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Post- Incunabula Locatellus MISSALE ROMANUM Venice 1501
This item SOLD on 6/29/2009 for $2,900.00
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[Beatae Mariae Virginis] [Xylography - Woodcuts] [Albrecht Dürer] [History of the Printing Arts] [The Mass] [Sacraments] [Early Roman Catholicism] [Missale Romanum - Roman Rite Missal] Missale secundu[m] morem sancte romane ecclesiæ : Venetiis (i.e. Venice); [Before 12 January] 1501; Benetum Locatellum (i.e. Bonetus Locatellus); Octavo (4½ by 6½ inches - 11.5 cm by 16.5 cm); 248 (of 248) leaves, regularly foliated in eights: A8; B8; a8 - z8 aa8 - cc8, paginated: [16 leaves] 1 - 232 (leaves); collated and complete; First Edition. Probably the first (and certainly among the first (using the ownership date - 12 January, 1501, from the Freiburg Example) Missal printed in the sixteenth century; the first Missal with each leaf printed in both red and black, and the sole copy located either by auction record, bibliography or online catalogue (including NUC, OCLC / WorldCat and cetera) complete with the two unpaginated Quires - A and B - containing the Calendar, the Tabula and Post Missam. In Good Antiquarian condition, in eighteenth century acorn calf, stamped in blind, in the style of the fifteenth century, with a doubled pomegranate and acanthus boss within the central rectangular compartments (front and back) surrounded by a blind-rolled border featuring the pomegranate, gentian, daisy and acanthus leaves, the textblock sewn on four cords, the spine raised on four corresponding bands, in five compartments, titled in blind to the second compartment; all other compartments stamped in blind with a single rosette, and with the turn-ins rolled in blind in a small, intricate floral pattern; 17th century marbled endleaves; 17th century hand-cut paper ex-bibliotheca label affixed to lower compartment (slight damage to central portion of label), with a more modern ghost over that, indicating removal of a later label; an unidentified previous owner's block-printed vellum ex libris, previously laid in, now returned to the front pastedown; modern paper label (circa 1750) of Herr Klinkenberg laid down on front free endleaf; previous owner's inscription (nearly illegible) [Egidy Zeley(?)] dated 1656. Generally 35 lines, in Latin, in double columns, with the body text in Benetus Locatellus' small Gothic Black Letter Antiqua face (Typ.3:63/64G - i.e. GfT1720), the headlines in his larger Gothic face Typ.4:93/94G, and the title printed in red in his Type IIa (Typ.2:120G) large Gothic font. Printed throughout in red and black, with more than 1500 Lombard initials in red, and more than 12,000 smaller initials and rubrics, likewise printed in red; Hymns printed in black square notation, on red four-line staves; full-page woodcut of the Crucifixion on leaf 108 verso (i.e.Æ? 124 verso) in the style of Albrecht Dürer, with the blood droplets from Christ's hands showing old hand-colouring; a few leaves show faint finger-soiling and edge-toning, but altogether a remarkable well-preserved example of any book of 500 years' age, with the textblock yet brilliantly fresh and clean, and in the case of Locatellus' Missale Romanum , the sole surviving locatable example, this having the Calendar, the Tabula, and the Post Missum (the unpaginated Quires A and B), and the title leaf present, thereby quite probably the unique complete example. Click either thumbnail for a full-sized view. Citations: Weale [ Bibliographia Liturgica. Catalogus Missalium Ritus Latini ab Anno M.CCCC.LXXV ; London; 1886; William Henry James Weale, editor and compiler]: 281: 2:4. Molitor ( Deutsche Choral-Wiegendrucke; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Chorals und des Notendruckes in Deutschland ; Regensburg; 1904; F. Pustet, publisher; Raphael Molitor, Editor and Compiler): 45. Not in Adams, the Bibliothéque Nationale, the Vatican Library, or the British Library. Number of examples located by WorldCat: one: the Universitatsbibliothek Frieburg Copy, cited by Molitor in 1904 and by Weale in 1886, under OCLC Accession Number 316005169, which lacks Quires A and B - the Calandar, Tabula and Post Missam as well as the title leaf. Provenance: unidentified previous owner's block-printed vellum ex libris, previously laid in, now returned to the front pastedown; modern typeset paper label (circa 1750) of "Mr. Klinkenberg, Secretaris te Puth Schinnen" laid down on front free endleaf; suggesting that the book spent at least some years in Netherlands; previous owner's inscription (nearly illegible) [Egidy Zeley(?)] dated 1656. Containing the Liturgy for the priest to celebrate the Mass, as well as those portions of the Mass which would have been sung, with the complete hymnal inserted at the proper position throughout, in Square Notation on a four line staff, with the responses printed in red throughout, the Missal gives specific directions for the Celebrant, including three different Offertory Benedictions. Where readings are intended to be sung in response, the passages are printed in red below the Staff. Gospel readings are written as rubrics as well, and paragraph line is accorded a two-line or three-line Lombardic initial printed in red, as well as is each sentential capital struck in red in the fashion of a Liturgical manuscript, so that each page is printed in both red and black throughout. The Missæ Sanctis, with the dedication for the Mass for the Feast Day of each individual Saint, broken into Liturgical Months, each with its own headline; the Masses for the Special Feasts, including (each in its separate section, with individual headlines printed in red) a Comune de Apostolis, and Comune de Martyribus, a Comune de Pontificus, a Comune de Maria Virginis, and a complete Beatæ Maria Virginis. Following that, the section of Special Masses (including that of Saint Matthew, and that for the Feast of the Assumption), and two sections devoted to directions for the Priest. Between the two "halves" of the book, the Ordinary of the Mass is printed, and the whole, along with the Litany, is organised in the Tabula, immediately following the full 12 month Kalendarum. Click either thumbnail for a full-sized view of the blindstamped binding or the Crucifixion woodcut. Of the Missale Romanum ,Herbert Thurston [in The Catholic Encyclopedia ; New York; 1911; the Robert Appleton Company; Volume 10] notes: "The present Roman Missal, now almost universally used in the Catholic Church wherever the Latin Rite prevails, consists essentially of two parts of very unequal length. The smaller of these divisions containing that portion of the liturgy which is said in every Mass, the "Ordo Missae" with the prefaces and the Canon, is placed, probably with a view to the more convenient opening of the book, near the centre of the volume immediately before the proper Mass for Easter Sunday. The remainder of the book is devoted to those portions of the liturgy which vary from day to day according to feast and season. Each Mass consists usually of Introit, Collect, Epistle, Gradual and Alleluia or Tract, Gospel, Offertory, Secret, Communion, and Post-Communion, the passages or prayers corresponding to each of these titles being commonly printed in full. The beginning of the volume to the "Ordo Missae" is devoted to the Masses of the season (Proprium de Tempore) from Advent to the end of Lent, including the Christmas cycle. After the "Ordo Missae" and Canon follow immediately the Masses of the season from Easter to the last Sunday after Pentecost. Then come the proper Masses of the separate festivals (Proprium Sanctorum) for the ecclesiastical year; while these are often printed in full, it may also happen that only a reference is given, indicating that the larger portion of each Mass (sometimes everything except the collect) is to be sought in the Common of Saints (Commune Sanctorum), printed at the conclusion of the Proprium Sanctorum (Proper of Saints). This is supplemented by a certain number of votive Masses, among the rest Masses for the dead, and a collection of sets of collects, secrets and post-communions for special occasions. Here also are inserted certain benedictions and other miscellaneous matter, while appendixes of varying bulk supply a number of Masses conceded for use in certain localities or in certain religious orders, and arranged according to the order of the calendar. To the whole book is prefixed an elaborate calendar and a systematized collection of rubrics for the guidance of priests in high and low Mass, as also prayers for the private use of the celebrant in making his preparation and thanksgiving. It may be mentioned here once for all that the collection of rubrics now printed under the respective headings "Rubricae generales Missalis", "Ritus celebrandi Missam", and "De Defectibus circa Missam occurrentibus" are founded upon a tractate entitled "Ordo Missae" by John Burchard, master of ceremonies to Innocent VIII and Alexander VI, at the close of the fifteenth century. They are consequently absent from the first printed edition of the "Missale Romanum" (1474). The printed Missal of the present day, reproducing in substance the manuscript forms of the latter part of the Middle Ages, has resulted from the amalgamation of a number of separate service books. In the early centuries, owing to the lack of competent scribes, the scarcity of writing materials, and various other causes, economy had greatly to be studied in the production of books. The book used by the priest at the altar for the prayers of the Mass usually contained no more than it belonged to him to say. It was known commonly as a "Sacramentary" (Sacramentarium) because all its contents centred round the great act of the consecration of the sacrifice. On the other hand those portions of the service which, like the Introit and the Gradual, the Offertory and the Communion, were rendered by the choir, were inscribed in a separate book, the "Antiphonarium Missae" or "Graduale" (q.v.). So again the passages to be read to the people by the deacons or rectors in the ambo (pulpit) -- the Epistle and Gospel, with lessons from the Old Testament on particular occasions -- were collected in the "Epistolarium" or "Apostolus", the "Evangeliarium", and other lectionaries. Besides this an "Ordo" or "Directorium" (q.v.) was required to determine the proper service. Only by a slow process of development were the contents of the sacramentary, the gradual, the various lectionaries, and the "Ordo" amalgamated so that all that was needed for the celebration of Mass was to be found within the covers of one volume. The first step in this evolution seems to have been furnished by the introduction of certain smaller volumes called "Libelli Missae" intended for the private celebration of Masses of devotion on ordinary days. In