Printed Books from Fifteenth-Century Europe
An Exhibition at Bridwell Library, February 1 – May 3, 2010
FIFTEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS’ BOOKS
57. LUCAN (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, 39–65 CE). Pharsalia. Venice: Juvenus Guerinus, 14 May 1477.
Bridwell Library’s copy of the fifth
edition of Lucan’s epic poem on the battle of Pharsalus (48
BCE) bears a painted coat-of-arms
depicting a leaping white hound on a red field. This armorial belonged to
Wenceslaus Brack (d. 1495), whose widow donated his library of 276 books to
the Praemonstratensian Abbey of Weissenau (Augiae minoris) near
Ravensburg, Germany. A noted scholar and physician at the court of the
Archbishop of Salzburg, Brack was the author of one of the most widely
disseminated schoolbooks of the fifteenth century, De vocabularius rerum.
Like several other books formerly owned by the Abbey of Weissenau, this book
features exuberant calligraphic initials added by the monastery’s
rubricator, Lazarus von Andlau.
58.
[Pseudo-]AUGUSTINE (c. 12th century).
De cognitione verae vitae. [Mainz: Peter Schoeffer, not after 1474].
Wenceslaus Brack also owned this brief tract from Peter Schoeffer’s press.
He inscribed its title beneath his name on the inside of the book’s original
vellum wrapper, along with the titles of five other tracts by Jean Gerson
(1363–1429): De mundificatione cordis; De directione [cordis];
De perfectione [cordis]; Trigilogium astrologiae
theologizatae; and Contra superstitiosam dierum observantiam.
These works, formerly bound with the first, were most likely from Ulrich
Zel’s collected edition, issued c. 1472 at Cologne.
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