OXFORD CALF WITH TEXTBOOK WASTE
GERHARD, Johann.
Meditationes sacrae. Editio postrema, prioribus emendatior.
Oxford, John Lichfield for Henry Curteyne, 1633.
12mo, pp. [ii], ‘235’ [recte 238], [1, blank], [2], [1, blank]; woodcut ornament to title; rule-border of title-page, one letter of title, and a few headlines partly trimmed, a few minor spots; else a very good copy in contemporary Oxford calf, board-edges hatched (Pearson type J), edges stained blue-green, rear endpapers of printed waste from book IV of Melanchthon’s Erotemata dialectices (see below); a little scuffed, corners worn, some ink spots to edges; early ownership inscription of one John Guy to rear flyleaf, pentrials and sketches of birds to endleaves.
First English-printed Latin edition of Gerhard’s ‘devotional masterpiece’ (ODCC), Oxford-printed and in a contemporary Oxford binding with binder’s waste from an early edition of Melanchthon’s textbook on rhetoric.
The leading Lutheran dogmatist of his day, Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) studied and later taught divinity at Jena. Among his works were the nine-volume Loci theologici, which ‘reintroduced scholastic methodology and terminology into Reformation dogmatics’ (ibid.), as well as the controversialist Confessio catholica and an attack on Bellarmine. Perhaps his most popular work was the present series of fifty-one devotional meditations. Drawing in part on Scripture and in part on older ascetic writers such as Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas à Kempis, the work was written for self-edification in Gerhard’s student days and first published in 1606. It was subsequently ‘reprinted in countless editions (at Jena, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Leiden, Amsterdam etc.) and translated into almost every European language’ (ADB, trans.).
The Meditations had appeared in two contrasting English renditions, by Richard Bruch (London, 1611) and Ralph Winterton (Cambridge, 1627), but ours was the first edition of the Latin original in England, printed at Oxford by John Lichfield, Printer to the University. Bound in contemporary Oxford calf, the present copy also preserves as a waste endpaper a leaf from an early edition of Philip Melanchthon’s Erotemata dialectices, the Reformer and humanist’s last and most comprehensive treatise on argumentation. First published in 1547, the work was widely used as a textbook in the universities and would have been ubiquitous in seventeenth-century Oxford.
Provenance:
John Guy, with his early ownership inscription to rear flyleaf; possibly the student of that name who matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in March 1632/2, graduating BA at Hart Hall (predecessor to Hertford) in 1636 and MA in 1639 (Foster, Alumni Oxonienses II, p. 621).
ESTC S103045; STC 11770; Madan 1633:17 (‘twelves (16°)’).
