ANNOTATED BY AN ITALIAN PROTESTANT SYMPATHISER
[BIBLE, New Testament.]
Pauli Apostoli epistolae … Epistolae Catholicae … Apocalypsis Beati Ioannis.
Brescia, Damiano and Giacomo Filippo Turlino, May 1537.
8vo, ff. 112; title and colophon within double ruled border, large metalcut to f. 2v (see below), woodcut initials, woodcut device to colophon; some worming to title-page and following 2 leaves (old repairs) touching some words and the metal cut, some worming to final 3 leaves (old repairs), some light dampstaining and creasing to corners, erasure at head of last page; otherwise good in twentieth-century half vellum, decorative printed paper to covers; repair to foot of spine; cancelled contemporary ownership inscription ?Nicholo Benedetti to foot of title, several contemporary marginalia to Romans I, Corinthians I, Galatians, and James (see below), armorial bookplate ‘Ex libris Familiae Vinciorum’ (i.e. the Vinci family) to front pastedown.
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Pauli Apostoli epistolae … Epistolae Catholicae … Apocalypsis Beati Ioannis.
Scarce Brescia edition of the Epistles of St Paul, St James, St Peter, St John, and St Jude, and of the Book of Revelation, in the Vulgate version, with a remarkable metalcut depicting St Peter and St Paul holding a Holy Shroud bearing the face of Christ, owned by an Italian Protestant-sympathiser.
The annotations in the margins of the first quire are of interest, particularly in relation to the cancelled early ownership inscription at the foot of the title (?Nicholo Benedetti). The attention reserved exclusively to the Epistle to the Romans, a text explicitly concerned with the problem of salvation as deriving from faith alone or works, chimes with the contested reading of such text in the years preceding the Council of Trent: in the preface to his German translation of Romans, Luther had hailed this epistle as ‘the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian’s while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul’. Our early reader underlines and repeats in the margin the phrase ‘Virtus Dei in salutem...’ (f. 3v), indicating an emphasis on the belief in salvation by faith alone.
Additionally, the lectio ‘…de filio suo qui factus’ in Rom. I, 1 is cancelled and supplanted in manuscript with ‘…de filio suo qui genitus…’, reflecting Erasmus’ choice of translation as published in his Novum Testamentum since 1516. The Council of Trent sanctioned the old Vulgate as the only accepted version, rejecting Erasmus’ theologically important innovations. The early annotator of this text may perhaps have felt it necessary to cancel his name from a book which carried evidence of Erasmian parallel reading, and of engagement in one of the most central religious controversies of the age.
Rava writes at length on the metalcut: ‘This image, extremely curious and interesting, of a primitive and even archaic character (particularly noticeable in the almost Byzantine face of Christ on the shroud) belongs to the style of sets of images of the “Passio Christi” and “Horologium devotionis” engraved with a technique called “schrottblatt” in Germany around the middle of the fifteenth century … The appearance of an image of this kind in a book printed in Brescia in 1537 is something completely unexpected. The image is framed by a border composed of four blocks of different provenance: the upper block of enlaced pinnacles is found very frequently in Venetian books of the first quarter of the sixteenth century; on the left, a fragment of a very fine Venetian border of the fifteenth century decorated with sirens, birds, does etc. among acanthus scrolls; on the right, ornaments on a black ground emanating from a central rosette [found in other books printed in Brescia] … the lower block, a fragment of a black ground border, decorated with cornucopiae, scrolls, and acanthus leaves, is probably Milanese’ (Rava, Supplement à Max Sander: Le livre à figures Italien de la Renaissance (1969), p. 118, trans.) He also describes two repeated initials, showing God blessing and a pope, as primitive in style.
The ‘index’ at the end lists Epistle and Gospel readings for the year from Advent to All Saints, as well as for the feasts of Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, and Virgins, for the dedication of a church, and for marriages, according to Parisian and Roman use.
EDIT16 CNCE 6001; USTC 802779; Sander/Rava 5467a. Not in Darlow & Moule. Only one copy traced in the UK (Bodleian) and two in the US (Folger, UCLA).
