It’s amazing isn’t it just how much work you have to do to support a fairly simply hypothesis when the pieces are unpredictable? Today I finally got the last of the obviously French/Lowlands 16thC manuscripts sorted. In 2004 I was able to read a book on calendarium(s) and today all I have left from my list of MSS to find is one clearly German book. Going by the clothing I suspect is Bavarian.
All that is left is to get the official scanning institution pages saved as PDFs so I can be offline and still work on citations.
It’s also an amazing window into just how many manuscripts were owned by individual women. So many! I already have noticed an asymmetry when it comes to the most useful genres/fields of study for each region. Portraits and donor paintings were HUGE business in Cologne, but there are so very few “genre” paintings like you get in the Lowlands. Manuscripts are also in short supply, imported yes, local, no. Written printed works HUGE, printed illustrations, not so much.
So I’ll soon be able to separate out the most important MSS for my work, and set aside the rest for later.