In librum Psalmorum brevis explanatio

by Marco Antonio Flaminio (Marcantonio Flaminio | Marcus Antonius Flaminius)

Venice: Sons of Aldo Manuzio, 1545

[4], 272, [2] leaves | 8vo | *^4 A-2K^8 2L^10 | 167 x 100 mm

First edition of the Italian humanist's popular verse paraphrase of selected psalms, widely reprinted throughout Europe over the course of the next few decades, including at least two editions in Paris the same year as the first (one now reported lost). Flaminio was a talented poet with great faith in the literary potential of the psalms. He showed promise early life, his first publication issued even before his 18th birthday. He moved around Italy in diverse humanist company. While living in Verona, he "made contact with Venetian reform circles, foremost among which was the loose group of spirituali, or proponents of personal and ecclesiastical reform," which sometimes included Reginald Pole, Englishman and cousin of Henry VIII, and whose household Flaminio later joined (Gleason). Pole encouraged Flaminio's work on the psalms, which went on to influence English translations. He was living in Venice in 1543, where perhaps he arranged publication of the present, and died in Rome in 1550. "His complex and ambiguous thought continues to offer remarkable insight into the exterior and interior world of an Italian spirituale" (Gleason). ¶ Flaminio here paraphrases a selection of psalms in Horatian meter, each accompanied by his own commentary (a concise opening argumentum and followed by a much lengthier explanatio). His creative spin on the psalms partook in a phenomenon that was very much in vogue at the time: Latin verse translations of the Bible, itself just part of a larger fashion for Neo-Latin poetry. "The great impetus to produce such translations seems to have arisen all over Europe in the late twenties of the 16th century, seems to have reached a climax towards the end of the century and to have subsided during the first decades of the 17th century" (Gaertner). Judging by the output of Europe's presses, the Psalms were easily the Bible's most popular single book. In Dordrecht, for example, church officials found four or five different psalters in the typical home. The psalms had long served as a private devotional text, comforting and consoling as the case may be. "What the educated public found in the Latin (and occasionally Greek) metrical translations was something else: a humanistic delight in literary skill and an occasion for a fascinating comparison between original and translation. The Psalms were well known to everyone through liturgical use, through responsive reading or chanting, through musical versions used in school, church and home, through the prayer books and books of hours; any new version of the old familiar text therefore must have given both Catholics and Protestants the same curious delight we still feel when we hear a parody or the surprise that grips us when we listen to the National Anthem in translation." ¶ While there's no shortage of Aldines out there, we're always excited to find such gratifying evidence of their prompt travel north. This copy is in a very satisfying panel-stamped German calf binding dated the year of publication. A panel of King David playing the harp dominates the front cover. A title is tooled above, the year below, with a foliate roll on three sides. Tradition ascribes the Psalms to King David, and they were commonly sung, so the image is an eminently appropriate decorative choice. Versions of this stamp were rather widely used. Haebler records dozens, including seven with an inscription like ours: Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. This is the opening of Psalm 51, which David is said to have written after committing adultery with Bathsheba. ¶ Panel-stamped bindings first appeared in 13th-century Holland, but found their heyday in the wake of the printing press, when the iconography of many panels can be traced to devotional woodcuts. By the middle of the 16th century, panels were among the most popular means of decoration in Northern Europe. They were more commonly cast than engraved, and could be distributed at the international book fairs, scattering identical versions across the continent, which themselves could be copied and modified. Using such panels would certainly have offered some efficiency compared to building a design from small tools, “but it is clear that what gave the panel such a great advantage over hand tools was its almost unlimited iconographic possibilities,” which otherwise could only be achieved with the cuir ciselé method (Fogelmark). ¶ Dominating the rear board is a dated and initialed roll of the four Evangelists (1540, the initials perhaps ND or MD). This, too, was a tremendously popular roll in Germany. Haebler does identify a version dated 1540, and with the Evangelists in the same order as ours, though ours appears to be narrower and longer than his. If we're reading the initials correctly, MD could suggest the tool came from Leipzig binder Martin Drampitzsch, the only binder with those initials Haebler identified. He also found a 16th-century Nicolaus Dahmer in Paderborn. We wouldn't bet the farm on this evidence, especially since tools were known to travel, but we offer the names as a potential starting point. An old bookseller's description calls this an Augsburg binding, perhaps on the strength of the pine cone tools used on the rear cover, the pine cone being that city's emblem. The description further suggests one Mathias Gartner may have been the binder, given the initials MG flanking the date on the front cover. These initials were clearly added as an afterthought, and perhaps more likely belonged to a former owner or a bookseller retailing the book.

