Uncover the unique history of 18th century rebound medieval Frisian manuscripts, now part of the Dutch Unesco protected Richthofen Collection.
Recent research into the Richthofen Collection at Tresoar (Leeuwarden, the Netherlands) made it possible to put together some fragments where Frisian bookbinders are concerned. The collection consists of ten manuscripts from around 1350 until 1600 containing medieval Frisian law. They were all rebound in the 18th century. Several of the bindings were commissioned by the owner who first brought the manuscripts together in one collection, the Frisian state lawyer Petrus Wierdsma Sr. (1729-1811).
Based on their tooling the bindings can be attributed to two Frisian bookbinderies from the corpus of mostly anonymous bookbinderies compiled by Storm van Leeuwen in his ‘Dutch Decorated Bookbinding in the Eighteenth Century’, the Daffodil Bindery and the Frisian Prize Bindery. The archival records of the estate of Friesmastate made it possible to identify the master bookbinder of the Daffodil Bindery as Roelof Hunia.
This presentation presents the outcome of the research and further discusses the potential of archival records and material analysis for identifying bookbinders. It shows how these records can be used to establish a biography and inform us about the binders’ involvement in their communities, their networks and their working methods.
