Folio, (296 x 214 mm). 391 ff., lacking only the final blank, otherwise complete. With 19 large Maiblumen initials, large woodcut frontispiece and 275 woodcut illustrations, all in contemporary colouring. Contemporary boards, the original covering replaced in the 17th century with tooled Spanish leather, boards with supralibros and a complicated brocade design of parallel curved and straight lines, small squares and discs, fixed with a metallic film and glue, painted in reddish gilt, silver, and black; somewhat worn, joints restored, clasps removed, preserved in a dark green cloth Solander box. A very fine copy with wide margins. The first 3 and final 2 quires re-sewn, with some leaves restored in the gutter, ff. I and CCCLXXXI repaired at lower and upper margin, respectively. Minor thumbing and soiling, occasional light damp-staining, some bleed-through of colours in a few places.

This stimulating work is a collection of biographies of the so-called Desert Fathers, both male and female, they were early Christian hermits who retreated from mundane life into the deserts to practice ascetism and lives of devotion. The earliest versions of these Vitae were written in the 3rd and 4th centuries and were extremely popular already in very early monastic circles. There was never a standardized order or combination of these texts; rather, they were adapted according to the varying focusses of the convents for which they were made. A special treat within the printed editions is their great number of lively and often very dynamic woodcut illustrations, which made it easier and more enjoyable to read and hear these stories. Our copy is furthermore heightened with handsome contemporary colouring.

Text:

Transmitted under the Latin title of Vitae sanctorum patrum or Vitas patrum, this collection consists of stories about early Christian hermits who, from the 3rd century on, had retreated from cities and villages to the deserts of North Africa and Asia Minor to lead lives of devotion and ascetism. There was never a canonical combination of texts that formed the corpus of the Vitas patrum. Instead, the choice of texts could vary according to the focus of the respective institution that owned the book. From the 6th century on, the Rule of St. Benedict recommended the Vitas patrum as essential reading for monks. St. Dominic was an ardent devotee to the lives of the Desert Fathers, and it cannot be underestimated how strong the texts’ influence was on the development of Western monastic culture. Virtually every monastery owned a copy of the ‘textbook for ascetism’ (another designation for these compilations of narratives). In the Middle Ages, the accounts of their lives, deeds, and sayings were attributed to St. Jerome, although he in fact wrote only three of the biographies, St. Jerome was only responsible for the biographies of SS. Hilarion, Malchus, and Paul the Hermit.

The present German edition is preceded only by the Strasbourg edition printed before 1482 by the unknown ‘printer of the Antichrist’. That edition provides only a reduced number of exempla from the original collection, but contains sayings from sources other than the Vitaspatrum, making this a different and shorter work.

For this considerably extended Augsburg edition at hand, the printer Anton Sorg added the Bavarian Verba seniorum, a collection of about 750 exempla originating from around 1400 in Bavaria. The printer’s purpose in doing so was clearly to offer the most complete combination of the German texts on the subject. Apparently, this edition satisfied the demand with regards to content, as later editions were not augmented.

Illustration:

This is one of the most richly illustrated incunables printed in Augsburg. It is adorned with 276 woodcuts printed from 204 blocks. The opening full-page woodcut depicts six of the hermits in a landscape; apart from the full-page title cut (195 x 140 mm) and the author portrait showing St. Jerome (100 x 80 mm), the text illustrations measure c. 73 x 68 mm.

Many of the stories are true adventures, calling for more than one illustration. For instance, the story of Malchus the monk is accompanied by four illustrations. Malchus leaves his convent in the desert – against the insistent warnings of the abbot – to visit his native town in Syria to comfort his widowed mother. On his way, however, the group with whom he travelled is taken captive by the Saracens. The abductors keep Malchus as their slave and shepherd, after a while urging him to marry a young Christian woman among the other captives. Since she was still married to another man, Malchus is appalled and tries to refuse the alliance. His captors threaten him badly, however, so he yields, and he and his new wife live together in chastity and eventually decide to escape the Saracen’s camp. To prepare, Malchus slaughters two of his he- goats, makes bags out of their skin, and takes the meat as supplies for their flight. On their way to freedom, they must cross a broad river; they thus inflate the goat bags, on which they safely float to the other side.

This narrative is remarkable because it invites the illustration of nudity, which would normally be considered indecorous within a pious book from a virtuous, medieval standpoint. While Adam and Eve and perhaps tortured martyrs might appear nude, the theme did not extend much further. However, our story explains that the Saracens’ slaves were often naked since their garments would fall to pieces and they were not provided new ones. Below, we compare two woodcut interpretations: the Strasbourg edition (left) and an image from the copy at hand (right). The mirror-image relationship between the two compositions clearly indicates that the master of the Sorg cuts knew and used the Strasbourg compositions as models. It is also clear that s/he did not make mere copies but rather had to adapt the composition from a horizontal image to one that was nearly square. The resulting composition, focused squarely on the bodies in flight, offers a more vivacious, physical, and even sexy illustration of the escape.

The models for our second part, the exempla, must have been adapted from another source, which was possibly a manuscript, as the Strasbourg edition provided only four pictures for this part. It is also conceivable that the talented artist who designed the illustrations for the first part also invented the designs for the remaining woodcuts himself, as scholar Musper suggests (“Dialekte und Idiome im frühen Buchholzschnitt.” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1940, p. 108.).

Color:

All the illustrations and the large woodcut initials are in a beautiful contemporary colouring. We do not have specific details on the organization of hand colouring in Sorg´s printshop, evidently, these enhancements were commissioned by the publisher or the retailer. Often, however, a buyer provided for the embellishment according to his own taste and means. In our case, we can find some similarities between the colouring of the Augsburg copy and the one at hand, which might suggest that the present book’s colouring also comes from Sorg’s workshop.

These magnificent woodcut sets proved popular, and re-appeared in 1492 in an edition printed by Sorg’s son-in-law, Hans Schobser, and later in 1488 by Peter Berger, 1485/87 and 1497 by Johann Schönsperger.

Provenance: Nonnberg Abbey, a Benedictine convent near Salzburg, with oval supralibros of Nonnberg showing St. Erentrudis stamped on binding. Contemporary ownership inscription on pastedown and first leaf and a small stamp on the second leaf. Nonnberg is the oldest continuously existing nunnery north of the Alps; later with Emil Offenbacher (1908-90), New York, bookseller, sold the book in 1954 to; Cornelius J. Hauck (1893-1967), Cincinnati, Ohio, a bibliophile primarily known for his collection of books on botany and horticulture. 

The convent was founded in 712/15 A.D. by St. Rupert for his relative (probably his niece) St. Erentrudis, the original abbess. As a religious house, it was forced to cede its finest manuscripts to the Royal Library in Munich during the secularisation of 1802-03. Moreover, like so many other Austrian monastery libraries, it sold books in the 1920s to meet rising costs and dwindling income.

This work is very rare in commerce and scarcely complete. Besides the present copy, we could trace only one complete copy at auction since 1950 (1958, Karl & Faber, auction 65, lot 40a), the other five copies were imperfect (the last one 2007 at Christie’s). ISTC records twenty-eight copies (four in the U.S.A.), at least thirteen of which are incomplete or even fragmentary.

Hain no. *8605; GW M50901; ISTC ih00217000; Goff H-217; London, BMC II, p. 350; Munich, BSB-Ink V-259; Schreiber no. 4217; Schramm IV, pp. 26-30, figs. 285, 842- 1045; Rosenwald collection no. 89.