This blog was written and researched by Dr Anna-Lujz Gilbert

On the outside, it’s an unassuming and slim little volume in a twentieth-century marbled binding. Open it up, however, and you encounter the oldest book in the Devon and Exeter Institution’s collection. This is the Sermones Quadragesimales (“Lenten Sermons”) of Jacobus de Voragine, printed in Italy in or around 1493, and donated by William West in memory of West Country Studies Librarian Geoffrey Paley in 1986.

Or rather, what the DEI has is a section of the book. This comprises the first two gatherings (A12B10). A gathering is a sequence of pages made up of one or more sheets folded and sewn at the spine. The DEI has only ever held this fragment, and we don’t know why the rest is missing. It may be that the rest of the volume was damaged, or that the book was split up for resale at some point during its journey through the antiquarian book trade. Books printed from the start of moveable type in Europe, c. 1440, up to 1500 are referred to as incunabula and have a high status within book collecting and print history.

Author Jacobus de Voragine was Archbishop of Genoa in north-west Italy until his death in 1298. He was a prolific writer who also produced a chronicle of the city. By far his most famous and influential work was the Golden Legend. This was an enormously popular compilation of saints’ lives which was intended to supply priests with nuggets for preaching, but which was much more widely used as a source of entertaining stories. Having been widely copied and circulated in manuscript, the Golden Legend was also a bestseller of print in its early years. An English translation of 1483 was one of the earliest books to be printed on William Caxton’s press.

The Sermones Quadragesimales does not have quite the same superstar status, but it nonetheless occupied a very respectable place in the late-medieval book charts. It was one of three collections of sermons published by Jacobus; the others were Sunday sermons on the Gospels and sermons for saints’ days. Jacobus was a member of the Dominican order, which expected preachers to give sermons twice a day in Lent. Ready-made model sermons which could be personalised were very helpful for this task, and could also be used more widely by other preachers. The DEI fragment does not include the sermons themselves; it contains the textual apparatus, which appears before the main text in early printed books. This includes an alphabetical index to the sermons, and a summary of Gospel readings in the order they are given in the sermons.

These pages were printed in Brescia, northern Italy, by the brothers Angelo and Giacomo Britannico. Members of their successful family included the humanist scholar Giovanni and the Dominican friar Gregorio, whose sermons Angelo and Giacomo also published. Giacomo began his printing career in Venice but returned to Brescia in the mid-1480s and set up business with Angelo. During the 1490s and early 1500s, they dominated the printing and bookselling trade in Brescia, having driven out their rival, Bonino de Boninis.

Books from this period have a statement at the back of the book, called a colophon, which tells you where and when the book was printed, rather than having this information on a title page. In this edition of Jacobus’s Sermones Quadragesimales, the colophon records both brothers’ names, the place of Brescia, and the date of 20th August 1483—but this is incorrect. We know that the type used to print it was founded at a later date than this, and we also know that the brothers only put both their names on books they printed during the period 1491–1496. In bibliographies, this edition is usually given a date of 1493, on the assumption that the error stems from a typo.

In this period, print and manuscript circulated side by side. The design of early printed books was indebted to manuscript publication, and a printed text might carry clues of its manuscript origins. The word “incipit” seen in the Sermones Quadragesimales, for example, was a convention of manuscript publication to indicate the start of a new text, which could be identified from its first few words. Scribes copying manuscripts used a system of abbreviation to save time and space, and this was carried over into print before gradually dropping out of use. Lots of abbreviation symbols can be spotted in the Sermones Quadragesimales. The first lines introducing the index at the top of the right hand column, for example, reads “Incipit tabula in sermones quadagesimales magistri Jacobi de varagine” (“Here begins the index of the Lenten sermons of Master Jacobus de Voragine”), but only some of these letters are printed. 

Fifteenth-century books were often produced with both print and manuscript technologies; printers commonly left spaces for initials to be added by hand, for example. In the DEI’s Sermones Quadragesimales, nobody has supplied these initials as intended, so we are left with spaces. The little letter “a” floating in a blank square at the start of the index is a guide letter telling the artist or scribe what initial to draw. For an alphabetical index, a big red initial would have been a practical as well as attractive addition, which made navigating the text much quicker.

The travels of the DEI’s oldest book in the years between being printed in Italy and being donated to the library are still a mystery. Some pencil markings were added by a collector or bookseller in the twentieth century, but they give no hint of what happened to the book before then, or why it consists only of the textual apparatus. Whatever turn of events that brought the book to William West, and from West to the DEI, the library is fortunate to hold such a wonderful piece of printing history.

 

Sources available to view in the DEI Library:

Jacobus de Voragine, Sermones quadragesimales (c.1493). Classmark: Bay 68 1493 JAC.

Other sources:

C. E. Beneš, translator and editor. Jacopo da Varagine’s Chronicle of the city of Genoa. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.

Eamon Duffy. Introduction. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, by Jacobus de Voragine, translated by William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

V. Scholderer, editor. Catalogue of the Books Printed in the XVth Century now in the British Museum. Part VII. London: British Museum, 1935.