# The Ashburnham Pentateuch > Unidentified Late Antique workshop (called in modern scholarship the Master of the Ashburnham Pentateuch) - Late 6th or early 7th century (main text and surviving miniatures); marginal corrections and 13 replacement leaves added in the mid-8th century, apparently after the manuscript reached Francia > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/master-of-the-ashburnham-pentateuch/ashburnham-pentateuch-bnf/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-17 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unidentified Late Antique workshop (called in modern scholarship the Master of the Ashburnham Pentateuch) - **Date:** Late 6th or early 7th century (main text and surviving miniatures); marginal corrections and 13 replacement leaves added in the mid-8th century, apparently after the manuscript reached Francia - **Medium:** Ink and tempera with gold on parchment; uncial script, with later marginal additions mixing uncial, semi-uncial and Caroline minuscule - **Dimensions:** 142 folios in two columns, 375 x 310 mm (written space 280 x 240 mm) - **Object type:** Manuscript - **Period:** Late Antique to Early Medieval, Latin West - **Current location:** Bibliotheque nationale de France, Departement des manuscrits, Paris - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary The Ashburnham Pentateuch is a Latin manuscript of the first five books of the Bible, made in the late 6th or early 7th century by a workshop whose location is still disputed among named scholars, with Italy, Rome, Visigothic Spain and North Africa all argued in the literature. It is one of the oldest surviving illustrated biblical manuscripts, its Creation page originally showing a rare anthropomorphic image of the Trinity later partly painted over at Tours, where the book spent the whole medieval period.In 1842 it was stolen from Tours by Guglielmo Libri, the French government's own Inspector-General of Libraries, who fled to England in 1848 ahead of arrest and was convicted of theft in absentia by a French court in 1850. Libri had already sold it, in 1847, to Bertram Ashburnham, 4th Earl of Ashburnham, whose son's estate sold it back to the Bibliotheque nationale de France in 1888, after a decade-long campaign by the scholar Leopold Delisle to document its theft.It has been held in Paris ever since, under the shelfmark Nouvelles acquisitions latines 2334, and remains, on its dating, its iconographic sources and important details of its own theft and sale, an object with more open questions than closed ones. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. late 6th - early 7th century** Unknown Latin biblical workshop (region disputed) `[disputed]` (origin) The text and the original cycle of about 69 full-page miniatures were produced by a single workshop. Its location is unresolved: Italy, an imperial scriptorium at Rome, Visigothic Spain and North Africa have all been argued by named scholars on the basis of script, iconography and textual affiliation, with no consensus reached. - **-8th century** Unknown `[documented]` (transmission to Francia and repair) The manuscript had reached Frankish Gaul by the 8th century. Thirteen folios lost from the original quires were replaced at this time with new leaves copied directly onto the damaged book, and marginal corrections were added mixing uncial and semi-uncial script. - **9th century** Unknown (a Carolingian-period corrector, apparently at Tours) `[documented]` (alteration) The anthropomorphic Trinity on the Creation page was partly painted over, reducing an original scheme of paired Father-and-Son figures and a winged Holy Spirit to a single Creator figure, a change read as consistent with Carolingian theological concerns about Trinitarian unity. The identity of the corrector is not recorded. - **9th century-1842** Custodians at Tours `[documented]` (custody) The manuscript is documented as having remained at Tours throughout the medieval period. A secondary, non-scholarly source consulted for this record states more specifically that it was held in the library of the cathedral chapter of Saint-Gatien and transferred, with other confiscated ecclesiastical holdings, to the civic Bibliotheque municipale de Tours during the French Revolution; this detail could not be corroborated in the scholarly or institutional sources consulted and is flagged as unverified. - **1842** Guglielmo Libri `[documented]` (theft) Stolen at Tours in 1842 by Guglielmo Libri, then serving as the French government's Inspector-General of Libraries, a post that gave him unsupervised access to provincial collections he was nominally cataloguing. - **1842-1847** Guglielmo Libri `[documented]` (private possession) Held privately by Libri, who catalogued it among his own manuscripts as item 'Libri 13', the number still used cross-referentially in the Bibliotheque nationale's own catalogue. - **1847-1878** Bertram Ashburnham, 4th Earl of Ashburnham `[documented]` (purchase) Bought by the 4th Earl of Ashburnham in 1847 as part of a much larger purchase of manuscripts from Libri, who fled France the following year. A single non-scholarly source consulted claims Libri represented the manuscript to Ashburnham as originating at Grottaferrata, near Rome, to disguise its French origin; this claim could not be corroborated elsewhere and is flagged as unverified. - **1850** `[documented]` (trial in absentia) On 22 June 1850 a French court convicted Libri of theft and sentenced him in absentia to ten years' imprisonment. He remained in England and never returned to France; he went back to Italy in 1868 and died near Florence in 1869. Ownership of the manuscript, by then in England, was unaffected by the verdict. - **1878-1888** Estate of Bertram Ashburnham, 5th Earl of Ashburnham `[documented]` (negotiation) After the 4th Earl's death in 1878, his son opened negotiations to sell