[JACOBUS de Gruytrode, attributed.]
Lavacrum conscientie [omnium sacerdotum]. [(Colophon:) Cologne, Heinrich Quentell, 1504.]
4to, ff. [i], 57, [1]; gothic letter in two columns, with a woodcut initial at beginning of text; occasional minor marginal dampstaining, wormhole in text sometimes resulting in loss of a letter (sense recoverable), but a very good copy in early nineteenth-century boards, red morocco lettering-piece on spine; slightly rubbed, upper joint cracked but firm; from the library of Robert Crewe-Milnes, first Marquess of Crewe (1858–1945), with bookplate.
Rare edition of this popular late medieval treatise, ‘The Bath of Conscience’, widely ascribed to the Carthusian monk and prior of Liège, Jacobus de Gruytrode (c. 1400–1475).
Essentially a handbook for priests, with a significant devotional element, it was first published between 1487 and 1489. The text, arranged in twenty-one chapters, discusses inter alia sacerdotal ornaments; alms-giving; prayer; the vice of lust; preaching; ecclesiastical benefices and the abuse thereof; and priestly misdemeanours; and ends with an extended devotional section on Christ’s Passion.
Numerous exempla are supplied along the way to reinforce the author’s arguments. We read, for example, of a countess condemned for her showy dress; a concubinary priest living under the same roof as an adulterous innkeeper; an ignorant cleric only knowing how to read one office; a bad bishop who behaved like a lion and died like a dog; a Parisian arts student who swotted day and night; two women who pulled out a holy man’s hair; and a priest fornicating on Christmas Day.
According to Theodor Petreius’s Bibliotheca Cartusiana (Cologne, 1609), the author is in fact Johannes Meskirchius (Messkirch, d. 1511), a monk at the charterhouse of Güterstein near Stuttgart.
OCLC records only two copies outside Germany (National Library of Sweden and St. Bonaventure University); not found in Library Hub.
VD16 J 105. For Messkirch, see R. Deigendesch, ‘Bücher und ihre Schenker – Die Bücherlisten der Kartause Güterstein in Württemberg’ in Bücher, Bibliotheken, und Schriftukultur der Kartäuser: Festgabe zum 65. Geburtstag von Edward Potkowski (2002), pp. 93-115.