General

Title

The Great Parchment

Manuscript name

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hunt. Add. E

Summary

Early in the sixteenth century, an old ilan was acquired by the Italian humanist and philosopher Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (1472–1532). The text it bore was the idiosyncratic introduction to the sefirot Iggeret sippurim (Letter of stories) and Reuben Ṣarfati’s commentary on it, the “Commentary on the Great Parchment”—making it, therefore, “the” Great Parchment. The ilan subsequently found its way to the library of Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), the Italian noblewoman who became queen of France. Manuscripts from Catherine’s collection arrived at the royal library of Paris in 1599. It was there that the great scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) discovered the ilan. The old parchment, which by then may have celebrated its bicentennial, was in such poor condition and so difficult to read that Casaubon found it impossible to decipher. He therefore commissioned the Scottish Hebraist James Hepburn (1573–1620) to undertake its reproduction in 1606 or early 1607. Hepburn was a fine artist and a learned Hebraist with a penchant for Christianity-validating syncretistic prisca theologia (ancient theology). Hepburn is referred to in the colophon added later to the parchment as “the young brother Jacob Ḥebroni, the Scot.” This is in keeping with his self-reference on the engraving entitled Virga Aurea (Golden rod), an iconotextual feast that praises the Virgin in a kabbalistic whirlwind of seventy-two different alphabets. Hepburn prepared it with the engraver Philippe Thomassin (1562–1622) and printed it in Rome in 1616, while serving as curator of Oriental manuscripts in the Vatican. Hepburn’s reproduction of the old ilan displays no few decorative embellishments. For additional information, see J. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree, pp. 47–51.

Layout

1

Support material

parchment

Form

http://vocab.getty.edu/page/aat/300028629

Identifier

MS Hunt. Add. E

Alternative identifier

Repository

Oxford, The Bodleian Library

Country

http://ontologi.es/place/UK

Settlement

Oxford

Dimensions

Measure

1 membrane

Width

75.0 cm

Height

108.0 cm

Creation time