PROVENANCE: Annotated in a contemporary hand through the first 62 leaves. Many of the annotations are of the nota bene, wayfinding variety, copying phrases from the printed text—with slight alteration—presumably to reinforce memory and facilitate recall. Still, not all of these are of the pious, God-fearing variety. In his explanatio of the first psalm, Flaminio draws attention to a word he borrowed from Cicero, and our early reader noted this in the margin (Verbu[m]: cadendi, consistendi). Like any good humanist, perhaps they just couldn't resist highlighting a good classical turn of phrase, something they might muster into service themselves. Annotations occasionally expand on Flaminio's less precise citations, too, adding Cap. 4 to the margin where Flaminio cites the Acts of the Apostles, for example (fol. 3v). It's possible our reader possessed an extraordinary command of the Bible, but we rather suspect they took the initiative to track down Flaminio's citations. Our annotator betrays such diligence throughout, a close reader sufficiently industrious to even add their own cross references to Flaminio's text (see marginal citations on fols. 5v and 7v that refer to each other), and even to paste an updated annotation over an earlier marginal note (fol. 34v). ¶ Many annotations do betray more thoughtful response to the reading. On fol. 35r, for example, our reader has clearly absorbed and reflected on elements of Flaminio's commentary. Where Flaminio comments on divine law, how it's meant to instill a kind of fear like that a child should feel toward their parents, our reader reflects: "A life correctly and appropriately governed toward the fear of God is the only life" (Vita recte et ordinis instituta...timorem dei, sola vita est). Our reader's annotations on the psalms themselves—much of the marginalia responds to Flaminio's commentary—are especially among the more probing variety. In the margin of Psalm 7 (fol. 11v), for example, there's a note beginning Obsecro te reminiscent of Theodoret of Cyrus's commentary on Psalm 85 (cum hostibus vero comparatus, sanctus videbor), perhaps indicating a comparative reading, or even a personal devotional response. ¶ A few early notes on the front fly-leaf, and another on a rear fly-leaf.

CONDITION: Contemporary panel-stamped and blind-tooled leather over wooden boards, as described above. The panel was stamped in Zwischgold, a lamination of gold and silver (or even a base metal) then common in Germany. As usual, its brilliance has entirely disappeared. ¶ Small 1 cm closed tear in upper corner of fol. 16, not affecting text, but really very nice internally. Leather cracked over the joints, with some loss along the front joint, though all cords remain intact and boards securely attached; spine ends chipped; clasps lost; light general surface wear.

REFERENCES: USTC 830008; EDIT16 CNCE 19235; Renouard, Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde (1834), p. 131 ¶ On the content: M. Anne Overell, Nicodemites: Faith and Concealment between Italy and Tudor England (2019), p. 59 ("The importance of the psalms for Viterbo's piety was immense. Flaminio's life-long work of translating and paraphrasing the psalms was encouraged by Pole and it influenced other translators, such as George Buchanan and, almost certainly, the English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Throckmorton owned" a 1546 edition the present); Elisabeth G. Gleason, "Flaminio, Marcantonio," The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (2005), online (cited above; "He knew Calvin's Institutes by 1541, when he became a member of Cardinal Pole's household in Viterbo...Flaminio's life and work exemplify the ambivalence and doubts shared by many intellectuals of his generation. Despite his humanist education and fame as a poet he remained dependent on patrons. Although drawn to the ideas of northern reformers, he developed his own spirituality."); Holt N. Parker, Olympia Morata: The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic (2003), p. 185 ("Flaminio said specifically that he wrote his versions because he wanted to inculcate good morals by making sacred poetry acceptable to the scholar and accessible to the young"); Johannes A. Gaertner, "Latin Verse Translations of the Psalms: 1500-1620," The Harvard Theological Review 49.4 (Oct 1956), p. 271 (cited above; "The history of metrical Latin Bible translations is really the history of Psalm paraphrases in Latin verse...The Psalter has always been the most popular of all Biblical books"), 274 (cited above); Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World (2019), p. 131 (on psalter ownership in Dordrecht); Patrologiae Graecae v. 80 (1864), col. 1555 (for the Theodoret reading) ¶ On the binding: Konrad Haebler, Rollen- und Plattenstempel des XVI. Jahrhunderts (1928), v. 2, p. 14 (the dated 1540 Evangelist roll), 379 (all Evangelist rolls), 428 (King David panel stamps), 462-463 (binders with surnames starting with D); Staffan Fogelmark, Flemish and Related Panel-Stamped Bindings (Bibliographical Society of America, 1990), p. 80 (cited above), 133 (on panels' casting and mass production); Mirjam Foot, The History of Bookbinding as a Mirror of Society (1998), p. 9 (on the earliest appearance of panel-stamped bindings), 15 (German and Dutch binders, "and their colleagues in Eastern Europe also used rolls and panels longer than their French and English contemporaries and employed these with low-quality gold (a mixture of gold and base metal, now badly tarnished) during the second half of the sixteenth century"); Eric Marshall White, "Item 11: An Early English Panel-Stamped Binding," Six Centuries of Master Bookbinding at Bridwell Library (2006), p. 35 (“Panel stamping eventually replaced blind tooling as the dominant form of binding decoration in Northern Europe during the sixteenth century"); Bernard McTigue, "English Bookbinding and the Continental Woodblock Tradition," Printing History 6, 3.2 (1981), p. 22 (panel decoration "is strongly related to the graphic arts, particularly devotional woodcuts which, late in the fifteenth century, had been printed both as separate sheets and as illustrations used in books. This amplification offers an excellent opportunity to explore the interrelationships between bookbinding and the other visual arts.”; J. Basil Oldham, English Blind-Stamped Bindings (1952), p. 11 ("In the sixteenth century when panels are used, there is almost always in Germany a plain space, occasionally containing two or three foliage stamps, or more commonly the owner's initials and the date, at top and bottom of the panel but not at the sides")

Item #803