these only one, or at most two or three Masses, were written; but as they were not used with choir and sacred ministers, all the service had to be said by the priest and all was consequently included in the one small booklet. A typical example of such a volume is probably furnished by the famous "Stowe Missal". This little book of Irish origin of which the leaves measure only five and a half by four inches, is nevertheless one of our most priceless liturgical treasures. The greater part is devoted to a single Mass of the Blessed Sacrament, in which the Epistle and Gospel are inserted entire as well as a number of communion anthems, the private preparation of the priest, and other matter including rubrical directions in Irish. Thus, so far as Mass was concerned, it was in itself a complete book and is prolix ably the type of numberless others -- fragments of similar Irish "libelli Missae" are preserved among the manuscripts of St. Gall -- which were used by missionaries in their journeys among peoples as yet only half christianized. The convenience of such books for the private celebration of Mass where sacred ministers and choir were wanting, must soon have made itself felt. When one thinks of the many hundreds and even thousands of Masses which in the eighth and ninth centuries every large monastery was called upon to say for deceased brethren in virtue of its compacts with other abbeys (see details in Ebner, "Gebets -- Verbrudernugen", Ratisbon, 1890), it appears obvious that there must have been great need of private Mass-books. Consequently it soon became common to adapt even the larger sacramentaries to the use of priests celebrating privately by inserting in some of the "missae quotidianae votivae et diversae", or sometimes again in the "commune sanctorum" such extracts from the "Graduale", "Epistolare", and "Evangeliarium" as made these particular Masses complete in themselves. Examples of Sacramentaries thus adapted may be found as early as the ninth century. Ebner for instance, appeals to a manuscript of this date in the capitular library of Verona (No. 86) where in the "Missae votivae et diversae" the choral passages are written as well as the prayers. Whether the word Missalis liber was specially employed for service books thus completed for private use there seems no evidence to determine. Alcuin writing in 801 certainly seems to contrast the term "Missalis libellus" with what he calls "libelli sacratorii" and with "sacramentaria maiora" (see Mon. Germ. Hist. Epist., IV, 370); but the phrase was older than Alcuin, for Archbishop Egbert of York in his "Dialogus" speaks of the dispositions made by St. Gregory for the observance of the ember-days in "Antiphonaria cum missalibus suis" which he had consulted at Rome (Haddan and Stubbs, "Councils", III, 421), where certainly the language used seems to suggest that the "Missalia" and "Antiphonaria" were companion volumes separately incomplete. Certainly it may be affirmed with confidence that what was afterwards known as the "Missale plenum", a book like our present Missal, containing all the Epistles, Gospels, and the choral antiphons as well as the Mass prayers, did not come into existence before the year 900. Dr. Adalbert Ebner, who spent immense labour in examining the liturgical manuscripts of the libraries of Italy, reports that the earliest example known to him was one of the tenth century in the Ambrosian Library at Milan; but although such books are of more frequent occurrence from the eleventh century onwards, the majority of the Mass-books met with at this period have still only an imperfect claim to be regarded as "Missalia plena". We find instead a great variety of transition forms belonging to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries which may be referred in particular to two distinct types. In the first place the sacramentary, lectionary, and antiphonary were sometimes simply bound up together in one volume as a matter of convenience. Codex lot in the library of Monza offers an example of this kind in which the three component elements are all of the ninth or tenth century, but even earlier than this in an extant notice of the visitation of the Church of Vicus (Vieil-St-Remy) in 859 by Bishop Hincmar of Reims we find mention of a "Missale cum evangeliis et lectionibus seu antiphonario volumen 1". As a rule, however, the fusion between the original sacramentary and the books used by the readers and the choir was of a more intrinsic nature and the process of amalgamation was a very gradual one. Sometimes we find sacramentaries in which a later hand has added in the margin, or on any available blank space, the bare indication, consisting of a few initial words, of the Antiphons, the Epistles, and the Gospels belonging to the particular Mass. Sometimes the "Commune Sanctorum" and the votive Masses have from the beginning included the passages to be sung and read written out in full, though the "Proprium de Tempore" and "de Sanctis" show nothing but the Mass prayers. Sometimes again, as in the case of the celebrated Leofric Missal in the Bodleian, the original sacramentary has had extensive later supplements bound up with it containing new Masses which include the parts to be read and sung. In one remarkable example, the Canterbury Missal (manuscript 270 of Corpus Christi, Cambridge), a number of the old prefaces of the Gregorian type have been erased throughout the volume