Acta oder Handlungen des löblichen Synodi in der Stad zu Eisleben in der Graff und Herschafft Mansfelt, den xiij Frebru. des Jars 1554, versamlet wider etliche falsche Leren darinnen verdammet

excerpts from Martin Luther | edited by Erasmus Sarcerius

Eisleben: Jakob Bärwald, 4 April 1554

[40] p. | 4to | A-E^4 | 194 x 138 mm

First and only edition of this report of the 1554 Eisleben Synod—which happens to have been the first book printed in Eisleben, perhaps best known today as the birthplace of Martin Luther. USTC alone mentions an edition of Johannes Agricola’s Ain Christliche Kinder printed at Eisleben in 1528, though it reports no copies (USTC 710818). We suspect this refers to a copy once at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, tragically lost in the war. Like many editions of the Christliche Kinder, the title indicates the author prepared the catechism for his students in Eisleben, where he taught. Hence a cataloger might mistakenly provide Eisleben as place of printing when no other city appears on the title page. While Henry Cotton reports Eisleben was printing as early as 1535, Deschamps found no evidence of this and defers to the Synod publications of 1554 as the earliest. For what it’s worth, VD16 reports no Eisleben imprints before 1554. ¶ This particular synod was occasioned by three pastors in Mansfeld: Stephan Agricola, Moritz Heling, and Georg Major. All had professed that good works were necessary for salvation, which obviously smacked of papistry. Nearly a hundred attended the synod, with a complete list of names here on leaves C1v-C3r. While the vast majority did reject the necessity of good works, the debate ended like so many noncommittal institutional positions, “without clear wording as to whether an agreement was reached with the opponents at all, and without mentioning the dismissal of Agricola and Heling” (Dingel). ¶ But at least the report left us with Luther’s first printed appearance in the city of his birth. Indeed, half of the content, beginning on C3v, consists of excerpts from Luther’s vast corpus. The synod appears to be citing Hans Lufft’s multivolume Wittenberg edition. Compare Luther cited in our pamphlet, aus dem vierden Tomo, fol. 550, to fol. 550v in Lufft’s fourth volume (1551). Luther’s family moved to nearby Mansfeld—the locus of our pamphlet’s controversy—the year after he was born, where he spent most of his youth. Family business brought Luther back to Mansfeld in 1546. He preached his final (antisemitic) sermon in Eisleben just a few days before his death. ¶ Jakob Bärwald was a Leipzig printer. He produced just a handful of items in Eisleben before turning the press over to Urban Gaubisch in 1554, his former apprentice and now husband to his sister-in-law. Of Bärwald’s five Eisleben items, two have precisely dated colophons: our Acta (April 4) and an Oration by Georg Lauterbeck (April 7; VD16 L776). The preface to Sleidanus’s Kurtze summa is dated 16 April (VD16 S6720). Sarcerius dates the text of his Trostschrifft May 5 (VD16 S1779). Which leaves only Sarcerius’s Form und Weise einer Visitation to possibly rival the April 4 Acta for priority (VD16 S1705 and ZV20662, representing two slightly different title settings). And priority appears to go to the Acta. His two imprints with precise dates and the three without form two distinct groups, even beyond the precise colophons, with Form und Weise belonging to the second group. The later imprints, those without precise colophons, have dated title pages; the Acta and Oration have no imprint information whatsoever on their title pages. The Acta and Oration use the same woodcut decoration on the title, which Bärwald only deploys again beneath the errata in Form und Weise; he preferred different decorations for the other three titles. This is consistent with Sabine Arend’s assessment, whose research found that Form und Weise “flowed from his pen between April and June 1554.” And for what it's worth, our source, a (reputable) German auction house citing reference sources beyond our own, was unequivocal in calling this Eisleben’s first printed book. ¶ Of course it’s satisfying to have the first printed book from any given city. But beyond that, to have Luther’s first printed appearance in the city of both his birth and death...it feels almost totemic. ¶ We find two copies in North America (Harvard and Yale).

PROVENANCE: A couple of numbers inked on the title page, perhaps shelfmarks of the 18th or 19th centuries. Scattered early underlining on a handful of pages. Faint evidence of an old ink stamp on the title.

CONDITION: Recent full brown calfskin, the boards paneled in blind, the spine tooled in gold. ¶ Title leaf and blank verso of the final leaf soiled; scattered dark staining in the lower margin, a few leaves with large stains in the text; title leaf and final leaf repaired at the outer margin, the other outer margins generally a bit ragged, but damage not quite reaching the text.

REFERENCES: USTC 608666; VD16 A151 ¶ Henry Cotton, A Typographical Gazetteer (Oxford Univ, 1831), p. 132 (“Eisleben, a town of Upper Saxony, near Mansfeld, memorable for the birth of Luther. Printing was exercised here at least so early as 1566.”); Henry Cotton, A Typographical Gazetteer, Second Series (Oxford, 1866), p. 104 (claiming 1535 as the start of printing in Eisleben); P. Deschamps, Dictionnaire de géographie ancienne et moderne a l’usage du libraire (Berlin, 1922), col. 666; Irene Dingel, Controversia et Confessio Digital (2022; an excellent summary of the content); Sabine Arend, “Die Kirchenordnungen der Grafschaft Mansfeld im 16. Jahrhundert,” Von Grafen und Predigern: Zur Reformationsgeschichte des Mansfelder Landes (Leipzig, 2014), p. 50; Heinrich Rembe, “Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst in der Stadt Eisleben,” Zeitschrift des Harz-Vereins für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 18 (1886), p. 423-425; Josef Benzing, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im Deutschen Sprachgebiet (1963), p. 94 (cites 1554 as Eisleben's first year of printing and Bärwald as its first printer)

Item #508