It was named in honour of the Day of Pentecost--"L'Ordre de la
Chevalerie du Saint-Esprit." The phrase "au droit d?sir" had reference
to the circumstances preceding the marriage. The knot was worn in token
of the "perfect amity" of the members of the Order.[44]
[44] See reproduction, published at Paris by Englemann and Graf in 1853,
1. fol.
Other works of the fourteenth century are enthusiastically praised by
Italian writers, as, _e.g._, those of Don Silvestro, a Camaldolese monk,
who flourished at the same time as the illuminator of this MS. of Louis
of Taranto, and who worked on the great choir books of the Monastery
"degli angeli," in Florence, so loudly commended by Vasari and others
who had seen them. They have long been broken up and dispersed, and it
is not improbable that cuttings from them were among those bought by
Ottley, Rogers, and other amateurs. A fragment of an Antiphonary of
Nocturnal Services, now in the Laurentian Library at Florence, finished
in 1370, shows the style of work to be of the kind just described. Other
great choir books of the earlier period are preserved in the Academy at
Pisa. But the number of MSS. to which reference might be made is legion.
Those of this date are chiefly civil law books; next to these come the
canon law, and divinity.
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