Lower cover - reproduced from the State Library of Victoria by permission of the Library Council

A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH BINDING IN THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA: LINKS BETWEEN CAMBRIDGE AND COLOGNE

THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA possesses a copy of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius 11), Commentariorum ... de Concilio Basileae celebrato libri 11 (c.1521), in an interesting contemporary binding (Plate opposite). The bin­ding, which measures 320 x 210 x 48 mm., is of light brown calf over wooden boards. The design comprises an intersecting roll-produced frame, the space within being divided by diagonal fillets into lozenge and triangular compart­ments. The roll shows a portcullis, a pomegranate and a rose, motifs representing the arms of Catherine of Aragon. Both the roll and the lozenge stamp are record­ed by J .B. Oldham in his English blind-stamped bindings (Cambridge, 1952), the roll as HE. h (1) (Plate XL VI, fig.762) and the lozenge stamp as C. (4) (Plate LVIII, fig.982). The ties on this binding are missing and the clasps are defective; the calf too is defective near the spine, and the book has been rebacked in the twentieth century. It is possible to evolve a hypothesis concerning the origin of the binding, while at the same time suggesting where the book is likely to have been printed, a question which itself has never been answered with certainty.

The book is a folio collating a6 b-z4, A-T4 V6 (this copy lacks T2- VI), of which Piccolomini's Commentaries occupy only a2r-iP. Most of the rest is taken up by other documents relating to the Councils of Constance and Basle, some let­ters of Piccolomini, and documents relating to the \Vycliffites and Hussites; but the Commentaries justify their pride of place on the title-page, for they were an important document to the Humanist generations of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Piccolomini (1405-64), who reigned as Pope Pius II from 1458, attended the Council of Basle from 1432 to 1439 in relatively junior, secretarial capacities, but he was more intimately concerned in its intrigues than anyone else whose personal account of it has come down to us. He was among those who saw the Council as representing perhaps the last chance to reform the Church from within, in the face of mounting papal autocracy at its centre and heretical activity at its perimeter. Later, in the years immediately before becom­ing Pope, Piccolomini renounced his earlier support for conciliar resistance to papal power, and disowned his Commentaries; but not before they had, ap­parently, circulated widely in manuscript. By the early 1520s, when they were first printed, heretical activity was again threatening papal authority, this time more seriously, and their editor in his preface uses the current situation to justify his publishing of the Wycliffite doctrines which had been condemned at the Council of Constance (1414-17),

and also the reasons why they deserved condemnation, in case anyone imagines that there happened here what was criticised by many in the theologians of Paris, who recently [in 1521] publish­ed the condemnation of Luther without any reasons. I

236 A Sixteenth-Century English Binding

The book bears no imprint, and opinions on its likely place of origin have been divided between Basle and Cologne. It is not very clear what evidence the Basle theory rests on. Three of the six extant manuscripts of the Commentaries are in the University Library at Basle,2 and one of these (MS. E. H. 14) contains, on the last few pages of the text, marginal marks at the points where the cor­responding pages of the printed text begin. But the recent editors of the work, after collating all six manuscripts, can state that none of them served as copy for the editio princeps.3 They also note that the copy of the printed book in Basle University Library is catalogued '[Basle: Andreas Cratander, e.1524]', on the basis of 'the initials and their arrangement' (whatever that may mean).4 The two British Library copies are assigned in the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books to '[J. Frobens: Basle, 1525?]" though the Short-title catalogue of books printed in the German-speaking countries 1455-1600 in the British Museum (1962), p.700, has '[A. Cratander: Basle, 1525?]'. H.M. Adams, presumably following the cataloguing of one of the seven Cambridge copies which he lists, has '[Basle: J. Parcus, c.15421'. 5 The Yale copy is catalogued '[Basle, Cratander, ca. 1524], , while the other five copies listed in the National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 imprints appear as '[Cologne, c.1521]'.6

The evidence for Cologne is more easily stated. In 1568 there appeared at Leipzig a small volume entitled Libellus novus, epistolas & alias quaedam monumenta doetorum superioris & huius aetatis compleetens. It is a collection of letters edited by Joachim Camerarius, the friend and biographer of Melanchthon and an avowed Protestant since at least 1521. On sigs. D6-7 Camerarius prints a letter written to him from Cologne on 8 April 1521 by 'Sturciades Opercus', in which it is related:

