[De pollutione nocturna] Incipit tractatulus venerabilis M[a]g[ist]ri Joh. Gerson cancellarij Parisiens[is] tractans de pollut[i]one nocturna an impediat celebrantem vel non

by Jean (Johannes) Gerson

[Cologne: Ulrich Zel (Zell), about 1469-1472]

[15] of [16] leaves (without final blank) | 4to | [a]-[b]^8 | 211 x 137 mm

Perhaps the fourth edition of the famed Paris theologian's discourse on nocturnal emissions, its first edition commonly cited as the first printed work of medical interest, and no doubt among the earliest bearing on sexuality. The four earliest editions are all undated Zel quartos, a voluminous corpus of bewildering priority. The first appeared ca. 1466, among Zel's very earliest books. A second followed not long after, ISTC using "about 1467" and Needham asserting "not after 1468." Longstanding chronologies typically suggest our edition is the third, with a broad date range of 1467-1472, followed by ISTC ig00258000 placing fourth at ca. 1470-1472. Needham, however, suggests that last Zel edition was instead printed in the later months of 1468. This is partly on account of its bull's head watermark, widely (but not exclusively) used in Zel's earliest quartos. Our watermark is a gothic P surmounted by a trefoil. While Needham himself is the first to call his own watermark research a starting point, he does not mention a gothic P among the handful of other watermarks he found used occasionally. We have 27 lines to the page, a standard Zel settled on sometime in 1467, and our type has a 20-line measurement of roughly 106 mm, deviating from the earliest measurements of 99 mm (BM says it was leaded; Corstin says Zel actually recast the type; Jenkinson suggests it was recast, but not before a heavily leaded experiment). And by 1468, a new lowercase 'h', with a descender dipping below the baseline, was used alongside his original bowl-shaped sort. While most of our 'h' sorts take the newer form, the original version remains scattered throughout, from the first page to the last (see pulchrioribus in penultimate line of the opening page, and Johannis in the colophon). With sufficient comparison to similar Zel quartos, perhaps this could be used to place it earlier rather than later. That said, with Needham now dating the old third edition to the later months of 1468, and considering the watermark evidence mustered so far, we're not inclined to date this earlier than 1469—which, as available incunabula go, is still VERY EARLY, ESPECIALLY FOR WORK BEARING ON MEDICINE AND SEXUALITY. Far more certain is that this undated Zel quarto series wrapped up in 1472, if not sometime in 1471. ¶ The text appeared a dozen times more through the end of the century, and was reprinted into the next. It was among Gerson's "most popular and famous tracts," exploring whether a priest should celebrate Mass the morning after a nocturnal emission—a wet dream, as it were. "A question that some today might see as indicative of schoolboyish scrupulosity...was in Gerson's world grounded both in contemporary medical theory and in centuries of moral and theological reflection concerning cultic purity, sexual desire, moral agency, and free will" (Longo). The sheer number of editions suggests the work addressed a fairly pervasive sexual anxiety among the clergy. While undeniably stemming from a point of theological concern, its discussion of a fundamental physiological action links it securely to the medical sphere. And so, first printed ca. 1466, it's generally "considered to be the first medically related book printed with moveable type" (Colaianni). To be sure, Gerson recognizes that relevance on the very first page, noting that "finer medicines" can hardly correct the condition (vix pulchrioribus medicame[n]tis sanari potest). In his sexta consideratio, he even mentions a conversation with "one of the most famous physicians" (unus ex medicis famatissim[is]) who admitted that he had long studied, in vain, a cure for nocturnal emission (studuisse diligenter s[ed] frustra laborasse). ¶ Gerson's work represents the "culmination of a centuries-old conversation," counting among its contributors St. Augustine and Gregory the Great. "Gerson's place in this long conversation is to recover the balanced approach of Gregory and Augustine, who made good use of contemporary medical theory" (Longo). Citing the lack of free will while dreaming, Gerson excuses the erotic dreamer from any sin, at times comparing the unintentional emission to menstruation (see his Sexta consideratio: talis in viris a liquibus qualem femine patiuntur in me[n]struis...; also his Consideratio vij: Idem se[n]tiu[n]t doctores de me[n]struis mulierum). More than an absence of sin, nocturnal emission "can even result from merit" (Longo). ¶ Stillwell cites just two works of medical interest certainly printed before the first edition of De pollutione nocturna: a calendar for 1457 and another for 1462, on account of their bloodletting and purging guidance. We add a Viennese bloodletting calendar for 1462, sold at Sotheby's in 1994. Stillwell also cites a possible Utrecht edition of Saliceto's De salute corporis, broadly dated 1458-1472, but more recent research on Dutch prototypography might well place it after Gerson's work (ISTC calls it "not after 1472"). Fewer than a dozen more texts of medical interest were published by 1472, if we care to use the outside of our date range. Even the eminently authoritative Avicenna didn't appear in print until the very end of 1472. ¶ We find FEW EARLIER WORKS OF MEDICAL INTEREST AT AUCTION, most of them at least a generation behind us: a second edition of the present at Christie's, 2001 ($12,925); a first edition at Sotheby's, 1981 ($6,000); and a third edition at Sotheby's, 1956. The aforementioned 1462 bloodletting calendar at Sotheby's, 1994 (£221,500). A spectacular 1469 first edition of Pliny at Christie's, 2000 ($458,000), and a 1472 edition at Swann, 1997 ($5,520, lacking several leaves). The 1471 Ruralia commoda, the first printed work on agriculture, at Forum, 2018 (£93,750). A 1471 Antidotarium at Anderson Galleries, 1917. A 1472 Conciliator and De venenis by Petrus de Abano at Sotheby's, 1982, and another De venenis at Sotheby's, 1903. ¶ In North America, ISTC reports copies of this edition at the Huntington, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Library of Congress.

