Bifolium from a decorated manuscript Antiphonary, illustrated with initials formed of a bird, a richly clothed human arm and a growling green lion clutching a codex, in Latin, on vellum, bifolium, single column of mixed text and music in neumes of 18 lines, the text in a rounded professional scribal book hand in brown ink and music added in neumes in black ink in a contemporary hand, the same hand also adding c- and f-clef marks to each row of neumes, rubrics in red, with four large initials of c.40 x 40mm: a geometric harp-shaped initial V formed of blue, red and green acanthus leaves with many lobed edges edged in white and bands around the initial’s body; a pale green growling lion seated and clutching a medieval codex (with bosses and corner pieces visible on the front board, as well as double clasps on the fore-edge and at the foot) in his long claws, to form an E; a human hand with a decorated gold band on its wrist, clasping a spray of acanthus to form an E and finally a green eagle with vivid green and red wings, holding more acanthus in its beak, to form an M, bifolium reused (probably in sixteenth century) on a binding, folds visible as well as areas of discolouration and small holes at extremities of original boards, some small scuffs in places too, including the latter two initials (once on outside of the binding), small areas of loss at head of central fold and near upper right corner, neither affecting text and repaired with vellum, each leaf c.355 x 225mm., Rhineland, [first half of 12th century, perhaps first few decades]. *** The twelfth century is rightly regarded as the golden age of Romanesque book art, and this leaf bears witness to the so-called ‘Early Medieval Renaissance’ in the Rhineland. The script is precise and skilled, and points towards the early part of the twelfth century, when a ct-ligature was still in common use in the Rhineland scriptoria (cf. the Freidrich Lektionar of c. 1130: Köln, Dom Hs. 59, reproduced in Glaube und Wissen im Mittelalter, 1998, no. 30, which has a similar ligature; and yet the copy of Gregory the Great, Epistolae, of the first half of the twelfth, ibid. Dom Hs. 95, Glaube und Wissen, no. 35, in which it survives only in a broken form as a curling back stroke of the ‘t’). The rich palette of lapis lazuli blue, deep red and pale green echoes other monastic books produced in Cologne in the twelfth century (Glaube und Wissen, nos. 27, 38, and see also 31 and 35).