Early Printed BooksDuff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
History
Early Printed Books
Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
Incunabula -- Bibliography; Printing -- History -- Origin and antecedents
Next in our conjectural arrangement comes the Lyndewode, _Super
constitutiones provinciales_, a large folio of 366 leaves. This is the
first edition of the celebrated commentary of William Lyndewode, and
of the Provincial Constitutions of England. On the verso of the
first leaf is a woodcut, the first occurring in an Oxford book.
Ascribed to the year 1485 are the _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus and
the Latin translation of the _Epistles of Phalaris_, whose colophon has
been already noticed.
The _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus is known only from two leaves in
the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge. These leaves are used
as end papers in the binding of a book; and a volume in the library
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, bound in identically the same
manner, has also as end papers two leaves of an Oxford printed book.
That these two books must have been bound by the same man, almost at
the same time, is shown from the fact that in both we find used vellum
leaves from one and the same manuscript along with the refuse Oxford
leaves.
The Latin translation of the _Epistles of Phalaris_, by Franciscus
Aretinus, is in many ways the most interesting of this last group
of Oxford books, containing as it does a very full colophon. It was
printed, so the colophon tells us, in the 297th Olympiad, which those
who write on the subject say was the year 1485. It is a quarto of
eighty-eight leaves, and a very fine perfect copy is in the library of
Wadham College, Oxford; two other copies are known, belonging to Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, and the Spencer Library.
The last book issued by the Oxford press was the _Liber Festialis_,
a book of sermons for the holy days, by John Mirk. Several imperfect
copies of this book are known, the most complete being in the library
of Lambeth Palace. It is a folio of 174 leaves, and contains a series
of eleven large cuts and five small ones. This series of large cuts
(together with the cut of an author at work on his book, which occurs
in the _Lyndewode_, and which is clearly one of the set), were not cut
for the _Festial_, but appear to have been prepared for some edition of
the _Golden Legend_. It was to have been a large folio book, for when
we find the cuts used in the _Festial_, they have been cut at one end
to allow them to fit the smaller sized sheet.
The _Festial_ is dated 1486, but has no printer’s name. After this we
know of no other book produced in Oxford during the fifteenth century,
and we have no information to account for the cessation of the press.
It is possible, however, that Rood left Oxford and returned to Cologne.
Panzer (vol. iv. p. 274) mentions two books, _Questiones Aristotelis
de generatione et corruptione_ and _Tres libri de anima Aristotelis_,
printed at Cologne by a printer named Theodoricus in 1485 and 1486. In
the library at Munich is a copy of the first book, and a facsimile of
a page was published lately in Burger’s _Monumenta Germaniæ et Italiæ
Typographica_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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