Germany and Austria 8 items

1.
  • BLOODLETTING CALENDAR FOR 1462 [Vienna: Ulrich Han? late 1461]

Curatorial Note:
  • It was a fundamental belief of ancient and medieval medicine that there are good and bad days for bloodletting and taking purgatives, governed by the phases of the Moon. Gutenberg printed a bloodletting Calendar for the year 1457 using his DK type, uniquely preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The present Calendar states that its New Moon and Full Moon times are calculated on the meridian of Vienna. These times are not printed, but added by hand, as Arabic numerals, in red ink, and they are of remarkable accuracy. It has been supposed that they were calculated by the famous astronomer-mathematician Regiomontanus, who at this time was in Vienna. The small images representing the opposite phases of the Moon are woodcuts. Thus printmaking, typography, and calligraphy are combined to create the calendar.

2.
  • BIBLE, LATIN. [Bamberg: Albrecht Pfister, not after 1461]. Vellum fragment

Curatorial Note:
  • This Bible of 36 lines per column was printed with a recasting of Gutenberg’s DK font, and was set from a copy of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible. It is considered the third edition of the Bible, datable by one rubricator’s subscription to no later than 1461. Several of the fifteen surviving copies trace their roots to Bamberg, where Albrecht Pfister utilized the same types as early as February 1461. This incomplete copy is the only one held in America. When it came to light in Würzburg’s “Schottenkloster” in the 18th century, the original binding (now lost) bore an inscription recording the Bible’s donation in 1468 to the Benedictines of Kloster Aurach by Prince-Bishop Georg I von Schaumberg, whom Pfister had served as episcopal secretary in Bamberg. All surviving 36-line Bibles were printed on paper, but fragments in bookbindings attest to several otherwise lost vellum copies. The exhibited vellum fragment (Psalm 10), bought by John Scheide in 1934, lacked historical context until 2016, when an investigation led by Princeton University determined that 88 fragments from the same copy survive, all used during the 1680s to bind up documents at Bad Wildungen (Hesse) and other German archives.

3.
  • MEDITATIONES VITAE CHRISTI. Augsburg: Günther Zainer, 12 March 1468

Curatorial Note:
  • Günther Zainer, who brought printing to Augsburg, presumably first worked in the Strasbourg shop of Johann Mentelin: he acquired citizenship in Strasbourg in 1463 by marriage to the daughter of a burgher. Zainer’s first book, a widely popular collection of meditations on the life and resurrection of Jesus, was often attributed to St. Bonaventure, but is here presented as an anonymous writing. In the later Middle Ages, floods of unnamed theological tractates were attributed in scribal copies to the major fathers of the Church, notably Augustine and Jerome, Bonaventure and Aquinas. Zainer’s first type font possibly reflects an influence from Mentelin’s fonts, for it includes an awkwardly shaped ampersand. The paper of the Meditationes came not from Italy, the source of paper in the earliest Strasbourg printing, but from a paper mill in Zainer’s native town of Reutlingen, south of Stuttgart.

4.
  • PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE, DE VITA CHRISTIANA. [Cologne:] Ulrich Zel, 1467

Curatorial Note:
  • Ulrich Zel almost never signed or dated his publications. In the four years after the 1466 Chrysostom, he printed well over 80 more editions in the same quarto format. The majority are pastoral and theological tractates designed for a clerical and monastic market. They could be purchased singly or in individually selected small collections, according to the wishes of customers. The only one with a date is this 1467 tract. The Scheide copy is bound as originally purchased, with three other undated Zel quartos, probably all likewise printed in 1467.

5.
  • GERMAN PRAYERBOOK. [Tyrol, Diocese of Brixen], 1458

Curatorial Note:
  • This highly miscellaneous collection of German prayers and meditations was designed for use as a personal, hand-carried prayerbook, perhaps in a nunnery; it shows signs of heavy use. It was written and decorated by a single scribe, carefully but non-professionally, on unruled lines. In two places the date of writing is recorded: Anno domini M° cccc° lviij°(1458). At the end are four leaves with hand-colored metalcuts of saints which, as they belong to the original construction of the book, can be closely dated to 1458 or before. The metalcut of the Holy Face or Veronica Veil is the source of the closely copied metalcut that appeared in the type-printed Bavarian editions of Leiden Christi, and would also have been used in the Italian Passione di Cristo shown adjacently, although the Passione fragment is missing that leaf.

6.
  • BIBLE, GERMAN [Strasbourg: Johann Mentelin, before 27 June 1466]

Curatorial Note:
  • Mentelin’s German Bible is the first to be printed in a vernacular language. Its type is a smaller version of Mentelin’s first font, with pages set in double columns of 61 lines versus the 49 lines of Mentelin’s Latin Bible. A copy in Munich was purchased on 27 June 1466 by an Augsburg merchant and chronicler, Hector Mülich. The text basis is a 14th century Middle High German literal translation, which included the false letter of Paul to the Laodiceans. Although more fluent German translations had been made in the late 14th and 15th centuries, Mentelin’s more antiquated text dominated, being followed by all subsequent German Bible editions until Martin Luther. At least eight manuscripts are known whose copyists used the Mentelin German Bible as their text source.

7.
  • BIBLE, LATIN. [Strasbourg: Johann Mentelin, not after 1460]

Curatorial Note:
  • The Gutenberg Bible held no particular significance for 16th and 17th century churchmen and scholars. Falling into disuse, these old Bibles were lost, stored away, or recycled as binding waste. This German law manual of 1666, acquired by Princeton University in 2017, shows the handiwork of a 17th century bookbinder who cut up a discarded Gutenberg Bible to create an inexpensive vellum cover. Not until the 1700s did historians reconnect the 42-line Bible with Gutenberg and the origins of European printing. The vellum strips glued inside the German binding of Princeton’s 1483 Venice edition of Horace, also acquired in 2017, are the only known Mainz Donatus fragments still intact within the binding that utilized them. Printed in the 1460s with the Gutenberg Bible types and one of Fust and Schoeffer’s Psalter initials, this copy of Donatus served as a schoolbook for only a few years before it was discarded as binding waste.

8.
  • BIBLE, LATIN. [Bamberg: Albrecht Pfister, not after 1461].

Curatorial Note:
  • This Bible of 36 lines per column was printed with a recasting of Gutenberg’s DK font, and was set from a copy of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible. It is considered the third edition of the Bible, datable by one rubricator’s subscription to no later than 1461. Several of the fifteen surviving copies trace their roots to Bamberg, where Albrecht Pfister utilized the same types as early as February 1461. This incomplete copy is the only one held in America. When it came to light in Würzburg’s “Schottenkloster” in the 18th century, the original binding (now lost) bore an inscription recording the Bible’s donation in 1468 to the Benedictines of Kloster Aurach by Prince-Bishop Georg I von Schaumberg, whom Pfister had served as episcopal secretary in Bamberg. All surviving 36-line Bibles were printed on paper, but fragments in bookbindings attest to several otherwise lost vellum copies. The exhibited vellum fragment (Psalm 10), bought by John Scheide in 1934, lacked historical context until 2016, when an investigation led by Princeton University determined that 88 fragments from the same copy survive, all used during the 1680s to bind up documents at Bad Wildungen (Hesse) and other German archives.