Opus pene diuinum celeberrimi vtriusque censure interpretis d. Petri de Ancharano in materia statutorum super caput canonum statuta de constitutionibus, quod prius Rome tum Bononie Impressum fuerat, adeo corruptum atque inemendatum fuerat vitio scriptorum et impressorum incuria vt vix tanti viri opus obtenebratum foret: nunc vero per Benedictum Hectoris librarium prius magna arte castigatum, demum originali proprio reperto enucleatius emendatum, editum est, quo si vera fateri licet et multa frustra addita detraxit et maiora detracta addidit impressitque fideliter in eadem ciuitate Bononie. Anno Domini M.cccc.lxxxxiij. tertio nonas Augusti. The little less than divine work of the most famous interpreter of both codes, Dom. Petrus de Ancharano, in the matter of the statutes, on the chapter “Canonum statuta de constitutionibus,” which first at Rome, afterwards at Bologna, had been printed, by the fault of copyists and the carelessness of the printers, so corruptly and with so little correction that the work of so great a man was hardly shadowed out, now, on the other hand, by Benedictus Hectoris, stationer, has first with great skill been corrected and then by the discovery of the author’s original more purely emended, and so published, whereby, if truth may be told, he has both removed many vain additions and has added more things that had been removed, and has faithfully printed it in the same city of Bologna in the year of the Lord 1493, on August 3d. Legal works are usually crabbed reading in themselves, and in the fifteenth century were made infinitely more so by the multiplicity of contractions used in printing them. It might seem natural, therefore, that there should be a special difficulty in obtaining correctness in these texts. But, as a matter of fact, to whatever department of knowledge we turn, we shall still find the fifteenth-century editor exclaiming against the wickedness of his predecessors. Thus, if we go to divinity, we may find as loud complaints as any law lecturer could formulate in the colophon to the Hagenau edition of Gabriel Biel’s sermon on the Lord’s Passion. Dominice passionis trium partium notabilium sermo preclarus domini Gabrielis Biel supranotati. Qui olim negligenter: ex mendoso exemplari: et sub falso titulo impressus, postea emendatus ex originali et per prefatum Florentium diel diligenter revisus: in laudem altissimi innovatus clariusque interstinctus atque emendatus: non modo in sententiarum quarundam defectibus: verum etiam in orthographia. Et in imperiali opido hagenau impressus.