Jacobus Sobius has shown us the proceedings of the Council of Basle, written by Aeneas Silvius, who was at that date only a Canon; which Sobius himself is going to publish, along with a preface of his own (the greater part of which we have heard, from his reading of it aloud). The commentaries are all, as I might say, 'Lutheran'. 7

On the basis of this, David Clement and, following him, Panzer8 accept Cologne as the place and e.1521 as the date of printing. But there is also the evidence of the unsigned preface to the Commentaries, in which Sobius - if indeed he is the editor - says:

The rarity of this work can be inferred particularly from the fact that they say it is not extant at Basle. For only the first book is held there, but it is badly written and full of mistakes, despite there being in the town a large number of books in which the proceedings of that synod are contained. 9

From this two things are clear: first, the text was printed from a manuscript which was not held at Basle; second, the editor's preface was not written at Basle. It is difficult to see why Sobius, since he had an established relationship with the

A Sixteenth-Century English Binding 237

Cologne printer Peter Quentel, who printed a number of Sobius's own works, should have had Piccolomini's printed at Basle. Further corroborative evidence that the book was printed at Cologne emerges from an investigation of the bin­ding of the State Library of Victoria copy.

Oldham associated the portcullis-pomegranate-rose roll with the London book trade, and found it used on books printed between 1511 (i.e. within two years of Catherine's marriage to Henry VIII) and 1541, twelve years after the King had begun proceedings for its annulment. 10 The combination of ihis roll and the lozenge stamp was noted by Oldham on books printed between 1511 and 1535. It seems very unlikely that the roll would have been in frequent use after the beginnings of Catherine's ignominy in 1529. One of its last recorded appearances is on a binding which Oldham dates' 1530?', II where it is used in conjunction with a pair of panels depicting respectively St 10hn the Baptist and St Roch. Now, this pair of panels is also found on a copy of Paulinus (Bishop of Nola), Epistolae et poemata (Paris, 1516) in Cambridge University Library, a binding which is among the very few attributed with certainty to John Siberch, Cambridge's first printer .12

The problems surrounding the identification of Siberch's bindings are more than usually tangled. G.1. Gray was able with some certainty to assign six bin­dings (three of them in Cambridge libraries) to him, four of which bear his one signed roll (also incorporating the arms of Catherine of Aragon).13 Despite Oldham's addition of thirty-six bindings, all of which bear one or more of Siberch's rolls, the number of bindings which can certainly be attributed to him has risen hardly at all, since the movement of tools between Siberch and at least two other Cambridge binders of his day seems to have been particularly fluid. To the Dutchman Nicholas Spierinck (binding in Cambridge c.1503-33) are at­tributed at least two bindings which bear Siberch's signed roll in conjunction with a ro1P 4 which was certainly Spierinck's own; and Siberch's two unsigned rolls are each connected with Siberch by one book only, as well as being each connected with one or more other binders: in one case with Garrett Godfrey (working in Cambridge, c.1520-35) and with 10hn Reynes (London, c.1509-44), in the other with a binder who uses a signed roll 'Z.C.'.IS As it turns out, one result of these permutations is that still scarcely more than six bindings can safely be assigned to Siberch, while Oldham had noted, up to 1949, the remarkable totals of 147 for Godfrey, 308 for Spierinck and 473 for Reynes. 16 Certainly the appearance c.1530 of our roll in conjunction with a pair of panels which, at some indeterminate date after 1516, belonged to Siberch does not give us grounds for attribution, though indeed the pattern on our binding (rolls continuing beyond the intersections of the frame) is at least distinctively Cambridge - less so, admittedly, than a generation earlier. But there is a further factor which points suggestively to Siberch: his link with Cologne.

238 A Sixteenth-Century English Binding

John Siberch began life as John Laer, of Siegburg near Cologne, and migrated to Cambridge in 1520, thereafter calling himself by the name of his home town. I? He came to England at the instigation of Richard Croke, the classical scholar and diplomatist, friend of Erasmus and More and since 1517 holder of the first readership in Greek at Cambridge, specifically to set up the university town's first printing press. Though he remained there as a bookseller for many years, he seems to have stopped printing in 1522 or 1523, by which time he had printed probably no more than ten books.

