[Legenda Aurea Sanctorum, sive, Lombardica historia | Golden Legend]

by Jacobus (Jacob) de Voragine

Strassburg (Strasbourg): Georg Husner, 1479

[403] of [404] leaves (without the initial blank) | Folio | Collation from Bod Inc: [a-b^8 c^10 d–g^8 h^10 i–n^8 o^10 p-q^8 r^6 s–y^8 z^6 A-B^8 C^10 D–F^8 G^6 H–M^8 N^10 O–Q^8 R^6 S–V^8 X^10 Y^6 Z^8 AA^6 BB^8 CC-DD^10] | 311 x 222 mm

An early edition of the wildly popular 13th-century collection of saints’ lives—so popular that our edition, printed the same decade as the first, was still preceded by some thirty others. It’s widely considered one of the most influential books of the late Middle Ages. Scores of editions were printed in the fifteenth century, and it “was one of the most translated texts in fifteenth-century Europe, with editions in no fewer than nine vernacular languages” (Pettegree). It remained popular into the next century. An analysis of Amiens estate inventories, 1503-1576, recorded 45 copies of the Golden Legend, nearly matching the 53 Bibles. And ownership cut across all classes. Among merchants and artisans, it was second only to the ubiquitous Book of Hours. ¶ In such a frequently printed work, the most engaging elements are often found at the margins (literally in this case; see below). Most editions, for example, included a standard table of the saints arranged according to the liturgical calendar. Some printers occasionally tinkered with improvements. For his edition of ca. 1475/1476 (ISTC ij00174000), Nicolas Jenson ignored the liturgical calendar and instead arranged the index according to the months of the standard Gregorian calendar. Conrad Winters added an alphabetical table of saints to his 1476 and 1478 editions (ISTC ij00086000, ij00090500), surely a welcome addition, as did Johann Koelhoff in his 1479 Cologne edition (ISTC ij00093000). And Richardus Pafraet’s 1479 Deventer scrapped the traditional table altogether in favor of a strictly alphabetical list (ISTC ij00094000). ¶ But this edition, and just a handful before it, added a powerfully useful thematic index linked to discrete lettered sections within the saints’ lives. For example, if you want to read about how hitting women is bad (mulieres offendere non est bonum), consult the C section of the 176th saint’s life (St. Pelagius). This index is modeled on one for Isidore of Seville’s De Summo Bono, referred to in the preface, that was intended to help preachers locate useful passages for sermons. The index's authorship has been variously attributed to Nicolas de Hannapes (d. 1291) and Petrus de Palude (d. 1342). Whatever the case, its utility is obvious. For a work that’d been circulating for two hundred years, one as popular and influential as the Golden Legend, this new index must have been a dramatically convenient evolutionary step, not least for preachers mining hagiographies for sermon content.  ¶ Of the 34 Golden Legend editions ISTC reports through 1479, only six others contain this enhanced index. (We haven’t ascertained its presence in Anton Sorg’s 1478 German edition (ISTC ij00157800), most extant copies being imperfect, though we doubt it.) Husner didn’t include it in his 1476 edition. It first appeared in the Paris edition of ca. 1474 (ISTC ij00088300), and again in their 1475 edition (ISTC ij00083000); it’s in Barthélemy Buyer’s 1476 Lyon edition, in French (ISTC ij00151700); then in Johann Zainer’s two Ulm editions of ca. 1478 (ISTC ij00087000, ij00091000), and in Berthold Ruppel’s ca. 1479 edition (ISTC ij00094500). For a book with appeal across the entire breadth of literate Europe, perhaps these printers saw a particular opportunity among preachers. They certainly added the right tool for it.

PROVENANCE: A persistently annotated copy, altogether with roughly 2,500 words of early manuscript added to the printed text. Some 250 brief annotations are scattered throughout, ranging from a single word to several lines, most of it probably the work of a single reader working on multiple occasions. Many annotations are of the wayfinding variety, where our reader simply copied a keyword from the printed text into the margin. Others, which we find far more interesting, are occasions where this early annotator indulged in the very activity printing made possible: the consultation of many books, with precise cross references—including folio numbers—for common editions. In some cases, this level of specificity provides the means to identify the very editions the annotator worked from. Sources include the 1534 first edition of Polydore Vergil’s Anglicae Historicae on 192v and 193r, where they’ve taken an interest in early British history. See Polydorus li. 3 fol. 56, for example, which could only refer to the 1534 edition; the noted reference to Bishop of Troyes appears on p. 58 in the 1546 second edition. (This is not our reader’s only engagement with early English history; on fol. 44r, they note the English kings associated with Thomas Becket.) At times, our annotator appears to expand earlier citations, adding Ovid’s Fasti to an existing citation on fol. 158v (this not the only Ovid citation). On fols. 52v and 53r, they cite Durandus’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum multiple times. These particular citations likely refer to a folio edition published between 1480 and 1520. Durandus li. 4 fo. 66 could refer to more than a dozen editions from Germany and Lyon, whose folio settings consistently placed fol. 66 within the fourth book. Husner himself was responsible for five of them. The accumulation of editions cited, and the reader’s use of folio over pagina even in the paginated Polydore Vergil, perhaps paint the portrait of a reader in the middle years of the 16th century—before folio numbering gave way to pagination, and before that large format itself began losing ground to more portable volumes.  ¶ Though typically brief, our reader demonstrates a capacity for extended discourse on four occasions. Our favorite, because we’re always on the lookout for the use of the first person in marginalia, appears on fol. 80v beside the life of Ignatius of Antioch. Nestled in the inner margin: “I also wrote to you another time and begged for the same” (Scripso tibi etia[m] alias et rogavi de eisdem), suggesting our reader used the page as a record of personal devotional appeal. The 400 words occupying most of the outer margin reproduce two letters Ignatius allegedly wrote to John, now believed to be late medieval forgeries and belonging to “arguably the most historically influential forgeries of the late fourth century” (Ehrman). ¶ Folio 216v is more heavily annotated still and leans on Pietro Galatino’s De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis—either the 1518 or 1550 edition, we should expect, though we may give a slight edge to the 1518 edition given the likely dates of other editions cited. Here, some 700 words of marginalia surround text on the Assumption of Mary and are predictably focused on the Virgin. Our annotator freely transcribes from Book 7 of Galatino, Chapters 5 and 7 especially, where one finds discussions of the Virgin and her Immaculate Conception. Folio 245v, containing some 450 words of marginalia, focuses on Mary’s ancestry (like the printed text upon which it comments), and even sketches her family tree. Galatino appears at the top of the page, though our reader here more frequently cites earlier Christian writings (Eusebius, St. Ambrose). ¶ The fourth of these more extensive annotations appears on fol. 34r, with some 200 words on chronology, citing both classical sources (Tacitus at least) and Christian history. Our reader also penned another family tree on fol. 310v, and there is certainly still more discreet evidence of this reader’s diligence throughout. Unobtrusive interlinear glosses, for example; where the printed text associates Helena, mother of Constantine I, with Bethania, our reader suggests instead Bythinia or Britania (fol. 47r). ¶ Perhaps a handful of annotations likely predate those of our 16th-century owner. The most notable is a 15-line marginal note on fol. 154v, beside the hagiography of St. Vitus, which is likely a prayer from that saint’s passion (see Simson). ¶ “Annotation combines—synthesizes, I should say,” Heather Jackson writes, “the functions of reading and writing.” Through broad excerpting and close reading, with their responses drawing on both the classical and the current, the book offers a telling example of this early modern synthesis.