and upon the blank spaces thus created the proper Antiphons from the Graduale, and sometimes also the Epistles and Gospels for each Mass, have been written entire. In not a few instances the Gospels may be found included in the Mass-book but not the Epistles, the reason probably being that the latter could be read by any clerk, whereas a properly ordained deacon was not always available, in which case the priest at the altar had himself to read the Gospel. Regarding however this development as a whole it may be said that nearly all the Mass-books written from the latter half of the thirteenth century onwards were in the strict sense Missalia plenaria conforming to our modern type. The determining influence which established the arrangement of parts, the selection of Masses, etc., with which we are familiar in the "Missale Romanum" today, seems to have been the book produced during the latter half of the thirteenth century under Franciscan auspices and soon made popular in Italy under the name "Missale secundum consuetudinem Romanae curiae" (see Radulphus de Rivo, "De Canonum Observatione", in La Bigne, "Bib. Max. PP.", XI, 455). The first printed edition of the "Missale Romanum" lately republished by the Henry Bradshaw Society in two volumes (1899 and 1907), was produced at Milan in 1474. Numerous editions followed, but nothing authoritative appeared until the Council of Trent left in the hands of the pope the charge of seeing to the revision of a Catechism, Breviary, and Missal. This last, committed to the care of Cardinals Scotti and Sirlet with Thomas Goldwell (an Englishman, Bishop of St. Asaph, deprived of his see upon the accession of Elizabeth), and Julius Poggio, was published in 1570. St. Pius V published a Bull on the occasion, still printed at the beginning of the Missal, in which he enjoined that all dioceses and religious orders of the Latin Rite should use the new revision and no other, excepting only such bodies as could prove a prescription of two hundred years. In this way the older orders like the Carthusians and the Dominicans were enabled to retain their ancient liturgical usages, but the new book was accepted throughout the greater part of Europe. A revised edition of the "Missale Romanum" appeared in 1604 accompanied by a brief of Clement VIII in which the pontiff complained among other things that the vetus Itala version of the Scripture which had been retained in the antiphonal passages of the Pian Missal had been replaced, through the unauthorized action of certain printers, by the text of the newly edited Vulgate. Another revision bearing more especially upon the rubrics followed under Urban VIII in 1634. In the early part of the nineteenth century, owing largely to the exertions of Dom Guéranger, the Benedictine liturgist, a number of the dioceses of France which had up to this persistently adhered to their own distinctive uses upon a more or less valid plea of immemorial antiquity, made a sacrifice to uniformity and accepted the "Missale Romanum". The last authoritative revision of the Missal took place in 1884 under Leo XIII. It should be noticed finally that the term Missal has been applied by a loose popular usage to a number of books which, strictly speaking, have no right to the name. The "Missale Francorum", the "Missale Gothicum", the "Missal of Robert of Jumièges", etc., are all, properly speaking, Sacramentaries." Click either thumbnail for a full-sized view. The First Edition of Bonetus Locatellus' Roman Missal holds the distinction of being the first complete Missal to have been printed entirely in two colours. While earlier Missals were printed by Presses across Europe, most were produced utilising only a handful of second-colour (nearly always red, as was the custom in Liturgical manuscripts of the Medieval period) strikes - usually from wood blocks. Together with his business partner, Octavianus Scotus, form whom he oftimes printed, Locatellus perfected, over the course of some years, a system of colour registration employing two type cases, each bored vertically at one corner (the upper right for bifolia with left-facing versos, and the lower left for bifolia with right-facing versos) which were aligned through a register pin perpendicular to the screw, which seated in the girth strap, and which could be attenuated by a geared wheel and lock mechanism, keeping the case a set horizontal distance from the press' cheeks. By this means, the type frames each remained the same distance both horizontally and longitudinally from any central point, and using a simple "L" shaped jig against which the outermost corner of the paperstock could be placed, any number of like type cases could be made to perform with precision. The cases themselves were registered laterally by inserting blank sorts the width of the printed text (and vice versa the letters for the spaces in the "mirror" tray), creating the first accurate registry system for two-colour printing. Variations on these same mechanics were employed in two-colour printing from their first use here, in 1501, through the last quarter of the twentieth century. We are pleased to present this outstanding Late Medieval Missal for consideration with no reserve, and to ship this item anywhere in the world, via insured and bonded carrier, at no additional cost. Residents of New York State are responsible for 8% Sales Tax.
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