PROVENANCE: There's a tiny correction in the ninth consideratio, a pair of printed characters scraped away, ve written in a contemporary hand in the margin, beside the scar. We remain open to the possibility that the printing house made this correction prior to publication. Jan Moretus was known to sometimes correct his texts "with pen and scalpel in as many as a thousand or more copies...If this was a practice that was regularly used at the Plantin press, this was probably also done at other presses that took correct printing seriously" (Imhof). ¶ Old bookseller's notes on a front fly-leaf, and evidence of a label removed above them. Old ink stamp obliterated from the first page of text, folio [9]r, and folio [15]v. Small round ink stamp of one J-MM on a front fly-leaf, and over the obliterations on [9]r and [15]v. We wonder if this J.MM. was possibly James McManaway, acting director of the Folger 1946-1948. This copy was later in the psychiatry collection of Dr. Michael Stone (1933-2023), whence it found its way to auction.

CONDITION: Signed brown calf by Paris binder Hippolyte Duru (d. 1884), with a tiny 1846 penned beside his stamp. Ramsden notes that Duru worked under his own name only 1843-1846, conveniently providing a pretty narrow range for this binding. Edges gilt, the spine skillfully rebacked. RUBRICATED THROUGHOUT, with multiple two-line initials, plus a four-line opening initial. ¶ First and last leaf just a trifle dusty; some capitals heightened with a very pale yellow (possibly washed?). Boards moderately scuffed.