CONDITION: Late 19th-century brown morocco-grained leather, simply tooled in black and signed by Townsend. First page with opening initial and capital strokes in silver (tarnished). A wide-margined copy, the marginalia blissfully spared the binder’s knife. ¶ Lacking the initial blank leaf; dampstained throughout, rendering some annotations faint and fuzzy, but almost always still legible; large marginal tears in fol. 147, 219, and 376 (repaired); fol. 377 with two large closed tears, not repaired, one affecting text; lower outer corner of fol. 215 repaired probably at time of binding, not affecting text; small hole in leaves 313-315, affecting tiny bit of text; first several leaves and last ten leaves heavily worn and torn, with occasional patches (the entire margin of the first leaf reinforced on the verso) and the final leaf with some textual loss; rust-colored surface soiling on a few leaves. Freshly rebacked and ready for use; binding extremities gently rubbed.

REFERENCES: ISTC ij00092000; Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries, J-92; Copinger, Supplement to Hain’s Repertorium Bibliographicum, pt. 2, v. 2, p. 210, #6417; Robert Francis Seybolt, “Fifteenth Century Editions of the Legenda Aurea,” Speculum 21.3 (July 1946), p. 329, #24  ¶ Roger Chartier (Lydia G. Cochrane, tr.), The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton Univ, 1987), p. 56-57 (the Amiens inventories, citing the work of A. Labarre), 150 (ditto); Roger Chartier (Lydia G. Cochrane, tr.), The Culture of Print (Princeton Univ, 1987), p. 70-71 (“appears in 45 inventories after death between 1503 and 1576, making it the most frequently found title, second only to books of hours. It is also one of the most ‘popular’ titles, as twelve merchants and ten artisans in that city are given as owning it.”); Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (Yale, 2010), p. 58 (“published in over 150 editions in the fifteenth century, though it proved more popular in northern Europe than Italy”); Lucien Fevre and Henri-Jean Martin (David Gerard, tr.), The Coming of the Book (Verso, 1984), p. 252 (“The cult of the saints led to the immense success of Voragine’s Golden Legend (88 editions in Latin, 18 in French, 5 in English, 2 in German, 2 in Czech, 13 in Flemish, 6 in Italian)”); Casimir Oudin, Supplementum de scriptoribus vel scriptis ecclesiasticis a Bellarmino omissis (Paris, 1686), p. 603 (index attribution to Petrus de Palude); Marie-Dominique Chapotin, Histoire des Dominicains de la province de France (Rouen, 1898), p. 687 (index attribution to Nicolas de Hannapes); Ann Blair, “Managing Information,” Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford Univ, 2020), p. 180 (“In the case of large pages, the index could also specify a section of the page by use of guide letters (A, B, C, and so forth) printed at intervals from the top to the bottom of each page”); Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford Univ, 2013), p. 460 (on the Ignatius letters: “As has long been recognized, these were produced in the context of the Christological controversies racking the church at the time. Over the centuries they came to be used in a wide variety of other contexts…The forger of these short missives appears to have had access to the so-called Long Recension of Ignatius.”); B. Simson, “Zur Kritik des Widukind,” Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde (1886), v. 12, p. 597-598 (includes text from three versions of this prayer); Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010), p. 71 (“In the main, however, especially in Latin books, early modern annotations in the margins and flyleaves were reading notes—not personal responses of the kind found in more recent periods, but notes primarily designed to facilitate retrieval and retention of interesting passages. Annotations might make corrections to the text, add cross-references to similar material in the same or different texts, or include occasional words of praise or criticism, but predominantly they flagged passages of interest.”); H.J. Jackson, Marginalia (Yale, 2001), p. 87 (“Marking, copying out, inserting glosses, selecting heads, adding bits from other books, and writing one’s own observations are all traditional devices, on a rising scale of readerly activity, for remembering and assimilating text”), 90 (cited above)

Item #591