Passional, die gantz Histori von dem heiligsten leyden Iesu Christi unsers Erlösers, auss beschreibung der h. vier Evangelisten fleissig zusamen gezogen. mit mancherley Christlichen Lehrn und Erclärungen gezieret

by Adam Walasser

Dillingen: Sebald Mayer, [1566]

[8], 120 leaves | 8vo | A-Q^8 | 157 x 101 mm

First edition of the ardent counter-reformer and journeyman printer’s illustrated passional for lay German Catholics. Further editions followed in 1570 and 1598. This edition is undated, but typically assigned to 1566 on account of the preface, signed Ash Wednesday of that year (Aschermitwoch). For a layman, Walasser was a prolific producer of religious texts, and unsurprisingly for a lay audience. He actually worked in Sebald Mayer’s employ as early as 1551, apparently in a variety of capacities, and later helped the Benedictines establish a press at Tegernsee in 1573/1574. All to say, with some fifteen years of press experience under his belt, Walasser’s role in this book’s production likely went beyond author. He may well have helped to design and print it. ¶ Illustrated throughout with 27 woodcuts, making this PERHAPS THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED CATHOLIC PASSIONAL PRINTED IN POST-TRIDENTINE GERMANY. If this book doesn’t mark these illustrations’ first appearance, we can’t imagine they’d been much used previously. The impressions are sharp. Save for possibly a hairline crack in the block on fol. 108v, none shows any obvious signs of wear. The single-piece title border is in excellent condition, too, and clearly designed for a passional of this size. The illustrations altogether form a capable, cohesive series, likely the work of a single artist, with the sequence of 25 half-page cuts thoughtfully bookended by a slightly larger Crucifixion scene at the beginning and another larger cut at the end. This particular Passion cycle may not measure up to those of Albrecht Dürer and Urs Graf, but it’s certainly part of the same venerable tradition and taps into much of the same iconography. ¶ While we find quite a few illustrated passionals from the same period by Protestant writers, our searches for likely title words (sterben Christi, leiden/leyden Christi, variations of passio) have located no other illustrated Catholic editions. Of the anonymously authored versions we’ve found, all came from strong Protestant environments, printed in Protestant cities and/or by printers with solid Protestant track records. The only unconfirmed potential rival is Paul Siber’s Historia…morte & passione (VD16 ZV 16822), though the record for the only copy we trace mentions no illustrations. Nor, for that matter, do we find many unillustrated Catholic passionals in Germany for this period. Perhaps the much higher rate of Protestant passionals, many of them written by reformers, reflected a predilection for new devotional texts. “The prayer books were a conscious attempt to break the use of old books like the Hortulus animae, which the Protestants felt were too heavily directed toward Catholic feast days and prayers to the saints” (Chrisman). ¶ The Council of Trent, which settled the Catholic Church’s official reforms in response to the Protestant Reformation, concluded only in December 1563. A concerted program of updated official texts closely followed: the council’s official acts in 1564, a new catechism in 1566, a breviary in 1568, a missal in 1570, and an Office of the Virgin in 1572. The Jesuits were critical to implementing new Catholic measures, and likewise to the operation of Sebald Mayer’s press. He established his press, the very first in Dillingen, in 1550. Circumstances forced a sale to the bishop of Augsburg in 1560, however, putting it directly under church control. He soon leased it back, but found himself under Jesuit management in 1563. The press was officially transferred to the University of Dillingen in 1568. The founding of Mayer’s press actually coincided with the founding of this university, itself established to protect Catholic influence. Mayer certainly did his part, at times publishing texts that partook in the pugnacious rhetoric of the Reformation’s earliest decades more than any aspirational Tridentine accord. To be sure, he “produced a wide array of texts that reflect a spirit quite at odds with that reflected in the catechisms. While Catholic pastoral texts often emphasized modesty and conciliation, popular prints reveal a more combative tone” (Dunwoody). Walasser fell right into this category, too. “Though his favored genre was ostensibly devotional texts intended for the home, his style was almost always to attack, even when paying the thinnest of lip-service to ecumenical outreach…As ever, the reception of his works is harder to measure, but the many extant copies of his modest publications suggests that Walasser offered a widely absorbed model of Catholic sentiment organized around zealous, strident animosity towards Protestants.” ¶ The passional was a particular devotional book that conveyed through prayer (and often illustrations) Christ’s final moments of suffering. It was a kind of subset to the broader Vita Christi genre, both of which “became popular in Germany and the Netherlands during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” largely following the popularity of mystical writers like Thomas à Kempis and Ludolph of Saxony (Weekes). Some prayer and illustration cycles became standardized, and illustrated editions proliferated in the age of print. “Well before the Reformation, the laity themselves had begun to turn away from the more legendary accounts of saints and martyrs to find the source of their faith in the life of Jesus himself" (Chrisman). Vernacular editions like Walasser’s are especially telling. “These publications reflect the religious search of ordinary citizens. They were eager to know more about the life of Christ. They were anxious to develop their own religious insights, to strengthen their inner, spiritual lives” (Chrisman). This edition is DEDICATED TO URSULA FUGGER, daughter-in-law of the patriarch of the Augsburg banking dynasty—a reminder that women formed a vital audience for such vernacular devotionals. ¶ Rare. WorldCat locates a single copy of any edition in North America, and that unlikely the first (the “1566” copy at the Folger has foliation and imprint matching only the 1598 edition). We find only this copy circulating in the trade, and not at auction since 1946.