Croke had spent the years 1514 to 1518 in Germany, teaching Greek chiefly at Leipzig but also spending some time at Cologne in the early part of 1515, when he probably first met Siberch. It was Siberch, while still in Cologne in May 1520, whom Croke commissioned to arrange for the reprinting there of his Greek gram­mar under the title Introductiones ad rudimenta Graeca. 18 Siberch had the work reprinted by Eucharius Cervicornus and probably carried the sheets with him to Cambridge, perhaps bringing other books too for the English academic market or arranging for their transit later. In September 1520 a London stationer named Thomas Cots seized - apparently on behalf of the Stationers' Company - a consignment of 'divers books' which seem to have been either in transit from a foreign printer, or else travelling in the charge of a foreign printer, to Cambridge, and the university was obliged to intervene with the Lord Mayor for their release. Croke's Rudimenta is the only known book which fits the circumstances of the university's appeal, and Cambridge's action must have been prompted by Croke; but the reference to 'all such books as to be specyfied in the letters ... from Cam­bridge' certainly implies that there were others as well, not necessarily connected with Cambridge by authorship, but imported by Siberch at the same time, perhaps acting again for Croke. 19

This incident is too early, by a year or more, for Piccolomini's Commen­taries to have been in the consignment, but it does suggest that (as we might ex­pect) Siberch in Cambridge set out to maintain an international side to his business. It would be natural for him to retain commercial and intellectual links with Cologne as a centre where the study and printing of Greek were more established than at Cambridge. Croke's grammar was reprinted abroad because no printer in England had Greek type - a lack he and Siberch set out to remedy; and in fact the title-page of Siberch's edition of Lucian's Dipsades (Cambridge, 1521) contains the first appearance of Greek type in England. But the humanistic interests which patron and printer shared extended beyond the matter of Greek studies. What we know of Siberch20 suggests that Piccolomini's Commentaries are the sort of book he might well have imported from Cologne to Cambridge, and the Cambridge binding on the State Ljbrary of Victoria copy leads us to think that this is what happened. This transaction too may have been carried out at Croke's instigation, for among the latter's pupils at Leipzig had been the very same Joachim Camerarius who in April 1521 was privy to the publication of the Commentaries.

A Sixteenth-Century English Binding 239

Some mention should be made of the annotations on the book's end-leaves and title-page - if only because of their sheer quantity. The pastedowns, one side of the (mounted) end flyleaf and the title-page bear signatures and inscriptions in what appear to be at least three early hands, but despite this I am unable to pro­vide a coherent account of the book's provenance. A largely erased statement on the end pastedown looks as though it refers to an institutional collection (that of a 'capella') and may be the earliest ownership indication. Beneath, and on the title­page, is a reference to Cuthbert Sherbroke 'de Rocklande infra decanatum de Broke infra Norwicensem diocesem, c1eric[us]' (Rockland St Mary, a few miles south-east of Norwich in the deanery of Brooke), and one Cuthbert Jermyn (perhaps a relation?), of Hellington (a mile from Rockland), has signed the title­page. 21 The East Anglian associations seem significant. A plain 'Thomas' on the front pastedown has apparently been misread as 'Tho.More' by an unknown bookseller whose description of the book has been pasted beneath. The paragraphs of theological comment are strongly anti-Protestant, and at some ear­ly stage an owner (one of the Cuthberts?) has felt led to compose a 'black' Te Deum on the end free flyleaf (now sadly defective):

Te Lutherum c1amamus te hereticum confitemur. Te errorum patrem omnis terra detestatur. Tibi omnes angeli tibi celi et universae potestates Tibi cherubin et seraphin incessabili voce proc1amant Dirus dirus dirus blasphemus in deum sabaoth. Pleni sunt celi et terra prauitatis heresiae tuae ...

There are no clues to the book's ownership between the sixteenth century and at least the late nineteenth, when it belonged to the Rev. Llewelyn D. Bevan, who was Minister of the Collins Street Independent Church, Melbourne, from 1886 to 1910. In 1935 it was bought by the Public Library of Victoria from the Melbourne bookseller H.A. Evans along with several hundred other books of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries from Dr Bevan's collection.

