1453800 1496 Anton Koberger. Legenda Aurea.

 

RARE 1496 INCUNABLE PRINTING OF THE GOLDEN LEGEND.  (INCUNABLE) [VORAGINE, Jacobus de]. Lombardica hystoria que a pleriq Aurea legenda sancto appellature [Legenda Aurea]. (Nuremberg: [Anton Koberger] 1496). Small folio, contemporary brown calf rebacked and recornered, raised bands, blind-tooled boards; 210 (of 216) leaves. $12,500.  Splendid 1496 incunable printing of Legenda Aurea, The Golden Legend, one of the most important and widely read books of medieval Europe. Beautifully printed in gothic type with hand-painted illuminated initials in red and blue and rubricated throughout.  Legenda Aurea was one of the earliest books to be printed in the West and only the Bible was more popular. These accounts of the miracles and martyrdoms of the saints were written during the 13th century, at the peak of medieval civilization, by Jacobus de Voragine, an Italian Dominican friar who later became archbishop of Genoa in 1292 and was beatified in 1898. The work ‘soon became standard and was widely translated and read-many a medieval child was brought up on it’  (Hornstein, 221). Accordingly, de Voragine' s preeminence in western hagiography remains unsurpassed.  ‘The work was widely copied (and translated) in manuscript form, and later engaged the attention of many well-known early printers in England, France, Germany, Holland and Spain’  (Glaister, 277). This copy, printed in 1496, was issued by Anton Koberger, ‘the German printer most renowned at the end of the century,’  who produced two masterpieces in the history of printing: the Schatzbehalter and the Nuremberg Chronicle. This copy is printed in bold gothic type, in double columns, and is embellished with red and blue manuscript initials, paragraph breaks, and flourishes which often extend into the margins. It includes a table, the tales and a paean to St. Sebald, the patron saint of Nuremberg, by Konrad Celtis and Sebald Schreyer. Issued only four decades after the invention of moveable type, the combination of the medieval manuscript style and modern gothic type place this work at a pivotal moment in western history. Goff J-132. 210 (of 216) leaves. Text in Latin. Inoffensive library stamp on title, early owner inscriptions, a few very early marginal notes. Generally quite clean with occasional light spotting, expert repairs to several leaves. Minor age-wear to handsome contemporary blind-tooled boards. A lovely copy of this important medieval sourcebook.