part of the manuscript collection. Leopold Delisle spent much of the following decade assembling documentary proof that a large part of the Ashburnham manuscripts of French origin, including this one, had been stolen from French public libraries by Libri and by the bookseller Jean-Baptiste Barrois. - **1888-02-23** Bibliotheque nationale (France) `[documented]` (purchase) Purchased from the London bookselling firm Trubner on 23 February 1888 and entered into the manuscripts department's register under no. 8070(12); published the same year in Delisle's Catalogue des manuscrits des fonds Libri et Barrois. The price paid, individually or as part of the wider purchase, was not found in the sources consulted. - **1888-present** Bibliotheque nationale de France `[documented]` (institutional custody) Held since 1888 in the Departement des manuscrits of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, under the shelfmark Nouvelles acquisitions latines 2334. Distinct from the parallel, separately negotiated 1884 Italian government purchase that sent the Italian portion of Libri's manuscripts sold to Ashburnham to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence; no part of that group's later history belongs to this manuscript. ## Open questions - Where, and in what workshop, was the manuscript actually made. Italy, an imperial scriptorium at Rome, Visigothic Spain and North Africa have all been argued by named scholars, and the dispute remains open. - When, and by whom, was the Creation page's original anthropomorphic Trinity overpainted. The alteration is dated to the Carolingian period and located at Tours, but no individual corrector or exact date is recorded. - How and when most of the book of Deuteronomy was lost, and whether the manuscript was already this fragmentary before Libri stole it in 1842 or suffered further loss afterward. Not addressed in the sources consulted. - Whether Bertram, 4th Earl of Ashburnham, knew or suspected in 1847 that manuscripts he was buying from Libri had been stolen from French and Italian public collections. A genuine point of historical debate this record has not been able to resolve. - What price the Bibliotheque nationale paid for the manuscript, individually or as part of the 1888 Libri-Barrois purchase. Not published in the sources consulted. - Whether the claim that Libri sold the manuscript to Ashburnham under a false attribution to Grottaferrata, near Rome, is corroborated by any primary or scholarly source. It appears only in a single non-scholarly source consulted for this record. - Which specific scenes the roughly 51 lost original miniatures depicted. No reconstruction of the full lost picture cycle was found in the sources consulted. ## Sources - [1] Bibliotheque nationale de France, Departement des Manuscrits, Archives et manuscrits catalogue entry for NAL 2334 ('Libri 13. Biblia. Pentateuchus [Pentateuque dit d'Ashburnham ou de Tours]'), including its 'Historique de la conservation', physical description and bibliography. - [2] Biblissima+ portail, catalogue record for Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Departement des manuscrits, NAL 2334. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Ashburnham Pentateuch'. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the underlying scholarly literature (Awes Freeman, Verkerk, Narkiss, the BnF catalogue) wherever a specific claim depends on it alone. - [4] Wikipedia, 'Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja'. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography of Libri or with Delisle's own published account of the thefts. - [5] Maurizio Aceto, Elisa Cala, Gaia Fenoglio, Maria Labate, Charlotte Denoel, Lorenza Operti, Angelo Agostino, 'New evidence of non-traditional Egyptian blue manufacture in the 6th century Ashburnham Pentateuch,' Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 33 (October 2020), article 102487. - [6] Joseph Gutmann, 'The Jewish Origin of the Ashburnham Pentateuch Miniatures,' The Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 44 (1953-54), pp. 59-69. Citation as recorded in the Bibliotheque nationale's own manuscript bibliography (source 1); the article itself was not independently fetched for this record. - [7] Herbert L. Kessler, review of Dorothy Verkerk, Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the Ashburnham Pentateuch (Cambridge University Press, 2004), CAA Reviews. - [8] Jennifer Awes Freeman, The Ashburnham Pentateuch and its Contexts: The Trinity in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture 23 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2022). - [9] Leopold Delisle, Catalogue des manuscrits des fonds Libri et Barrois (Paris: Bibliotheque nationale, 1888). - [10] Leopold Delisle, The Manuscripts of the Earl of Ashburnham: Report to the Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. - [11] Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 'Historical Notes' and Fondo Ashburnham catalogue pages, on the 1884 Italian government purchase and deposit of the Italian portion of Libri's manuscripts sold to Ashburnham. - [12] Arlima (Archives de litterature du Moyen Age), manuscript notice for Paris, BnF, NAL 2334, with bibliography including Awes Freeman (2022). - [13] Turismo Prerromanico, 'Pentateuco Ashburnham'. Non-scholarly tourism/heritage source, used only for two specific claims (the Saint-Gatien/Bibliotheque-municipale pre-theft location and the alleged Grottaferrata false attribution at sale to Ashburnham), both explicitly flagged in this record as unverified and in need of a stronger source. - [14] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Ashburnham Pentateuch, and individual file API records (extmetadata), used to verify licence, photographer credit and folio identification for every image used in this record. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.