Sir George Grey (1812-1898) served as governor of the Cape of Good Hope from 1854 to 1861. When he left in 1861 to return to his previous post in New Zealand, he donated his personal collection of about 5000 books and manuscripts to the South African Public Library (as it was known at that time). Along with his manuscripts, he also donated about 100 incunabula (not filmed by HMML). He purchased most of his books and manuscripts in England in the 1850’s, and there are remarkably good provenance records for many of the items (see Steyn). Thus, the Grey Collection – representing the collecting habits of one person – constitutes a transplanting of the European middle ages and renaissance to southern Africa.

The importance of the collection should not be underestimated, as Paul Oskar Kristeller indicated in a letter to Julian G. Plante (February 9, 1988): “The Grey Collection is a small but valuable collection of medieval and Renaissance Western manuscripts. It contains, among other things, several humanistic manuscripts whose textual content is rare or unique.” The Grey Collection encompasses a broad range of subject areas: Roman literature (Caesar, Livy, Lucan), patristic texts (Jerome, Boethius, Gregory the Great), medieval texts (Dante, John Mandeville, Roman de la Rose), renaissance texts (Boccaccio and Petrarch), as well as a few hagiographic works. There are several Books of Hours in Latin, French, and Dutch, as well as biblical and liturgical manuscripts. The earliest manuscript is a Latin Bible from the period around 875 to 900, probably written in France (Grey 4 c 15; South Africa 95). One of the more valuable manuscripts contains books of the Bible in Hebrew, copied in Spain with Sephardic script (Grey 48 b 2; South Africa 120). In addition, there are texts in Italian, Greek, German, Ethiopic, Arabic, Persian, and Siamese.