Trevor Mills, State Library of Victoria.

I 'Item rationes propter quas damnari meruerunt, ne quis hoc putet esse factum, quod in Pari­siensibus Theologis multi reprehenderunt, Lutheranam nuper damnationem absque rationibus nudam proferentibus' ('Ad lectorem', sig. A1 v).

2 Basle University Library, MS. A. Ill. 38, ff.157r-201 v; MS. A. IV. 16, ff.337 r-377v; and MS. E. 11. 14, ff.117r-147v. Of the other three MSS, two (including the only one to contain Book 11) are in the National Library, Vienna, and the other in Edinburgh University Library. They are described in Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, De gestis Concilio Basiliensis commentariorum Iibri 11, ed. Denys Hay and W.K. Smith (Oxford, 1967), p.xxx-xxxii.

240 A Sixteenth-Century English Binding

Hay and Smith, p.xxxiv. ibid.

Catalogue of books printed on the continent of Europe, 1501-1600 in Cambridge libraries, 2v. (Cambridge, 1967), no. P1343. Copies in the University Library (2), and at Corpus Christi, Em­manuel (2), Gonville and Caius, and Trinity. The number of copies in Cambridge is itself significant; the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Catalogue of Pre-1641 Books records no copies at all in Oxford, though it does list twelve copies of [Ortuinus Gratius], Fasciculus rerum expetendarum ac fugiendarum (1535), in which Piccolomini's Commentaries were next reprinted. (Information from Mr Paul Morgan of the Bodleian Library.)

6 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Brown University, Providence, R.l.; St John's Universi­ty, Collegeville, Minn.; St Louis University, Mo.; University of California, Berkeley.

'Jacobus Sobius ostendit nobis Acta Concilii Basiliensis Aenea Siluio adhuc Canonico autore. Quae ipse Sobius una cum sua praefatione (quam maiore ex parte, ipso recitante, audiuimus) editurus est. Sunt ea tota, ut ita loquar Martiniana'. Cited in David Clement, Bibliotheque curieuse historique et critique, v.S (Leipzig, 1759), p.241n.

Georg Wolfgang Panzer, Annales typographici, v.9 (Nuremberg, IS01), p.163.

'Cuius operis raritatem uel hoc collige, quod aiunt illud apud Basileam non extare. Nam primus liber tantum illic habetur, misere tamen et mendosissime scriptus, cum tantus numerus librorum illic sit quibus acta eius synodi continentur' (sig. Al v).

10 J. Basil Oldham, English blind-stamped bindings (Cambridge, 1952), p.5l.

Oldham does not clearly identify this volume, and I have not been able to trace it. He appears to be referring to the Cambridge University Library copy of Paulinus (see below), but this bears only the pair of panels, not the roll.

12 See George J. Gray, The earlier Cambridge stationers & bookbinders and the first Cambridge printer (Oxford, 1904), p.61 and Pl.XIX.

13 Gray, loco cit. and Pl.XXVIII, fig.l; Oldham, Pl.XLV, fig.750 (roll HE. b (4».

I' Gray, Pl.XXVIIa, fig.I11.

15 Oldham. p.15-16. 16 ibid., p.3S.

17 The fullest accounts of Siberch are to be found in Gray, p.54-61; Robert Bowes and G.J. Gray, John Siberch: bibliographical notes 1886-1905 (Cambridge, 1906); and E.P. Goldschmidt's Sandars Lectures for 1953, The first Cambridge press in its European setting (Cambridge, 1955). Goldschmidt concentrates on Siberch's connections with the world of Humanist scholarship and on the market for the books which he printed.

18 The first edition, entitled Tabulae Graecas literas discere cupientibus utiles, was printed by Valentin Schumann at Leipzig in 1516, during Croke's residence there.

19 The one document referring to this incident (Guildhall, MS. Repertory 5. f.65) is vague. H.G. Pollard took the 'divers books' to be copies of Croke's Rudimenta only ('The Company of Stationers before 1557', Library, 4th Ser., v.lS (1937), p.25), but it is difficult to reconcile this with the word 'divers' .

Especially from Goldschmidt.

I have not been able to identify either of these owners from printed sources.

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