Peter J. Lucas and Angela M. Lucas are extremely well known to scholars of the Middle Ages, and in this handsome volume they bring their expertise to bear on the small but fascinating collection of medieval Latin manuscripts at the Russell Library, University of Maynooth. The subtitle, Explorations in the unknown, is particularly apt since the collection has not received much attention: as students of manuscripts will well know, such repositories generally remain underexplored due to the lack of published, detailed catalogues which are often delayed because of the time-consuming nature of such work. As noted in the book’s foreword, the cataloguer must be a detective too, facing serious challenges to determine details that will be crucial to the compilation of a catalogue. The result of their painstaking labour is a catalogue that will highlight and stimulate further work on the unique collection of codices and manuscript fragments at the library. Their detailed manuscript descriptions, encompassing history, codicology, collation, contents and bibliography for each item, will prove to be a rich resource for students of manuscripts worldwide.

The volume opens with a brief history of the Royal College of St Patrick, which was established in 1795, which had a library from 1800. The 1861 Pugin-designed building, which is now the Russell Library, has housed the rare books and manuscripts since 1984. The authors note that the rare books and manuscripts that are now held there began as a collection in the early days of the foundation of the college. This was mainly due to the displacement and movement of books associated with the revolutionary period in France. It is also possible that the first professors – Catholic clergy, educated on the Continent, and mainly in France –brought books and manuscripts with them. All had held academic and administrative positions in the French church. Indeed the first librarian was educated at Bordeaux.

The connections between the library, the college, and European history may in part explain the international dimension of the repository of manuscripts at the Russell. There are sixteen medieval manuscripts, plus three ‘independent fragments’, described in the volume. A total of four of those manuscripts now in the college came from the Benedictine abbey of St Jacques at Liège (and a further one from St Léonard, a cell of that abbey), possibly in possession of some of the early members of staff of the college in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, these manuscripts with a connection to Liège seem to be at the heart of the repository. They were among the manuscripts of the abbey that were dispensed with at a sale in 1788, and are traceable through, among other things, their distinctive binding, extensive annotations, and by mention of them in various catalogues of the St Jacques libraries from the 1600s onwards. It is highly significant that the authors can contribute four manuscripts to the list of books once held at St Jacques, especially since well over half of them remain untraced. Unsurprisingly the Liège manuscripts are theological and scriptural in terms of their subject matter. RB16 is a Commentarius in psalmum CXVIII from c.1320 attributed to Englebert (Poetsch) of Admont, and is an example of a codex that bears an inscription in the hand of Philippe d’Othée, who instigated a programme of more careful control of his books during his time as prior of St Jacques, 1404–46. The Liège manuscripts also comprise a copy of the text of Exodus accompanied by the Glossa ordinaria (RB45, s.xii); a manuscript of the Commentarius in Exodum of Bruno of Segni, s.xii (RB46); and an interestingly-annotated miscellany of works by Vincent of Beauvais, Augustine, Bonaventure, and others, and that has a table of contents also in the hand of Philippe (RB47). The volume with connections to St Léonard is a very attractive missal (RB54) dated to 1529, copied by Pieter of Venlo, who was a priest there.

The authors observe that the repository does not reflect the interests of a single collector but rather that it is an ‘in-house collection’ reflecting what the individuals responsible for it thought a library for the college should look like, as well as representing efforts to give the institution a status internationally and in terms of the education of the Catholic clergy in Ireland. The focus is for the most part on the church, and there is only one manuscript that is not religious: a ‘Commissione’ given by the doge of Venice to a captain of the fleet, Nicoclò de Pesaro, dated 1481 (RB52). The collection, then, has a unity that is enriched by the presence of a number of manuscript fragments, extant as individual items excised from volumes and sold as pictures and as papers in the bindings of early printed books. There are three of the former distinction, taken from books of hours and a liturgical psalter. The section detailing the fragments in early printed book-bindings is fascinating, offering rare photographic and textual glimpses into the underneath, hidden parts of books (many of which are of Spanish origin).

Although there is no material in the collection in Irish (or, indeed, in English), the material condition and history of several of the manuscripts will be of interest in an Irish context. At least six of the volumes have nineteenth-century Irish bindings. Frederick W. Conway, the nineteenth-century book collector from Dublin, owned the Augustine manuscript. Moreover, the volume presents the history of one of Ireland’s great rare book and manuscript libraries in rich detail. For the art historian there is much to appeal in this volume. The production values are very high, and the photographs record a set of images, illuminations and details from scripts and annotations that are as readable as are the descriptions of the manuscripts.

This beautifully-produced, richly-illustrated volume is no mere coffee-table book. In fact, as stated in the foreword, it is perhaps the only book devoted to and offering detailed descriptions of a collection of Latin manuscripts in an Irish library. The attention to detail is high to the end: the appendices are especially useful and thoughtful, opening with extracts from the will of the Very Reverend Dr Laurence Renehan (1797–1857) in which he bequeathed funds to purchase manuscripts for the library. Following a comprehensive bibliography there is a list of former owners of manuscripts and indices of incipits and manuscript contents. This is a publication that is especially welcome in a period in which catalogues are increasingly (and very usefully) available to search online but difficult to browse and absorb. I shall return to this volume again and again.