Henry Yates Thompson was a discriminating collector of medieval manuscripts, which he selected on the bases of the quality of their illumination and the identities of their initial owners. His self-imposed limitation of one hundred items meant that any new addition to his collection had to be finer than one he already owned. The collection was richest in French (most notably, the Sainte Abbaye, the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre and the Hours of Jean Dunois), English (the twelfth-century life of Saint Cuthbert and the Saint Omer Psalter), Italian (the Divina Commedia and a sixteenth-century book of hours), and other manuscripts primarily of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with some extremely important early ones. Thompson, a gentleman collector ahead of his time through his frequent buying and selling, was the first modern bibliophile, according to Christopher de Hamel, who also praised Thompson's taste: "he was probably the most...