PROVENANCE: This must be the same copy Sotheby’s offered in 1946: “original calf binding with line panels in blind and centre device of I.H.S. within a nimbus and the legend ‘In hoc Nomine,’ acorns at corners.” And so it should be the same copy Sotheby’s offered in the 1920 sale of the library of Sir Francis Alexander Newdigate-Newdegate (“original brown morocco, blind line borders on sides enclosing centre device of I.H.S. within a nimbus,” offered on the 15th day of the sale). And it might well be the same offered by J. & J. Leighton in 1916 (“orig. brown mor., centre devices”). Penciled note on the front paste-down, mostly obscured by adhesive residue.

CONDITION: Contemporary brown leather (goatskin?) over scaleboard, tooled in Zwischgold, with corner acorn tools and a central Jesuit device on each cover (motto: In hoc nomine oportet nos salvos fieri). Zwischgold was prepared by laminating gold leaf over a layer of silver leaf, or even base metal. It was an economical choice, but the gold was no match for silver’s oxidation, so surviving examples are invariably tarnished and dark. We can see just traces of the gold, but the silver does come through under illuminated magnification. ¶ Holes for two ties at the fore-edge, now lost. Woodcuts facing fol. 1r, then on 1r, 5v, 10v, 12r, 14r, 16r, 29v, 38v, 41v, 45v, 56v, 60r, 64r, 69v, 71v, 74v, 78r, 82r, 86v, 95v, 104v, 108v, 110v, 112v, 114v, and 115v. ¶ Scattered soiling throughout—the book was certainly used—and some occasional moderate marginal dampstaining; lower corner torn from fol. 84, not affecting any text; final leaf with a few small wormholes and a 1 cm tear in the upper margin, text unaffected. Rear hinge repaired, with a new free endpaper tipped to the remnants of the old; front paste-down covered in old adhesive residue; extremities worn, with a small chip in the lower corner of the front board. ¶ A solid copy in a handsome contemporary binding.

REFERENCES: USTC 683175; VD16 B 4813; Sotheby’s, Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books (1946; via Rare Book Hub); Sotheby’s, Catalogue of Rare and Valuable Books Selected from the Ancient & Celebrated Library at Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, the Property of Sir Francis Newdigate-Newdegate (1920), p. 500, #3529; J. & J. Leighton, Early Printed Books Arranged by Presses (1916), p. 186, #1441 ¶ John Flood, Poets Laureate in the Holy Roman Empire (De Gruyter, 2019), v. 5, S-107 (basic vitals for Paul Siber); Miriam Usher Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (Yale, 1982), p. 120-121, 166-167; Yann Sordet, “42. Luxury and Authority: The Tridentine Breviary of Balthasar Moretus I,” Christophe Plantin: A Century of Typographical Excellence (Cendres/Bibliothèque Mazarine, 2020), p. 406 (“The Council of Trent outlined a vast publishing programme, involving, first of all, the publication and dissemination of the council’s acts, and then, the massive circulation of catechism manuals and revised liturgical books,” an itemized list following); Sean Dunwoody, Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg (Brill, 2022), p. 143-144 (“In addition to back-office work in the shops, Walasser authored a number of tracts intended for a lay, German-reading audience”); Josef Benzing, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Harrassowitz, 1963), p. 78 (brief account of Mayer’s press); W. David Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk”: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Cornell Univ, 1996), p. 153 (“Adam Walasser, a Bavarian layman who compiled texts designed for lay use”); Christiane Krusenbaum-Verheugen, Figuren der Referenz (A. Francke, 2013), p. 272 (“Adam Walasser…worked as a journeyman printer [Buchdruckergeselle] in the first Dillingen office of Sebald Mayer”); Kai Bremer, Religionsstreitigkeiten (Niemeyer, 2005), p. 52 (“Walasser worked as an assistant printer [Hilfsdrucker] several times,” citing his role at Tegernsee); Jörg Jochen Berns, Von Strittigkeit der Bilder (De Gruyter, 2023), p. 199 (“Since 1551 he worked in Dillingen as a printer…editor, and author of numerous German-language writings”); Claudia Lingscheid, Das ‘Buch von den Neun Felsen’ (De Gruyter, 2019), p. 27 (Walasser “settled in Dillingen around 1550, where he found a job as a journeyman printer, corrector, and reader in the first printing press there, set up by Sebald Mayer in 1549/50”), 28 (“Walasser’s own literary activity, also entirely in the service of the Counter-Reformation, began in 1552”; and on the press’s transfer to the university); Ursula Weekes, Early Engravers and Their Public (Harvey Miller, 2004), Edoardo Barbieri, “Tradition and Change in the Spiritual Literature of the Cinquecento,” Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge Univ, 2001), p. 121; Mirjam Foot, The History of Bookbinding as a Mirror of Society (British Library, 1998); p. 15 (German and Eastern European binders tooled “with low-quality gold (a mixture of gold and base metal, now badly tarnished) during the second half of the sixteenth century”); Mirjam M. Foot, The Decorated Bindings in Marsh’s Library, Dublin (Ashgate, 2004), p. 115 (“’Zwischgold’, a metal foil, popular in German-speaking areas of Europe, made by beating a very thin layer of gold over a supporting layer of silver foil, an economy measure that time has shown up”); “Zwischgold,” Language of Bindings Thesaurus <http://w3id.org/lob/concept/1715>

Item #685