Provenance of Ege FOL 47
We began our search by looking at the Schoenberg database, from which we deduced that it is likely that Fol 47 is Schoenberg record 23057. There were many reasons to believe this including the similar number of lines, dimensions and writings in both French and Latin. The most revealing similarity was that Otto Ege was listed in the provenance. From Schoenberg 23057, we learned that Fol 47 was also in De Recci as Getz MS 7 and Ege MS 70.
Estelle (Mrs. Milton E.) Getz was born in 1880 to Kaspare and Hulda Cohn and married Milton Getz in 1909. Milton was a prominent merchant and banker in Los Angeles and the house he had built in the Beverly Hills consisted of 17 bedrooms and 29 bathrooms on a 3.5 acre lot. She died in 1943 at the age 62.
The second appearance in De Recci is due to the fact that Getz sold the manuscript to Otto Ege in 1936 before the Census was published. Otto Frederick Ege was born in 1888 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Ege was a professor and later Dean at the Cleveland Institute of Art and bought his first manuscript in 1911 at the age of 23. He believed that medieval manuscripts should be available to everyone and at the time the only way to do that was to break them up. He died in 1951 at the age of 63.
The final nail in coffin, connecting Ege Fol 47 to De Recci’s Getz MS 7 and Ege MS 70, comes from the description of the manuscript in the sales catalog when it was sold to Ege. It is here that we obtained descriptions of inconsistent borders, one of the defining features of the manuscript, as well as the French rubrications. It is also the only source describing the missing miniatures, one of which is explored in more detail in Death and the Maiden from the exhibit "Who used Fol 47?"
At this time the location of 11 of the 40 individual leaves remains unknown. Click on the link below to open a Google Map indicating all of the known leaf locations. Recently the personal collection of Otto Ege has been given to Yale, and there is hope that more leaves of this fascinating manuscript will be found within.
Explore the images to follow the paper trail left by Ege Fol 47 and read the longest known description of the complete manuscript.