS J2.16.10, flyleaf 1 verso: Ownership inscription: “John Pemberton’s, bought of John Kendall, Colchester, Great Britain. Joseph James had a varied career, working at a printer and later bank clerk in Philadelphia, as a merchant in New York City, and as a teacher, bookseller and druggist in Baltimore, in addition to editing “A Compendious Hebrew and English Lexicon” (Philadelphia: William Brown, 1826). The James family were devout Quakers, and the children attended the Friends’ School where they received a classical education in Latin under the direction of the Quaker historian Robert Proud (1728–1813). Joseph James was the older brother of Thomas Chalkley James (1766–1835), a noted physician and teacher based in Philadelphia. The first printed description was drafted in Philadelphia on Decemby Joseph James (1755–1830) and published seven years later as an appendix to the “Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library of the Four Monthly Meetings of Friends of Philadelphia” (Philadelphia: Joseph Rakestraw, 1831). Although the presence of the manuscript was overlooked in the compilation of the early-to-mid twentieth century “Census of medieval and renaissance manuscripts in the United States and Canada”, these contrasting earlier presentations reflect shifting understandings of the nature of medieval manuscripts over the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The manuscript was in fact described in quite different ways by two successive printed catalogues of the Friends’ Library published in 18. Over the course of the 19th century, two publications appeared which mentioned and attempted to describe the manuscript, although with mixed results. In fact, the “reception history” of this Bible is more complicated and interesting than Tanis suggests. After briefly describing the manuscript, Tanis makes the following claim: “Unlisted in any modern catalogue, the volume was only recently discovered and is published here for the first time.” Tanis draws attention to a Bible with historiated initials produced in northern France in the second quarter of the thirteenth century and given to the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia by the Quaker minister John Pemberton. In an overview of these manuscripts in his 2001 study on “Collecting Illuminated Manuscripts in Philadelphia,” James R. By the end of the 18th century, at least three illuminated manuscripts had reached Philadelphia.
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