É. Apor (ed.): David Kaufmann Memorial Volume: Papers Presented at the David Kaufmann Memorial Conference, November 29, 1999, Budapest.

ORMOS, István: David Kaufmann and his Collection

DAVID KAUFMANN AND HIS COLLECTION Franco-Flemish religious manuscripts,

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8 appears to be a late testimony of a considerable period of social tolerance which saw the efflorescence and prosperity of various urban minority groups in Western Europe, but mostly in France, during the period of urban revival in the High Middle Ages, which had its climax between 1050 and 1150, and disappeared immediately after the thirteenth century.

1

3' It was in this stiffening social atmosphere, too, in the course of events accompanying the waning of social tolerance in general, that Jews were expelled from France in 1306, and our manuscript, copied and illuminated in France a few years earlier, was in all probability taken to Cologne by one of the fugitive families.

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0 It was not a rare phenomenon for a manuscript to be illuminated with inappropriate scenes: this was a field where contemporary illuminators and copyists were able to display their abilities "indulging in the feeling of freedom with wild leaps and caprices."

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1 Thus in a contemporary manuscript in the Ambrosiana in Milan we come across animals such as cocks, apes and dogs decorating philosophical works, and it can only have been the spread and popularity of such inappropriate animal figures that made Rabbi Yehudah ben Samuel the Pious of Speyer in Germany deem it necessary in the second half of the 12th century to prescribe that upon the employment of Jewish Bible-copyists it should be made a condition that they abstain from executing the massoretic apparatus in the shape of all sorts of animals and birds, 13

7 Művészeti lexikon. [Encyclopaedia of art]. Edited by Anna ZÁDOR and István GENTHON. Budapest. 1965-1968. III. 37 [s.v. Alfred Leanque], (This ingenious, playful entry deals with a non-existent French painter, whose name reminds a Hungarian reader of the adjective "link" meaning "unserious", "useless" in colloquial Hungarian.) Előd HALÁSZ, Németmagyar szótúr [German-Hungarian dictionary], 9th ed. Budapest 1988. I. 1035 [s.v. Igel]. (Under this entry, as the equivalent of a familiar German expression, a long obscene quotation reminiscent of a Hungarian folk-song can be found.) Or, from a different viewpoint, this illustration can perhaps be regarded as a parallel to the graffiti termed "scatological" by LITTMANN

; Enno LITTMANN, Thamüd und Safä. Studien zur altnordarabischen Inschriftenkunde = [Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 25:1.] Leipzig 1940. 77-78. 13

8 See, e.g., RANDALI

, 1966. Plates CIV. fig. 502 [Merman and man, shot by], CX-CXII. figs. 533538, CXII. fig. 539 [shooting hindquarters], fig. 540 [do.], fig. 541 [spear aimed at hindquarters], fig. 542 [trumpet aimed at hindquarters]. Cf. also the lengthy list RANDALL 1966. 192-194 [Obscaena|. Cf. also Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie 1968-1976. III. 337-338. ,

3'John BOSWELL, Christianity. Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Chicago-London 1981. 209-301,333-334. 14

0 SED-RAJNA 1984. 37. ,4

1 KAUFMANN 1898. 257. Similarly inappropriate figures appear in medieval church architecture as well; see e.g. Peter SPRANGER, Heilig-Kreuz-Münster Schwäbisch Gmünd. Schwäbisch Gmünd 2000. 22. 155