The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
History
The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557
Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon)
Book industries and trade -- Great Britain; Printing -- Great Britain -- History
The work of Richard Rolle of Hampole on Job is known from four copies,
three of which were until quite recently in the University Library.
One of these was parted with as a duplicate in 1893, and is now in
the Rylands Library at Manchester. The fourth copy, up to the time
unnoticed, appeared in the auction of Mr Inglis’s books in 1900, when
it was bought by Mr Bennett of Manchester, and passed with his whole
library into the wonderful collection of Mr Pierpont Morgan of New
York. The volume consists of sixty-four leaves, and the last few pages
are taken up with a sermon of Augustine, _De misericordia_.
The separately printed _Excitatio ad elemosinam faciendam_ of Augustine
was probably issued about the same time. Only one copy is known and it
was originally bound in a volume with other fifteenth-century tracts,
two of which are dated 1482 and 1484. This volume was at one time in
the Colbert collection, which was finally dispersed by auction in
1728, when the volume was Lot 4912 and sold for one livre ten sous. It
ultimately came to the British Museum, where it lay for long unnoticed,
having been entered in the catalogue as printed by A. Ther Hoernen at
Cologne, but in 1891 it was recognised as a product of the early Oxford
press, and transferred to the select cases.
The next book in this group is a work on Logic, or rather a collection
of nineteen logical treatises strung together to form a systematic
work. It is generally associated with the name of Richard Swineshede
from the occurrence of his name at the end of the seventeenth
treatise. He was a monk of the Cistercian abbey of Swineshead in
Lincolnshire, and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, so that, as is
fitting, one of the two known copies of the book is in Merton Library.
The other copy is in the library of New College. A considerable number
of fragments of this book have been found used in bindings, and there
are odd leaves in the University Library and in the libraries of
Trinity and St John’s, Cambridge.
The _Constitutiones Provinciales_ with the commentary of William
Lyndewode, Wilhelmus de Tylia nemore, as he is called in the text,
is by far the largest and most important book issued by the Oxford
press, and the first edition of Lyndewode’s great work. It is a large
folio of three hundred and fifty leaves, printed in double columns,
with forty-six lines of text, or sixty of commentary, to the column.
On the verso of the first leaf, missing in the majority of copies, is
a woodcut of a doctor seated writing at a desk under a canopy, with a
tree on either side. This represents, however, not Lyndewode compiling
his commentary, but Jacobus de Voragine at work on the _Golden Legend_,
a book which the Oxford press appears to have made some preparations
for publishing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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