Provenance
Owner InformationThe Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Current or Former Ownercurrent
Provenance Place
Provenance Settlement Information (English)Oxford
Provenance Country Information (English)England
Research LiteratureJ. H. Chajes, The Kabbalistic Tree (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022), 47-51; Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “Un diagramme kabbalistique de la bibliothèque de Gilles de Viterbe,” in Hommage à Georges Vajda; études d’histoire et de pensée juives, ed. Gérard Nahon, and Charles Touati (Louvain: Peeters, 1980): 363–76; Anthony Grafton, and Joanna Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 83–85; and Robert Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic, and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 47n63.
A. Neubauer, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford 1886)
Catalogue of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Bodleian Library; Supplement of Addenda and Corrigenda to Vol. I (A. Neubauer's Catalogue). Oxford 1994.
צולם על כריכת הספר ' לב הקבלה' מאת דניאל מט, 2011.
Notes (Hebrew)Early in the sixteenth century, an old copy of the “Great Parchment” was acquired by the Italian humanist and philosopher Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (1472–1532). The text it bore was the idiosyncratic treatise on the sefirot, Iggeret sippurim (Letter of stories). This Great Parchment 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 Great 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. Comparison to the sketch of the Great Parchment found in Palatina Library, Cod. Parm. 2419 and to the newly discovered Great Parchment found in Uppsala University Library, O Hebr. 33:3 reveals that Hepburn’s restoration exchanged the idiosyncratic graphical framework of the original in favor of the array of the sefirot that had become iconic by his time. Particular graphical elements, e.g., the clusters of Tiferet and Malkhut and the medallions of Abraham and Ishmael adjacent to Gevurah, nevertheless betray Hepburn’s having worked from a Great Parchment very much like those in the Parma and Uppsala MSS. 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.
Notes (Hebrew)עם ציורים צבעוניים. / בתחתית המגילה, בצשד ימין :נוצרי כתב כלם ושמו הוא יעקב חברון אסכוטי תנצב"ה תל"ח. / נושא נוסף: קבלה / נושא נוסף: ציורים