REFERENCES: ISTC ig00256000; Arnold C. Klebs, "Incunabula Scientifica et Medica," Osiris 4 (1938), p. 154, #459.3; Herman Ralph Mead, "Incunabula Medica in the Huntington Library," The Huntington Library Bulletin 1 (May 1931), p. 128, #245; GW 10810; British Museum, Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century, v. 1, p. 184, IA. 2728; Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries, G-256; USTC 745278; ¶ On bibliographical matters: Paul Needham, "Ulrich Zel's Early Quartos Revisited," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 15.1 (2012), p. 9 ("For about the first six years of his printing Zel produced almost exclusively a single shape of book: Chancery quartos, most of pamphlet size, printed page-by-page on half-sheets (bifolia), using a rounded gothic Type 1...with the addition, at some stage, of a slightly larger Type 2 of the same design for titling...There are about eight-five such quartos, only two of which contain colophons naming Zel and providing completion dates of 1466 and 1467 respectively"), 10 ("There is reason to suppose, therefore, that most if not all of Zel's Type-1 quartos occupy the seven-year span 1466 to 1472, and they may even have concluded their run in 1471 with a transition to folio printing in 1472"), p. 30 (calling VK 479 the third edition, "1468, perhaps roughly in the second half of the year"), 46 (on why collation is sometimes called [a^6 b^10]: "The two formulae are materially equivalent; the seeming variation depends on the decisions of individual binders to wrap the blank leaf to the front or back of their copies"); Severin Corstin, "Ulrich Zells Fruheste Produktion," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 82 (2007), p. 74 (he calls ours Type 1b, recast from the earliest fount); Francis Jenkinson, "Ulrich Zell's Early Quartos," The Library Series 4, 7.1 (June 1926), p. 51 (saying Zel recast his type), 52 (suggesting the type was heavily leaded in at least one early case), 53 ("it would seem natural to search for the book in which the new h is first used, to take it as a fixed point, and to range all the books with only the early h on one side of it and all the books with new h on the other") ¶ On the content: Lois Ann Colaianni, "Library Operations," National Library of Medicine: Programs & Services Fiscal Year 1991, p. 6 (cited above, noting the 1466 edition as an important acquisition); The Book Collector (Autumn 1983), p. 342 (reporting a 1466 copy in recent Kraus catalog 164, "the first book to be printed on a medical subject"); E. Dominic Longo, Spiritual Grammar: Genre and the Saintly Subject in Islam and Christianity (Fordham Univ, 2017), "Moralizing the Priestly Body: De pollutione nocturna" (unpaginated ebook; "Two major influences on the entire conversation of seminal emissions in this literature were ancient medical theory, especially that of Galen, and Judaic ideas of ritual purity. The excretion of bodily fluids, as in menstruation, seminal emission, urination, and sweating, was understood in medieval medical theory as a mechanism for correcting a superfluity of humors of one sort of another."); Brian Patrick McGuire, "In Search of Jean Gerson: Chronology of His Life and Works," A Companion to Jean Gerson (Brill, 2006), p. 21 (along with his De cognitione castitatis: "These works have hardly been given the notice they deserve as indications of his views not only on sexuality but also on grace and free will."); Review of Longo's Spiritual Grammar in Medievalia et humanistica New Series 45 (2020), p. 112 ("Like St. Augustine, Gerson was obsessed with (his own?) corporal desires"); Michael J. Heath, "The Manner of Confessing," The Collected Works of Erasmus: Spiritualia and Pastoralia (Univ of Toronto, 2015), p. 31 ("Jean Gerson wrote so anxiously on this subject [nocturnal emissions] that he sowed unease in many a conscience"; "a work very frequently reprinted in the sixteenth century"); Margaret Bingham Stillwell, The Awakening Interest in Science during the First Century of Printing 1450-1550 (BSA, 1970), p. 322-324 (chronological chart of medical publications) ¶ On provenance and binding: Dirk Imhof, "Managing Misprints: Jan Moretus I's Diverse Approaches to Correcting Errors," Printing and Misprinting: A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450-1650) (Oxford, 2023), p. 210 (cited above); Private Book Collectors in the United States and Canada, 9th ed. (1948), p. 40 (McManaway listed, in a directory of private collectors); Members of the Grolier Club 1884-2009, p. 99 (McManaway a member 1942-1975); Charles Ramsden, French Bookbinders 1789-1848 (1989), p. 81 (on Duru)

Item #713