SUMMA ROSELLE DE CASIBUS CONSCIENTIAE

315 x 210 mm. (12 1/2 x 8 1/4"). 10 p.l., CCLXV leaves (without final blank).Edited by Ottmar Nachtigall. Contemporary German blind-stamped pigskin, covers with several blind-ruled panels, center panel on upper cover with three columns of blind-stamped knotwork (EBDB r000519), framed with a roll of repeating stags (Kyriss Hirsch-Rolle IV, EBDB r000520), head of front cover stamped with the letters "S rosela," lower cover with a central panel of four ruled X's framed by a roll of flowers with swirling vines, raised bands, head panel lettered in ink, two original brass clasps. Title page with stately wood-engraved border by Hans Baldung Grien depicting Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I on his throne (Johnson, "German Renaissance Title-Borders," no. 3). Title printed in red and black. Title page with ink stamp of the library of Buxheim Charterhouse. Adams T-1002; VD16 B 308; USTC 694895. For the binding: Kyriss 79, plates 161, 162; EBDB r000519 and r000520, workshop w002121. âPigskin a bit soiled, with a number of marks and quite a few small, round wormholes, but the binding completely sound and in very good shape overall; first half of contents with several small wormholes (though worming in second half quite minor), other trivial imperfections, but the text clean and crisp, and the margins ample. From a renowned monastic library, this is a copy of the first accurate edition of an influential manual on canon law which comes in a binding by a long-lived Augsburg workshop. Composed in 1483 by Franciscan monk Baptista de Salis Trovamala (d. 1496) and first printed in 1484, the alphabetically arranged "Summa" was intended to be a reference guide for students of canon law and for priests hearing confessions. It covers subjects from adultery to property rights, from Abbas (abbot) to Uxor (wives), drawing primarily from the writings of Nicolaus de Ausmo. The incunabular printings of the Summas were plagued with errors, corrected here by Strassburg humanist and professor of Greek Ottmar Nachtigall, who in his introductory poem compares his efforts to the labors of Hercules. Our copy was bound in Augsburg in a workshop said by Kyriss to have flourished from 1482-1532. The binder can be identified by the stag (Kyriss' "Hirsch") roll used to frame the front cover panel. The blind-stamped bindings database of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (EBDB) finds another binding featuring both the knotwork design and the stag roll on an unidentified book (Cultural Object k005529) held by Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. Our volume was once in the famed library of the Buxheim Charterhouse, the largest Cistercian monastery in Germany, which had extensive manuscript and incunabular holdings, the latter numbering more than 3,000. When the monastery was secularized in 1802, its property and library became the possessions of the Count of Ostein. After his death in 1809, it was inherited by Count Friedrich Waldbott von Bassenheim, whose son's extravagant spending forced the family to sell many of their assets, including the Buxheim library, which went to auction in Munich in 1883. OCLC shows only two locations of our edition of Trovamala's "Summa" in North America, and we could trace just two copies at auction (selling for â 2,784 in 2006 and $2,829 in 2019).…